A Conversation With Jeff Tweedy

Photo by Whitten Sabbatini

INTERVIEW

As the founding member and leader of the American rock band Wilco and before that the cofounder of the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Tweedy is one of contemporary American music's most accomplished songwriters, musicians, and performers. Since starting Wilco in 1994, Jeff has written original songs for eleven Wilco albums as well as collaborations with Billy Bragg, Mavis Staples, and many others. Wilco's 2005 album, A Ghost Is Born, earned a Grammy award for Best Alternative Album, and Tweedy has also been nominated for two other Grammys. His collection of poems, Adult Head, was released by Zoo Press in 2004. His memoir, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back), was released by Dutton in 2018. His newest book, How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back, demystifies the creative process and brings readers into the intimate process of writing one song—lyrics, music, and putting it all together. In it, Tweedy argues for the importance of making creativity a part of daily life for everyone, not just career artists and songwriters. It will be released by Dutton in October 2020.

Tweedy lives in Chicago with his family.

This interview was conducted in September 2020.

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MICHAEL PIAFSKY:

Your earliest memories of music are more focused on writings about music (like Lester Bangs's essays on The Clash) than on music itself. And the recollections in the early portion of your memoir, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back), come alive with characters like David Reeves, "the socially-awkward man-mutant" who sold you the music. Is this a product of finding it difficult to write about something as ethereal as songs, or was it more that the architecture around rock 'n' roll was your entry point into it and a large part of the allure?

JEFF TWEEDY:

I think music is difficult to write about. A lot of what makes it worthwhile and magical and poignant is that you can't really say it. You need music to express some things because it's the only way to communicate a certain feeling sometimes. If I could write that feeling, I probably wouldn't have learned to play guitar. Also, I just thought those were interesting things. Everyone has their own personal subjective relationships with music, but nobody gets to see a character like David Reeves unless I tell them about him. At the same time, the early '80s was a time uniquely suited to spit out characters like David Reeves. The pre-Internet world made these incredible hybrid beings of comic books and rock 'n' roll and fanzines, and there was almost no guidance and no real examples to follow for a guy in a small Midwest town. I think that helped form me and certainly people like David Reeves and the other people in the record stores. My theory is that there are more of them now, but they don't need to go outside anymore. They used to have to walk to streets to find each other.

PIAFSKY:

You describe your childhood as mundane—"mauve"—you also identify your grandfather as a "cabbie/pimp" without really going into that either time you mention him; it would seem like a contradiction. In shaping the narrative, how much did you weigh one truth—"In order to understand me, it is important for the reader to know that my childhood was mundane and my grandfather's profession was irrelevant to that"—against another: "I am trying to compel readers, and the fact that my grandfather was a pimp is fair and valuable material now."

TWEEDY:

I did not want to be mythologizing or glamorizing or romanticizing, or any of those things that I wouldn't trust, ego-wise. The fact is that my grandfather was a pretty unique character, but he was also kept at a distance from me when I was a kid. I had limited interactions with him, and I certainly didn't...