MUSIC - Luscious Jackson

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My next guest, Jeff Tweedy, is a multi-Grammy-winning artist and lead singer and guitarist of Wilco, but his latest book is a book about music by other musicians. World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music is a collection of essays about so many songs that had an impact on Tweedy for better or for worse.

The songs range from "Happy Birthday" to "Dancing Queen" and "Both Sides Now", and each song titles accompanied by a short chapter written by Tweedy about his relationship with the song, like how he inherited Loud, Loud, Loud by Aphrodite's Child from his older brother, or how he grew up thinking his cousin had written, Takin' Care of Business by Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

There are these interspersed short passages of moments from his life, what Tweedy calls re-memories, like a gambling moment in Reno or an unexpectedly meaningful gift from a fan that has a special place on his amp during concerts. Jeff Tweedy will be in conversation at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn on November 6th with Amanda Petrusich, I think I'm saying her last name right, I hope- of the New Yorker. Joining me now to talk a little bit about the book and have a listening party is Jeff Tweedy. Hey, Jeff, nice to see you.

Jeff Tweedy: Hey, how are you doing?

Alison Stewart: I am doing great. Obviously, people know you have written books before. You've written books about songwriting, but you say in the introduction, and it made me laugh, this probably should have been the first book you wrote? Why should this have been the first book you wrote?

Jeff Tweedy: It's probably the book that it's the topic that I've thought about the most, I think, and maybe have the most to share about.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think it wasn't the first book?

Jeff Tweedy: I think I wrote my first book by accident. I wasn't really searching for an opportunity to write a book and I was solicited to write a book. It took me a while to think about whether or not I actually could write a book. I was asked to write a memoir and so I think it took writing that book and maybe the next book for me to get the confidence to write about the stuff that I probably think about the most.

Alison Stewart: In the introduction, you note that songs and the way we experience them are a lot about context. You said, "It doesn't matter how many people hear a day in the life, there's only one version that belongs to you," which is beautiful. How did you come to that conclusion?

Jeff Tweedy: Gosh, I don't know. I think it's just contemplating how music works and how I've struggled with the idea of an audience as a person standing in front of audiences and thinking about who's listening to the records that I make and simplifying it for myself to realize that it's one consciousness at a time and that it can't be the same thing for everybody, and that everybody has an opportunity to put it together for themself.

Maybe it comes from inside of making music and putting it out there and realizing that it can be so misinterpreted and are over-interpreted into something better than what you intended. It really depends upon where you find somebody where in their life and how they put it together in their consciousness.

Alison Stewart: Have you had that experience when someone, or a journalist or something has explained one of your songs to you and you are like, "No, not really."

Jeff Tweedy: I usually try and be pretty polite. I think it's usually pretty valid. I'll only correct somebody if it's so egregiously wrong. I just don't want it out there in the public.

Alison Stewart: You've had to, I guess you as a creative you'd have to let go of that idea that someone's going to experience the song as you wrote it because, to your point, people come to it at different points in their lives.

Jeff Tweedy: With different listening histories and I wouldn't call it an agenda, but everybody's coming to the music. They listen to wanting something different and needing something different but I think it was just from realizing that through putting my own music out.

Alison Stewart: My guess is Jeff Tweedy, the book is World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music. You dedicate a whole chapter to The Beatles. It's the only chapter dedicated to a group rather than a song. This is funny, you note that, "If someone says the Beatles were bad at music, you should run from them like they're a demon." Is that your position as a fan or as a musician?

Jeff Tweedy: I think both. I think it's just-- I get why somebody might be a contrarian to the ubiquitous nature of the Beatles music and having it foisted upon them by so many people. I think people can recoil from the largeness of the Beatles. I don't think it's objectively an honest statement to act like they weren't good.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: You focus on the chapter on the Beatles anthology releases from the '90s, and that this was pivotal, I think that's the word you used. Pivotal to you as a songwriter, so pivot suggests change. What did it change about you or your thoughts about songwriting?

Jeff Tweedy: I think it was liberating in realizing that this really aspirational goal of making records that are as beautiful and as seemingly well planned and thought out as a Beatles record don't start there. In other words, I think it was pivotal to hear the Beatles sound not great or to sound human even.

I think that was the case for a lot of musicians my age, finding those after the fact being able to reverse engineer these songs that you'd listen to a lot, these perfect pop songs, and realize that they started out bad or not bad but not as good and rough around the edges. That really underlined that there's a process that you have to go through and you probably don't start at the end because that doesn't make any sense.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to play the first song that you write about in your book World Within a Song.

Music - Jeff Tweedy: World Within a Song.

All right. It's specifically those chords they're part of the conversation about Deep Purple Smoke on the Water, and you seemed a little conflicted about including it because you don't really like the song, but it has meaning for you.

Jeff Tweedy: I go on to explain that the song was co-opted by a certain subset of people in my school that frowned upon me. I think it became an anthem for a different culture than the one I belong to. That riff, the opening riff is, for a lot of people, I think the keys to the kingdom. It's just like being made aware that if you pick up an instrument you have a pretty good shot at being able to play that on one string of a guitar or picking out on the piano.

I think that that's an invitation, that's an open door for somebody to see themselves as someone that can play music. In that way, I think that that song needs to be honored and respected for that gift that I received, and so many other people I know have.

Alison Stewart: There's a song that you include, it was a favorite of your Dad's Long Tall Glasses by Leo Sayer from 1974. Let's take a listen.

MUSIC - Leo Sayer: Long Tall Glasses I was travellin' down the road

Feelin' hungry and cold

I saw a sign down the road sayin'

Food and drinks for everyone

So naturally I thought

I would take me a look inside

Alison Stewart: If you want a real treat, watch the video of that performance. [laughs]

Jeff Tweedy: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: There's dance moves and everything. Leg kicks. What does that song conjure up for you?

Jeff Tweedy: It conjures up my dad. It conjures up a version of my dad slightly inebriated or maybe well inebriated enjoying himself. It also conjures up an image of me not enjoying him, enjoying himself, [laughs] and being tortured by his habit of playing that song over and over and over again, and acting it out to some degree. The song don't have time to listen to the whole song, but the song goes from, I can't dance because he has to dance for all of this food that this place, this establishment is offering this singer or the narrator of the song. Then he figures out that he can dance.

Sorry spoiler alert. In the song when that moment happens in the song, my dad would jump up out of his chair and yell, I can dance. It was humiliating even in an, just in a room with just the two of us. I think I felt humiliated embarrassed the way young people can be embarrassed by their parents. Now it's a sweet memory. Now, I think of it and I'm happy to have this song be able to bring back those moments so vividly and see the innocence in it and the joy in it. I don't know. I think I only have joy for my dad's joy now when I listen to that song.

Alison Stewart: Nice. The name of the book is World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music. It is by Jeff Tweedy. We'll hear about Lene Lovich and The Replacements from Jeff Tweedy after a quick break. This is All Of It.

Music - Luscious Jackson

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Jeff Tweedy, of course, of Wilco. He's written a book, it's called World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music. He will be in town at Bethlehem in Brooklyn, hosted by Community Bookstore on November 6th. Mark your calendars. Before the break, Jeff, we talked about, I saw you connected with your dad. Let's talk about when you connect with your mom, Lucky Number by Lene Lovich. Let's play a little bit of it, for people who don't remember.

MUSIC- Lene Lovich: Lucky Number

I never used to cry because I was all alone,

For me, myself and I is all I've ever known,

I never felt the need to have a hand to hold,

In everything I do I take complete control,

That's where I'm coming from,

My lucky number's one,

I've everthing I need to keep me satisfied-

Alison Stewart: I love that song. What was the context that you first heard that song in?

Jeff Tweedy: It was the New Wave episode of midnight special music program in the '70s. They devoted our whole episode to the New Wave Movement In 1978. I was 11 years old maybe even 10 years old at the time. I'm not sure. It was, Iggy Pop, the band suicide cars were on. It was a pretty pivotal moment again for me. Just getting to see a lot of music that was more interesting to me than what I was hearing on the radio. That song, there was a video they played of that song. It wasn't an easy record to find where I grew up, but my mom must have responded to that song in a way that she wanted me to have that record.

She actually found it. I received that record as a present. I was like, was always really curious as to what my mom might've really responded to. I wrote about all of these songs without listening to them again.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting.

Jeff Tweedy: I wanted it to really be a reflection of what my memory is of the song. After I wrote the chapter, I listened to it again and realized that I erased, and my mother erased, the whole second half of the song where she decides that her lucky number is two, because she meets somebody, and it becomes much more conventional as a song. What I think occurred to me later in life is that it reflected my mom's philosophy, which was, you're born alone, you die alone. You might as well get used to being alone, which is kind of a sad philosophy. She had a pretty rough childhood and so, yes. It's just that song kind of just thinking about it and writing about it unlocked some mystery about it in regards to my mom.

Alison Stewart: You have a chapter about a live version of a song by probably my favorite band, The Replacements. God Damn Job by The Replacement. The song is short, the song is fast. [laughs] What was it about the performance of this song, not just the song that it made your book?

Jeff Tweedy: It's really hard for me to talk about. It's hard enough to write about, but it was like, it's just such a monumental moment, personal moment for me to witness. That band at that time, the very young Tommy Stinson on base just looked like something I could do. It was maybe one of the first bands I saw that looked like me, or that sounds really strange to say, because there's lots of bands really look like me, but not really.

Alison Stewart: They were scruffy and baggy around the edges a little bit in the best way.

Jeff Tweedy: There wasn't any showbiz. There wasn't any talent for the presentation. It was just raw emotion and energy. Yes, Paul Westerberg fell off the stage. It was the first song they're opening for a band. They're opening for the Band X and Paul Westerberg fell off the front of the stage in the middle of the first song and kept singing and the song lying on the floor on an empty dance floor in a half-empty club. It brings me to tears thinking about it still to this day, because it wasn't a bit, it felt real. It was electrifying to feel connected to something authentic in that way and to get to witness it.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear The Replacements, God Damn Job.

MUSIC - The Replacements: God Damn Job

I need a God damn job

I need a God damn job

I really need a God damn job

I need a God damn jobGod dammit

God dammit

God damn, I need a God damn job

Alison Stewart: A lot of the songs in the book are classics you grew up with. You have a song by the Spanish pop star, Rosalia, Bizcochito in here. Why does this song speak to you?

Jeff Tweedy: It's just as a person who spent a lot of my life making records and listening to records, I think it's really exciting record making. I think that she's probably one of the most fascinating artists on the planet at this moment. I see a lot of parallels between her artistic growth and a lot of the most iconoclastic artists of all time, say Picasso or Miles Davis or Bob Dylan, or people like that. Like coming from this very, very specific traditional discipline of flamenco music and then making this very futuristic pop music that still has an awareness of the, just really, I don't know how powerful a subtle gesture can be. I don't know. I can't get enough of it. I think she's great.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear a little bit of Bizcochito.

MUSIC - Rosalia: Bizcochito

Yo no soy y ni voy a ser tu bizcochito

Pero tengo to' lo que tiene delito- Que me pongan en el sol, que me derrito

El mal de ojo que me manden me lo quito

Yo no soy y ni voy a ser tu bizcochito

Pero tengo to' lo que tiene delito

Que me pongan en el sol, que me derrito

El mal de ojo que me manden me lo quito

Ta-ra-rá, ta-ra-rá, ta-tá

Ta-ra-ra-ta-tá-ra (me lo quito)

Ta-ra-rá, ta-ra-rá, ta-tá

Ta-ra-ra-ta-ta-tá-ra (que me manden me lo quito)

Alison Stewart: I know we have a little bit of time left. I'll Take You There by the Staple Singers ends the book. Why was that the right song to end the book?

Jeff Tweedy: I don't know. I think it's just such a huge part of our lives and my family. It's the first song that always gets played on our jukebox in our living room when friends are over and my wife decides that it's time to dance.

Alison: She's the boss.

Jeff: My wife's the boss and Mavis is the best and it just felt like an appropriate place to wrap it up.

Alison: The name of the book is World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music by Jeff Tweedy. He'll be in town on November 6th at an event hosted with Community Bookstore. Thanks for the time, Jeff.

Jeff: Thank you.

Alison: Nice to see you again.

Jeff: Thanks for having me. You too.

Alison: Let's go out on a Wilco track. This is from the new album Cousin. This is Evicted.

MUSIC - Wilco: Evicted

Oh I can take a joke but

My clothes are all soaked

It's too late to be unclear

I'd laugh until I'd die

If it wasn't my life

If it wasn't me in the mirror

Am I ever going to see you again?

Maybe I'm a whistle on a lonely old train

I'm crying all the time

Listen to the sound getting further away

Fading deep

Into the night

Am I ever going to see you again?

I'm evicted

From your heart

I deserve it

Alison: That song is Evicted. The latest from Wilco's new album, Cousin. We were speaking with Jeff Tweedy. The name of his book is World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music.

 

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