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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Tweedy
Read between
January 21 - January 28, 2019
I’ve still got David Bowie on my mind, so I see if I can figure how to play “Space Oddity.” Slowly, the other guys start joining in, grabbing their guitars and calling out chord changes to one another, singing harmony, or just drumming along on the nearest flat surface. Anything to contribute. It’s that organic and natural. Nobody says, “Let’s play some Bowie.” It starts with a note, which blindly stumbles into a recognizable melody, and then, piece by piece, it transforms into a song. It’s like the cafeteria scene from Fame. The David Bowie Hot Lunch just kind of happens.
After “Hummingbird,” I should have just continued that theme. “Mottled Duck.” “I’m the Man Who Loves Coots.” “Impossible Warblers (Unlikely Bananaquits).”
Springsteen, on the other hand, was going to save us all whether we wanted to be saved or not.
“If you know better, you can do better.”
Pretending you could be Joe Strummer was like daydreaming about being John Glenn. A perfectly respectable role model, but there’s no way I was ever fucking walking on the moon. But being an average-looking dude who wrote super-short indie rock screeds with a proletarian ethos before dying in a van accident at twenty-seven? That seemed doable.
The Sex Pistols, in spite of the vulgar implications, couldn’t sound like anything but the Sex Pistols. Nobody in the history of human listening heard a Sex Pistols song and thought, “Well, this is surprising. I was expecting more cello.”
THE PAINTER AND photographer Chuck Close once said that younger artists too often sit around and wait for inspiration to strike while “the rest of us just show up and get to work.” I assume by “the rest of us” he means anyone making art when they’re old enough to have realized inspiration is way more likely to come around when you already have your tools out. A pen on paper, a brush on canvas, a guitar in your hands. I’m
The people who seem the most like geniuses are not geniuses. They’re just more comfortable with failing. They try more and they try harder than other people, and so they stumble onto more songs. It’s pretty simple. People who don’t pick up a pencil never write a poem. People who don’t pick up a guitar and try every day don’t write a whole lot of great songs. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.
Life is short and you should wake up in the morning feeling excited about what you do. And if you don’t and you can afford to stop, you should stop. Even if it makes some people angry.
But if Kermit the Frog and Pepé the King Prawn want to interview us and coax us into singing “Rainbow Connection,” we’re probably going to sing along, because not singing “Rainbow Connection” with Kermit means you’re garbage.
I don’t believe that your kids should look at you as infallible. They should be able to look at you as a person who is struggling and persevering.
DOLLY PARTON ONCE said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.”