Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.

by Jeff Tweedy

Your life feels empty and worthless and small, and then you find this thing that feels special, and it speaks to you in ways nothing else has, and it becomes a way forward. You feel like you have a purpose, and you’re part of a global community even if you never set foot outside of your tiny corner of the world.

I know good carpenters aren’t supposed to blame their tools, but I would argue carpenters also aren’t often handed cheese graters when reaching for hammers. What I’m trying to say is, this guitar, ordered by my dear mother, from a JCPenney Christmas catalog, was, in fact, a colossal piece of shit.

Creating creates creators. When I was in the hospital going through treatment for addiction and depression, they would have everyone in my group do art therapy. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen was watching a catatonic sixty-three-year-old woman who had been hooked on heroin for close to thirty years become human again by holding a pencil and being asked to draw. I’m an agnostic by nature, but seeing that made me believe in staying close to the notion of a creator. The one we identify with most easily by finding it in ourselves.

I’ve heard people complain about my guitar when I play solo shows. “Why does he insist on playing that guitar? It sounds like it’s strung with rubber bands.” To which I say, Um . . . Shut the fuck up, get your own guitar and ring like a silver bell for all I care. I need a guitar with strings that don’t sound like a twenty-year-old who wakes up at five a.m. and has a venti iced Americano and is ready to seize the day!

I could stop somewhere just shy of feeling truly liberated and retreat back into my overthinking mind, inside my stupid head where I would remain, awkward and painfully self-aware. I was certain my self-consciousness was visible from outer space. Immediately afterward, when the show was over and we were off to the next town, I would be remorseful. I’d feel real shame. I’d replay the show in my memory and be tormented by mental images of me taking myself way too seriously. The self-loathing was constant.

“You have no idea what it’s like to stand onstage with somebody every night who struggles with and sometimes overcompensates for debilitating self-doubt, a guy sadly aware he’s disappointing a bandmate he’s spent his entire adult life trying to please.”

I sometimes prefer demos to a finished version of a song, especially when it’s a song of my own. I love that moment in the life of a song that is all possibility and potential. When I can imagine all of the different directions it could go. I find that just as enjoyable, maybe more enjoyable, than when it’s fully realized. A finished record is just . . . finished.

Any song that ever originated in a person’s imagination and was translated into notes and words is inherently inferior to its potential.

I trust myself enough to commit to a process, see what gets made, and respond with feeling and intuition, but when my ego gets involved I know I’m just going to cater to it, in other words, avoid embarrassment, be clever, show off. There’s nothing that makes me crazy like a song that just wants to be clever.

Music is most magical when everyone can lose the burden of self and be put back together as a part of something bigger, or other.

I try to make something new, something that wasn’t there when I woke up, by the end of every day. It doesn’t have to be long or perfect or good. It just has to be something. I used to fill up notebooks with poems and lyrics, now I do it with my phone. Sometimes I’ll give myself a time limit of no more than twenty minutes to write and record a song into my phone.

The people who seem the most like geniuses are not geniuses. They’re just more comfortable with failing.

Sometimes I think it’s my job to be inspired. I work at it. That’s what I do that most resembles work.

It seems to me that the only wrong thing I could do with whatever gifts I’ve been given as a musician or an artist would be to let curiosity die.

Songs become vessels for other people to pour themselves into.

just like writing songs. It’s a natural state to me. I like to believe most people’s natural state is to be creative. It definitely was when we were kids, when being spontaneously and joyfully creative was just our default setting. As we grow we learn to evaluate and judge, to navigate the world with some discretion, and then we turn on ourselves. Creating can’t just be for the sake of creating anymore. It has to be good, or it has to mean something. We get scared out of our wits by the possibility of someone rejecting our creation.

I’m pretty naive, I admit, but I’ll always believe that destruction would be an impulse a lot more difficult to indulge if more people were encouraged to participate in their own tiny acts of creation.