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

by Jeff Tweedy

think that’s why I often don’t bother with lyrics for a long time, because I don’t want them to get in the way of the emotion coming from the instrumental track. In fact, one of the primary ways I write lyrics is to sing and record vocal sounds without words—vowels and consonants that sound like what I hope the lyrics will sound like. I call them “mumble tracks.” I’ve gotten pretty good at making it sound like I’m singing actual words. So much so that a lot of times when I play people a track at this stage, they’ll think they’re listening to finished lyrics. I keep them mixed really low, so they’re almost a struggle to hear, but just loud enough to make out the rhythmic phrasing and melody. I almost always prefer to have a finished track before I commit to a lyric. So having a mumble track in place is an easier way to keep working without losing sight of the bigger picture. To translate a mumble track, typically, I might take a rough mix out to our cabin in Michigan and sit around for hours listening without trying to think too much, just writing down the first words that pop into my head that fit the meter. Once I’ve transcribed everything line by line, I’ll take a look at what I’ve got. The lyrics at that stage are often pretty meaningless and nonsensical—though sometimes they’re not, which fascinates me. The next steps after translating are to add however many more rounds of revisions and reshaping it takes until something coherent begins to come across. Usually, there ...

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

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.

Here’s an aspirational thought I’ve had about what I do that kind of turns Chuck Close’s quote inside out. 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. So I try to keep up with other people’s creative output. I read and I listen. I’m lucky that’s what I get to do with my time—keeping myself excited about the world and not being

Other books I don’t feel are necessarily to be read. Sometimes, I think it can be just as inspiring to imagine what a book is about. I might crack it open and read a sentence or two to get a feel for the language, but I don’t always need a larger context. I don’t need to read them from start to finish. My relationship with them is mostly my imagination of their potential. I’m guilt-free when it comes to books. I make an honest effort to read what I know is important, but I don’t grade myself. Life is too short to pretend you finished a book or understood it. Who cares?

Books are my companions. I love books and I’m always in the middle of several at a time. I don’t think of them as mountains to climb, or chores to accomplish for some notch in my belt or a badge to buff. Sometimes I’ll read a book about a book without even once feeling like a fraud for not having read the book the book is about. You understand. Sometimes I’ll read them with a highlighter, marking phrases that excite my lyric-loving mind. Otherwise I lose the plot. William H. Gass, who has written more than a few of my favorite sentences, has turned up in some of my songs. There would be no “Something in my veins / Bloodier than blood” without his genius.

“I assassin down the avenue” from “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” doesn’t really mean anything. It comes from a writing exercise. A lot of my lyrics originate this way.

Originally the line was “I assassinate down the avenue,” it started as an exercise where you make a list of ten or twelve verbs that you may associate with a vocation, in this case “a spy,” and a list of random nouns. For the next step you take a pencil and draw lines randomly between the two, until something surprising happens in the way they interact. Can I assassinate an avenue? Can the avenue assassinate? When we’re left to our own devices, verbs and nouns tend to pair up in clichéd ways, but when a verb is acting on an unfamiliar noun it can really be exciting. It stimulates the language. In the end the noun “assassin” sang better within the meter of the song and, for me, having it used as a verb made it somehow even more disorienting and evocative. I love it when words wake up and sound new again.

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 like this thought so much. Most of us often self-critique to the point where we can't accomplish anything.

world.” Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been. I’m writing this just weeks after returning from Belleville, where I sat next to my dad’s bed in my childhood house and watched him die. I can guarantee you that in the final moments of his life, he wasn’t kicking himself for all those times when he dared to make a fool of himself by singing too loud.

I’d listen to everything on the tape, whatever I’d recorded the previous nights, everything up to the blank space on the tape. Then I would imagine, “What comes next? What does the next song sound like on this album I’m making up as I go? If I was a teenager again, listening to an album in my bedroom, what would I want to hear next?” There’s so much power in that silence, just imagining what could happen but hasn’t happened yet.

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.

“Listen to me, motherfucker, listen.” Getting right up in my face. “Mine ain’t about yours. And yours ain’t about mine. We all suffer the same. You don’t get to decide what hurts you. You just hurt. Let me say my shit, and you say your shit, and I’ll be there for you.

We all suffer the same. Indeed.

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.”

I like working on too many songs at once, because you’re never focused on one thing for too long. If a song starts to lose its magic, and I start telling myself, “I don’t know what I was thinking. This sucks,” we just let it go and move on. What else is there that needs another listen? If I stay away from a song long enough, when I come back to it, it sometimes feels like I’m hearing it for the first time. That’s a beautiful place, if you can get to it, where you’re mesmerized by the potential in a song you don’t remember writing, and you finally have the energy and enthusiasm to finish it.

I think that’s the secret to this line of work—you have to be okay with music being a great thing to do, and not rely on it to be the thing that makes you rich or even the thing that pays all of your bills. As long as it’s something that makes you feel better and you wake up every morning wanting to get back in the studio to make something else, then there’s not much anyone can fucking do to ruin it. You can find an audience. You can take your time. You can find your voice. You can find new ways to express yourself. You can explore it. You can get better at it. If you keep it close, no one can take that from you. It exists. The beautiful part has existed and it will continue to exist.