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

by Jeff Tweedy

“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. You could take, say, all the verbs from an Emily Dickinson poem and set them side by side with all the nouns from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and see what happens. It might start as gibberish, but it’s amazing how hard it is to put words next to each other without some meaning being generated. It would have been so much harder to memorize some of my more abstract lyrics if they had remained just gibberish. 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.