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

by Jeff Tweedy

When you take a lot of Vicodin, your life is not a nonstop Algonquin Round Table. There’s a lot of being numb, and a lot of being sad that you’re not numb. That’s it.

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.

It was just playacting. I didn’t go home later and demand that my mom start calling me “The Boss.” I was just trying on a new identity, wearing somebody else’s skin to see how it felt.

Midwestern sarcasm plays it straight and makes you listen more closely. You have to treat every conversation like a safecracker.

At the very least, I wish everyone had a way to kill time without hurting anyone, including themselves.

I think that may be the highest purpose of any work of art, to inspire someone else to save themselves through art.

All band names are stupid.

I do believe whole towns can be collectively depressed psychologically like it’s a local dialect.

I think for most songwriters, unless they’re very singular and gifted, it takes some time for them to find their voice.

But I just don’t buy the argument that we suffer deeper, or harder, than anyone else. Anyone who makes stuff lucked out that they found an outlet for what most of the world has as a condition.

I think that artists create in spite of suffering, not because of suffering. I just don’t buy it. Everyone suffers by degrees and I believe everyone has the capacity to create, but I think you’re one of the lucky ones if you’ve found an outlet for your discomfort or a way to cope through art.

Joy doesn’t need to be audited. We’re just grateful to have had it at all.

If it’s one person who’s sitting so close you can see their eyes and hear their breathing, that’s when it becomes as intimate as a conversation. You’re confronted with what a song is capable of.

If you feel exposed when you’re singing to someone and each word gives you a distinct terrifying thrill resembling embarrassment, that means you’re doing something right.

I became a songwriter not when I composed that perfect couplet, or experienced the right amount of pain. It’s when I realized that whatever I wrote, even if it meant gutting myself in front of strangers, letting all those raw emotions come flooding out, making a fool of myself with my own words, was exactly what I always wanted to do with my life.

Fred Armisen was a regular at Lounge Ax, as a performer and a part-time assistant to Susie. He’d stamp hands at the door and answer phones, and occasionally his band Trenchmouth would play. Fred claims Susie gave him his big break when she asked him to host karaoke night once a month. Each month he’d come as a different character: Jesus, a guy with a head injury, a priest, and one time he hosted as Hitler, but not the evil Hitler, Fred’s Hitler was trying to soften his image and had taken up writing poems for a vegan fanzine.

If you’ve ever been in a relationship that you took for granted, even when it was the one thing holding you together, and you somehow didn’t lose it despite acting like an idiot, then you know how difficult it is to convey that amount of gratitude, much less set it to music. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

He was also happy and willing to dig in with me to find ways to subvert classic song structures. We complemented each other well in this regard; he approached songs like an architect and I approached them like a wrecking ball.

a lot of the time I’m totally unsure how I feel. It’s ambiguous. That’s the part I think people really can’t tolerate. We humans hate ambiguity more than almost anything else in the world. So we pick an emotion and stick with it.

I still hadn’t grown up in any significant way emotionally, and like a lot of men, I relied upon my spouse for an unconditional motherly type of love that isn’t particularly healthy.

Any song that ever originated in a person’s imagination and was translated into notes and words is inherently inferior to its potential. When a song is rattling around my subconscious, it’s still limitless, which means I haven’t found a way to fuck it up yet.

I 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.

I used to assume that the people who were great at writing songs were just more talented than everybody else, and that they always had a very clear understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and the intent behind it. As I’ve gotten older I’ve concluded that this is rarely the case. 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.

Listen, it’s a cop-out to hide ambition and pretend aspirations are shameful. It’s a way to protect yourself. Preemptive sour grapes.

if you can remain open to it and you’re not afraid to call it work sometimes, inspiration is limitless.

Every time somebody asks me, “How ’bout the Cubs?” I want to respond with “Yeah, the Cubs, they’re going to die someday. Do you ever think about that? All of them. All of them. Rizzo. Bryant. The one with the goatee. The other ones. The entire team. Some of them probably soon, you don’t know. They could be dying right now while we’re sitting here making conversation about baseball. Death is lurking.”

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.

No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, “Thank god I didn’t make that song. Thank god I didn’t make that piece of art. Thank god I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the 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.

The music industry depends on artists being insecure and needy, willing to crawl across cut glass to be famous. Historically it’s given them incredible leverage when it comes to negotiating contracts.

If you’re not willing to walk away from a deal, and the other side knows it, you are screwed. For some reason I’ve always been stupid or arrogant enough to walk away from negotiations when they start to feel gross or insulting.

We weren’t scheming to blow the lid off the record business by reinventing the economic model of how artists distribute content to their fans. We just wanted to play our songs on tour and not have audiences go, “What the fuck is this? Play something we know, goddammit!”

I get it when Wilco fans are still angry at me about Jay Bennett. I don’t like it, but I understand. They don’t think Wilco is as good now as it was when Jay Bennett was still in the band, because he’s on all of the Wilco albums that mean the most to them.

A band isn’t a sacred bond.

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.