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

by Jeff Tweedy

Belleville has (purportedly) the longest Main Street in the U.S., spanning 9.2 miles and ending somewhere around East St. Louis. One stretch of road and so many opportunities to get loaded and almost zero chance of getting lost.

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

I’d experienced rejection before, but not the world-shattering feeling of betrayal. It may even mark the beginning of the first identifiable pattern of depression in my life. When you’re prone to depression, this is the kind of catalyst that can bring it on and turn something upsetting into something debilitating and seemingly insurmountable.

If there’s one thing that’s 100 percent true about every intoxicated person in world history, it’s that you shouldn’t believe them when they say they love you. The only difference between you and that slice of cold pizza back at their apartment is that they haven’t met the pizza yet.

The part of me that could cope and had developed some healthy adaptations to all of those problems was ultimately in charge. The contrast and confusion comes from the idea that you can’t be two things at once. And I definitely disagree with that. I think you can be completely confident and comfortable with your talents, and in an undiluted way, pushing forward with your best abilities, and also debilitated by and maladapted to issues that never really go away. But that you only notice when you aren’t being distracted by something you’re good at.

I think it’s bad for people to believe they’re only supposed to have one emotion at one time. Are you ever really only happy? Or sad? Or angry? I’m ambivalent more than anything, and a lot of the time I’m totally unsure how I feel.

When you listen to a mumbling voice, your brain wants to hear words, the same way it wants to see animals or faces when we stare at clouds, because our brains are sense-making machines and we have a low tolerance for ambiguity.

So we sang to him at his bedside and got him to tell us what he thought about the whole “living” thing now that he was near the end. “Life is happy and sad and it hurts” is what he told us. Try and sum it up better than that—I can’t.

One of the main goals of recovery—and maybe the only essential goal of any kind of psychological intervention, whether it’s through meditation or talk therapy or even an AA meeting—is to become aware enough of your thoughts and emotions to see when there is a choice to be made. Addicts are compelled to do things by inner thoughts and feelings that are mostly invisible to them. The subconscious can steer the ship for a long time without your conscious mind ever noticing. It was a revelation when I started to be able to see that there were choices to make, and that it was a hell of a lot easier to do the right thing when you’re aware that you have a right thing and a wrong thing to choose between.