How to Write One Song

by Jeff Tweedy

If you’re coming to me for inspiration because you want to sound like me or “be” me . . . well, I’m flattered. But you’ll be surprised how good it feels to hear yourself sing your own song.

That’s one of the problems with humans—that we can be talked out of loving something. That we can be talked out of loving something that we do, and we can be talked out of loving ourselves.

However, I would like to point out to anyone troubled by the sound of their own voice that your voice is your body, so you have to at least tolerate it. It’s important to work toward acceptance at a minimum and love as a goal.

We build our lives around wanting to be good at something and our desire to have our contributions recognized. So I’m not going to argue that it shouldn’t matter to you whether the song you make is good. But I will argue that how you judge the art you make is nowhere near as important as the act of creation itself.

I want to stress again that it’s necessary to learn how to be OK with being bad at what you do—sound bad, write a bad song, suck at playing the guitar—or you’ll never get to “good.” And you have to keep being OK with going through “bad” to get to “good.”