Interview: Jeff Tweedy on Creativity and Catharsis
photo credit: Sammy Tweedy
“Songs are mysterious,” Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy writes in the introduction to his new book, How to Write One Song. “Any idea where they come from? I’ve written tons and tons of songs and STILL the best I can think to say after I finish one I’m happy with is ‘How’d I do that?’ It’s confusing when you can DO something and not know exactly HOW you did it (and then somehow expect to do it again).”
How to Write One Song is a meditation on creativity and craft that is applicable to other artistic endeavors beyond song composition. It blends practical advice with inspirational adages, while offering a window into Tweedy’s process, utilizing examples from his own work such as “Muzzle of Bees.” All of this is delivered in the musician’s wry voice, as he muses on process and reception.
The book emerged at the same time as a new album. Tweedy recorded Love Is the King at The Loft, his Chicago studio, in April 2020, alongside his sons Spencer on drums and Sammy on harmony vocals. It’s an album that speaks to the moment—the songs are a response to the anguish and isolation prompted by the pandemic. Love Is the King also dovetails with How to Write One Song, as some of the lyrics are referenced within the pages.
What led you to write a book that focuses on songwriting?
The primary instigation was from my friends who are writers—songwriters and authors. The people I’m friends with who do creative work all tended to say the same things about my memoir. They really enjoyed the sections about creativity and about my process and that made me think about writing a book that focused on that one aspect of the stuff that I think about and what I do.
I came up with the title for the book to help myself organize my thoughts and focus my attention on what it is that I’m doing at its most basic level. I never wanted to write a step-by-step, craftsman manual about music theory and stuff like that. I don’t have a firm grasp on that myself, and I kind of consider that an asset.
Did you have a target audience in mind while you were working on this?
The way I started the book was that I had my brother-in-law interview me about writing songs. He’s a good journalist, but he’s not a songwriter and he doesn’t play an instrument. So I basically started from transcriptions of those conversations. We talked for hours on multiple occasions and that gave me a framework for what somebody coming to the topic from absolute zero would potentially be curious about that I might overlook or take for granted.
Early on, you dispel some of the mysticism that surrounds songwriting, as you maintain, “I’m pretty sure it’s still ME doing the work. Some partnership between my conscious mind and my subconscious gets results, but when things are going right, the distinctions between the two become blurry, and I’m never really sure which is in charge.” In that respect, you demystify the process without diminishing it. Is this a subject you’ve contemplated for some time?
I’ve been introspective and kind of examining that side of what it is that I do for a long time because I’m a big skeptic of pseudoscience and things like that. And I absolutely wanted to communicate that without diminishing it because I think it’s magical. Just in and of itself, the reality of it is stranger and more exciting and interesting to me then these sort of new agey, metaphysical pseudoscience answers that people give surrounding where creativity comes from.
People are embarrassed to come across loving themselves or loving the things that they do. I’m sure that some of that decorum is worthy in some ways, to maintain modesty and the social norms, because no one wants to come across like they have some exalted view of themselves. But I think that does a disservice to the fact that you should love the things that you make. You should love yourself and you should discover the things that you are good at. Ironically, one of the ways that you do that is by getting your ego out of the way. Your ego is the part of you that probably wants to hide your true feelings about the things you do because you want other people to like you, but it’s sort of a strange conundrum that people have put themselves in. I think the main thing that people fear about loving the things they do is that someone’s going to talk them out of it. That’s way scarier to me, I think, than the ability people have to just outright tell you that you suck. The real pain comes from them being able to convince you that you suck.
While offering guidance on crafting lyrics, you mention that you’ll occasionally grab language directly from the works on your bookshelf. You identify The Gnostic Gospels as one of these sources. What are some of your other go-tos?
A lot of it is postmodern fiction, like Robert Coover, John Barth, William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon. I don’t ever allow myself to feel guilty about not following every single plot maneuver and every character that emerges from page to page. They’re really dense and I like having those type of books wash over me.
My bookshelves are also full of the whims of a guy that has spent a lot of his life walking around bookstores, deciding to buy a book on algebra or books about medieval mnemonic structures for some reason. I just get curious and I want to know everything. I can be enticed to buy almost any book.
What have you been reading lately?
A lot of my reading has just been keeping up on the insanity of our moment in history, to be honest. I can spend an entire day reading different articles and takes on social media. I think the one thing I’ve really been chipping away at is one of the most recent translations of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson. It came out a few years ago and it might be one of the only translations of the Odyssey done by a woman, or at least one of the most recent ones. It’s a pretty fascinating diversion.
Sticking with other forms of expression, at one point in How to Write One Song, you mention that “A truth always comes out in art. I think comedy finds it, and I think good songwriting finds it.” I recently read an archival interview with Albert Brooks who describes hanging out with Harry Nilsson and John Lennon, as well as the affinities between stand-up comedians and musicians. Since you’re also a baseball fan, I think professional athletes can be drawn in as well. Do you have thoughts on the correlation between all three professions?
The thing that occurs to me is that people who are good at those particular things are people who have never lost sight of the obvious, and if you want to include the baseball player, never lost sight of the basics. The basics are pretty rudimentary and they’re so ingrained that they don’t get lost as you become more adept or skilled. I think artists and comedians are able to keep their focus on things that everybody else might just walk by without observing.
That’s why people say, “Oh, my God, I wish I’d written that song because I’ve had that thought.” And the songwriter that’s connecting with his art form is able to capture those things and not walk by them without noticing them and documenting them. Observational comedy seems very related to songwriting because it doesn’t work if people can’t see themselves in what you’re saying or if it isn’t a thought that everybody’s had in some way.
You have some acting experience, contributing your voice to Lil Bush and appearing on Parks and Recreation. Has that impacted your perspective in any way?
I’ve hardly ever been asked to be someone that isn’t me, other than voicing God in Lil Bush. So I haven’t been forced to find the range of my acting abilities. [Laughs.] I would think that if I was asked to do that a little bit more, it might expand some of my narrative scope as a singer. The unreliable narrator type of songwriting might be something I could learn more about from being forced to act a little more.
But I’m sure those experiences have still affected me in a positive way. For instance, on Parks and Rec, I became friends with Nick Offerman and I believe your connections with other people are important. So having a strong friendship grow out of that experience has made me who I am and, I’d like to think, maybe a better songwriter, just through having a creative and productive friend.
You’ve written numerous songs for Mavis Staples over the years. Do you approach those differently when it comes to the methods you describe in your book?
I love writing for Mavis. I don’t know if it’s something I can explain easily but I feel like I have a natural kind of rapport with her. I have a deep sense of her and feeling for her. She feels like a family member to me at this point.
I love writing for her voice because I can always hear it in my head when I’m writing for her. I don’t write things that sound like me. I don’t even use the same language because she can get away with singing and saying a lot of things that would not sound as powerful coming out of my mouth. That’s liberating in itself.
I don’t think I would have that same sense of empathy if I wasn’t such a huge fan of hers. I think that gives me a clearer view of what she might want to sing. I’ve absorbed her music for so long that I don’t feel like I’m forcing words into her mouth with a crowbar. And I don’t get precious about it either. I always vet every single thing I write for her, but it comes naturally.
How to Write One Song also contains a brief yet powerful digression where you note, “I should probably steer away from a socio-political tangent here, but I think it would be irresponsible not to point out how copyright laws and the ways they’re enforced have changed based on how certain minority-innovated art forms became culturally and commercially valuable.” Do you think it’s possible that, as a result of the pandemic and a renewed appreciation for music as an integral part of our culture, we may see a shift by which additional government resources are committed to supporting some of these artistic pioneers, as well as assisting the art form in general?
Unfortunately, we’re pretty far away from the European model and level of support in the way that our culture is valued. That’s true not only of performance spaces but also of individual support for specific artists and endowments. Things like that seem much more part of their culture. I’m especially envious of the Scandinavian countries that seem to devote such a large share of their tax dollars to individual support. I know that, in Holland, they’ve renewed their version of the PPP loan three times, whereas we got one little drop in the bucket and a “Good luck!”
Of course, it’s not just artists that could use a lot more of a safety net. I certainly hope that what has happened will lead to some changes. A lot of things are going to have to change, regardless, and a lot of things are going to change for the worse before they get better. Unfortunately, I think that when things come back, or when they become safe again, a lot of things are going to be gone. It’ll take a long time to reopen all the venues that have been closed and to put together the PA companies and all of the businesses that are needed to support live music. It’s so widespread and it’s not just about the artists. So will something change within society to address this? All I can say is, “I hope so.”
Back to the practical aspects of your book, in two separate chapters, you present word ladder exercises. Initially, you pair 10 adjectives related to outer space with 10 nouns that popped into your head. Later on, you pair 10 verbs associated with a physician and 10 nouns within your field of vision. How did you come to apply this approach to your own songwriting?
The initial inspiration for those word ladder type of things is a surrealist game related to the “exquisite corpse” method of generating text. That isn’t exactly the way it was initially implemented—over time I modified it to create a little bit more potential meaning. I think the initial game is geared more toward absolute abstraction and randomness, so one of the ways I figured out how to make it a little bit less random was to give it the context of an invisible profession or an invisible activity, so that all of the verbs relate to something. So there’s a little bit of a ghost of a doctor that helps hold it together. But it’s basically an evolution from something that I read somewhere about the way surrealist writers generated texts. They were way more committed to having it come from somewhere other than their ego.
To what extent did the techniques you describe in the book help yield the material on Love Is the King? At one point, for instance, you generate two lines that later appear in slightly modified form within the song “Gwendolyn.”
There are definitely lines throughout the record that are related to some of the tricks I’ve learned in order to extract some exciting language out of myself. But for this record, in particular, a lot of the songwriting didn’t necessarily involve the process described in the book. Instead, the songs on Love Is the King tended to come from a classic kind of songwriting, like a Tin Pan Alley kind of style. I was basically trying to think of titles with the hope of coming up with country songs that could entertain my friends while also distracting myself from what was happening with the pandemic. So I was coming up with titles like, “I Don’t Want to Be Lonely, I’d Rather Be Alone.” These are cry in your beer kind of country songs. “A Robin or a Wren” was originally “The Last Last Call.” “Natural Disaster” was exactly like that, too. It’s just about coming up with those bumper-sticker kind of songs. Bumper-sticker might seem sort of demeaning, but what I love that about classic country music is the efficiency with which you’re able to tell somebody what the song is about.
I was doing that as an exercise early on in the pandemic to soothe myself, really. And in a lot of cases, I wasn’t asking myself to juice the language or reinvent anything. It was actually done a little bit more in the spirit of, “Well, the clichés work because they’re fucking great.” [Laughs.] So I was trying to explore some of the clichés that are there and see if I could subvert them just enough to make them my own. And, eventually, it became more and more exciting the more I allowed myself to do that, which is my natural inclination, I think.
I also think the world kept reasserting itself into the songs. It’s hard to think of a landscape for a simple country song if you have to paint it into the environment that we’re living in. That was a fascinating aspect of it to me, having that out there without directly looking at it.
When you’re writing songs for a particular album, does your knowledge of the personnel who will join you in the studio impact the process? With Love Is the King, I assume you knew that you would be recording with your sons.
I think that has a lot more impact on how the record comes together and what it sounds like at the end. The songwriting process, for me, is very similar to the way Love Is the King works. For almost a decade now, it’s been primarily me using the studio that I’ve put together as a writing tool or as a place to get lost in and hear what my new songs sound like. I’ve taught myself how to play a lot of instruments in order to try and get the sound closer to the potential that I hear in my head. And Spencer being around so much, and being such a great drummer, has allowed me to efficiently streamline that workflow. What ends up happening is that all of those songs could either be demos or they could be finished for a solo record. In the case of Wilco, they’re looked at as demos. It’s something that the personnel kind of decides. I get a feeling in the studio about which songs the Wilco members are most excited about. Those generally have the most momentum and energy behind them.
Speaking of Wilco, you began recording earlier this year, then put those sessions on hold due to the pandemic. When you finally resume, will you pick things up from there or do you have a new batch of songs that are a product of this moment?
When I close my eyes and picture what I want it to sound like, I can’t stop myself from wanting it to be something cathartic and big and inclusive. I want to acknowledge the audience in a way that is not insular. I don’t know if anthemic is in my repertoire, but this probably will be as close to that as I’ve ever imagined music to be for myself.
