Photo credit: Sammy Tweedy
It’s been a long time since anybody mistook Jeff Tweedy for a tortured artist. Around the turn of the century the Wilco songwriter was hailed as alt-country’s great iconoclast, a restless soul who guided his band through a series of creative reinventions while chronicling alienation on albums like the band’s 2002 masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But since seeking treatment for depression, anxiety and painkiller addiction in the mid-’00s, his music has become happier, more playful. A Pitchfork review dubbed Wilco’s easygoing 2007 album Sky Blue Sky “dad rock,” and although Tweedy shuttered at the term, on some level he seemed to embrace it. Fatherhood flattered him; he even began touring and recording with his prodigiously talented drummer son Spencer.
In November, Tweedy will release a memoir titled Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). Ahead of that book, and his return to the Pabst Theater for a solo show on Wednesday, Sept. 19, Tweedy chatted with the Shepherd Express about recovery, Wilco’s lovably annoying fanbase, and whether the end is near for the beloved band he’s fronted for nearly 25 years.
What compelled you to write a memoir? Was it something you’d been thinking about doing for a while?
I was approached by some different people about there being some interest in me sharing my story or some of my stories. And it seemed like a pretty daunting challenge, so I guess I enjoyed that aspect of it. I feel pretty young and not near the end of my career, so in that regard it feels a little bit premature or silly. But at the same time I do think there are unique aspects to the way my career has gone and I think I have stores to tell. So I decided to take a crack at it. I’m excited about it. I think people will enjoy it.
Was there a point in your career when you decided you were going to be more open about your personal experiences?
Maybe when I figured out that it actually meant something to somebody. Certainly after I got out of rehab, I think there’s a sense that you’re not helping anybody by being closed and unwilling to share. It just doesn’t work that way for anybody that’s gone through recovery. I think it’s supposed to. The right thing to do is demystify the process of getting help and to try to do your part to remove the stigma of asking for help for mental illness.
Opening up like that is difficult for anybody, but I imagine it can be even harder for artists, who sometimes enjoy preserving a certain mystique. It must be hard to let that go.
Maybe for somebody else. I don’t know. For me, I think it’s hard to keep up the bullshit [laughs]. I think it’s hard to be active in fortifying your persona. That’s a lot of energy! I don’t have anywhere near enough energy to be Madonna or somebody who needs that or desires that. For me, it’s always seemed like the simplest way to go. It’s the same with the people I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from, like The Minutemen. You know, I love Bob Dylan, but I don’t have that kind of energy. That’s not the same thing, but D. Boon and The Minutemen, The Replacements, and other people that looked and sounded like me and weren’t good at being slick performers, all of that, that felt real to me. And to me that felt like the way you’re supposed to be, you know? I wanted to seem like something doable to other people [laughs].
Did recovery change your songwriting at all?
I think everything that happens to you changes your songwriting a bit, but it didn’t in any way that I can point out and underline for you. That’s the short answer. The long answer is “not as much as you would think.” I think the part of me that was able to write songs and create and do something that was fulfilling was the healthier part of me. It wasn’t the part that needed to be healed or fixed as much as the parts of me that were suffering.
It’s funny how the popular notion of that is reversed. There’s still a belief that art comes from suffering.
It is reversed. In my opinion certainly there’s something adaptive and consoling about being a creative person. And art in general is a great consolation, and there are certainly people with certain types of mood disorders who find that comfort. I just think you’re kind of lucky if you find art as a way to go. I do think it’s backward. I think most art is made in spite of suffering, not because of suffering.
Was your creative process always pretty healthy, even in your darker days?
I think it’s always been fairly constructive. It’s always been me at my best. It’s a part of me that was there before I ever did drugs. It’s a part of me that… Well, maybe it had something to do with some of the mood disorders or the depression and anxiety that I think started pretty young. But I can’t attribute it to that. It’s who I am. I just got a lot of joy and satisfaction out of making songs, out of making anything. You know, the process changes a lot over time, but I think the thing that is the same is the impulse, feeling compelled to make something.
You’ve been doing a lot of acoustic tours lately. Do you have a preference between performing solo and playing with the band these days?
They’re like apples and oranges. I really enjoy both. I really like the simplicity of the whole thing, the practicality of getting out on tour with my acoustic guitars. As you can imagine it’s a lot less of an ordeal: fewer people involved, fewer buses and trucks and all of that stuff, so it feels relaxing, almost like a vacation. I enjoy it. I definitely enjoy it. But also I love what Wilco does. I love that feeling when we’re making something that the six of us can make that’s so big and majestic and when it’s working in the right way it’s great.
Those tours put you in such close proximity with your fans. They’re yelling stuff at you on the stage, and making requests. Have you learned anything about your fans that you didn’t know before you started doing them?
I’ve been doing them for such a long time, so I don’t think so. I like that people feel like we’re in a room together, doing it, and they’re not watching a movie. I’ve seen a fair amount of shows where you don’t get the sense where there’s a connection in that regard. I appreciate that Wilco fans, my fans, they’re almost annoyingly… Well, sometimes it’s annoying that they feel so comfortable shouting stuff at me and asking me questions during the songs [laughs], but I think the alternative would be far more boring. Don’t print that, though, because I don’t want to encourage anybody! [Laughs]
What’s the song they call out for the most?
That’s just it, there isn’t a song that they yell out the most. It’d be really handy if it was one! It would have been nice if I had a hit song at some point. But I usually ask the audience, since there isn’t an established song that I know I need to hold on to so that everybody will stay, I generally tell the audience to leave after they hear a song that they enjoy so I know when to stop playing.
Is there a song you refuse to play, a song they often request that just doesn’t mean much to you?
No, I’m pretty game to take a crack at almost anything. There are definitely songs that I can’t pull off by myself on an acoustic guitar, even if it was written that way. Sometimes there are songs that are too quiet or too fragile to present in a big theater. There are limitations to the whole thing sometimes. But I haven’t completely disowned anything. There are a few songs that I’d be really bummed out if I had to play, but luckily that’s not the case.
You’ve made a couple jokes on stage about the way that fans debate your discography and obsess about it. How closely do you follow the conversation around your own music?
Oh, I can’t keep up. I probably know a little more than some artists, because we stay fairly engaged with some of our fans because we’ve partnered with them for charities and stuff, and my wife pays attention to the chat groups and everything. So I’m not cut off. I definitely get wind of some tempest-in-a-teapot controversies over certain things. You know, before the internet people used to sit at bars and talk shit about bands, and nobody cared, nobody knew. That’s what people are still doing, they’re just doing it in a public forum where anybody can stumble across this stupid conversation and weigh in. It just always reminds me of a bunch of drunk people at a bar. That’s what the internet is: Everybody seems drunk to me.
I feel like it can be healthy for people to have an outlet where they can get worked up over inconsequential things. It’s like baseball: The stakes aren’t life or death, but people need to channel that energy somewhere, so why not somewhere harmless?
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Well, it would be nice if it went somewhere helpful, though! [Laughs] Maybe that would be nice, to put that passion toward helping their community or something [Laughs]. I’m not saying people who argue about baseball don’t do that, because they probably do. I’m not condemning it. I just think that’s what it is it.
With Together At Last [Tweedy’s 2017 solo album featuring stripped-down versions of songs from his previous bands], how did you decide which songs to record? Were you trying to document what you do on these live tours?
No, I think at some point I just started recording acoustic versions of songs, and a lot of times that’s exactly how they sounded when I first started working on them. It just occurred to me that I didn’t really have an archive of how the songs sounded when I wrote them. The first release was just picking some recordings that I thought sounded good together. There’s really no rhyme or reason to it. It’s just trying to get a decent version of as many songs as I can play by myself that I’ve written.
Are you going to keep recording more albums in that style then?
Well I’ve got a studio in my basement, and it takes about four minutes to record a song [laughs], so there’s not a whole lot of reasons to not do it.
Wilco has been around for a long time now. Do you ever think about a long term plan for the band? Do you think it’s the kind of band that can just keep going indefinitely, or will there come a time when you think you’ll want to retire it?
I don’t really believe in bands breaking up. I feel like if you’re tired of playing together you should just stop playing together and then wait and see if you feel like playing together again sometime down the road. I’m always a bit skeptical of the marketing of the ending of the band. It seems like it’s always a way to sell tickets or something. That being said, I don’t see any reason why Wilco can’t just keep playing forever. We enjoy it. We’re all good friends. We might not tour as much. We might not put out a record every year or keep up the same pace, but there’s nothing stopping us from enjoying it, so we’ll probably keep doing it for a pretty long time.
That seems like the healthiest way to keep a band running, not to put yourself in a situation where you’re obligated to keep cranking out records or tour. Just let yourself work at your own pace.
Yeah. You have to work at it to be self-positioned over a pretty long period of time to be doing that. It’d be a drag to feel like you had to do it. I could see some people being in situation where they have a big operation that only stays afloat if you stay pretty active, and that could burn you out pretty quickly. I think we just kind of lucked out, but we’ve always been fairly content not feeling greedy, like we have to get every dollar that’s on the table, you know? [Laughs] That would be a fucking drag!
Jeff Tweedy headlines the Pabst Theater on Wednesday, Sept. 19, at 7:30 p.m. with opener James Elkington.
