Will to work drives Wilco’s Tweedy to fourth decade making music

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy offers his perspective on how he keeps his creative sparks burning.

Songwriter and record producer Jeff Tweedy in his Chicago studio. Picture: Tim Klein/The Wall Street Journal.

When is the right time for an artist to step back and look at the life and work he has created? For Jeff Tweedy, leader of the rock group Wilco, it was when someone offer­ed him a book deal.

Writing his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Tweedy, 51, came to understand better what has sustained him throughout his career, including a compulsion to create and the thrill of exposing raw emotions through song.

Tweedy grew up in Belleville, Illinois, a town near St Louis where he picked up guitar, sought out punk records and, with high-school classmate Jay Farrar, formed the band Uncle Tupelo. In the early 1990s, their blend of punk and American roots music fuelled a new sound dubbed alt-country. Tweedy later would shed that label with Wilco, the band he formed in 1994 after Uncle Tupelo broke up.

Wilco has since released 10 studio albums and in 2005 won a Grammy for best alternative album. In his book, Tweedy writes about the band’s path and collaborators, including Farrar and soul singer Mavis Staples, as well as his struggle with prescription painkillers, which he used for chronic panic attacks and migraines.

A new solo album, Warm, includes some of Tweedy’s most autobiographical songs yet and serves as a musical companion to his memoir, out this month.

“It’s an opportunity to answer a lot of questions you never get asked,” he says in an interview at the Loft, the nickname for Wilco’s gear and guitar-filled headquarters in Chicago. He spoke about songwriting without words, how addiction affected his work and his aversion to the term dad rock. Edited excerpts follow:

Before this book, what was your position on retrospective stuff such as reissuing old albums and performing them on tour?

It’s probably smart to underline and enhance your previous work, but the majority of our energy gets spent on what’s next. I don’t know how this applies to other art forms, but there are some musicians that reach a point where they’re pretty happy to be a nostalgia act or a legacy artist. That doesn’t seem like a terrible way to live your life, as a troubadour, but I don’t think I’d be happy for very long doing that.

Guitars at Jeff Tweedy's Chicago studio. Picture: Tim Klein/The Wall Street Journal

For every band there’s a turning point when people seem more excited about the music they created in the past than the stuff they’re creating in the present.

A new piece of music isn’t going to be someone’s best friend right away, in the way that a record over time can become someone’s companion. But a lot of times artists give up on their new material too soon because of that fact. They’d be better off sticking to their guns and not just sneaking in a couple new songs in a set. When we started playing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (the 2001 album considered one of Wilco’s best), people f..king hated it. But it’s a good issue to contend with. It means you’ve managed to stay around for a while.

Even when your painkiller addiction was at its worst, you would time your drug intake to make sure you had some clarity when recording or performing. Was that out of pride, fear of embarrassment or what?

Some desire to do a good job, not let people down, not be embarrassed. But also to maintain my delusion about my own condition, thinking I was using drugs to be normal, not to party. Those types of thoughts were what kept me ill. I made a value judgment about what kind of addict I was. Ultim­ately all addicts are the same.

How important is self-confidence to your creative process?

I’ve managed to hang on to something that most people get — I don’t want to say beaten out of them, but it usually disappears for them. When you’re a little kid, you make stuff, and it’s good enough because it was fun. I still have that same kind of glee about just making something.

How do you get into that mode when you’re not feeling it?

That doesn’t happen very often. I get here (to the Loft) in the morning about 10am.

Usually there’s something obvious that I’m working on, and (with engineer Tom Schick and studio manager Mark Greenberg) we jump back into it. If not, I’ll listen to iPhone demos to see if there’s something I can start building on, or listen to things from countless other sessions to see if something inspires me to pick up another instrument or start to write some lyrics.

You’re not coming in waiting to be struck by lightning: “The greatest song ever written will be written today!” It’s more like, “I wonder what is going to happen today?” You have to like work.

Mixing console at Tweedy's studio. Picture: Tim Klein/The Wall Street Journal

Before you write lyrics, you record a rough draft with wordless singing. Do those vocals ever feel more emotionally potent than the lyrics that replace them?

Yeah, sometimes I have to try three or four times to get the lyrics, the actual words, to feel as good and create the same emotion that the “mumble track” did. The words can break the spell. In them I hear myself being clever, or I misunderstand how important a certain sound is to one part of the melody.

There are several verses on things I’ve released over the years that are not words. It’s just the original mumble track that I’ve already translated elsewhere in the song.

In the book you say that writing songs is an effort to get closer to people. Do you have an image in your mind of who the listener is?

Commercially or marketing-wise, it makes sense to because you can see them in front of you on a night-to-night basis.

But it’s a stereotype that doesn’t help me at all artistically because I want to sing to everybody. That’s one of the things that have always made it sting to be critiqued in that way.

There’s a general shorthand for comedians about what the whitest band is and Wilco is often used as that. The Dave Matthews Band is in there, too.

I can take it. It’s not racism or anything. But what am I supposed to do? They’re painting a picture that might make someone who hasn’t heard us think that our music is not for them. “Dad rock.”

On one hand, it’s super thin-skinned to complain about jokes like that.

On the other hand, it’s a legitimate complaint. I should be fiercely protective of my right to sing to everybody.

You see a distinction between “Wilco fan” and whoever you’re singing to?

Ultimately, I’m only singing to myself. For any artist, that’s all you have at the end of the day. You don’t get to have anyone else’s consciousness. As simplistic as it sounds, I want to get closer to everybody, but I’m all I’ve got.

The Wall Street Journal