At the Margin of Song and Spirit
Jeff Tweedy's new book maps the course of his life, one song at a time
If you live a life immersed in a particular art form, inevitably it will sculpt, well, pretty much every element of your being. You don’t even need to know it’s all around you.
It reminds me, kinda, of those gorgeous images from the various space telescopes, showing immense nebulae, clouds of interstellar gas, sculpted by radiation from exploding stars into — yes — rows and flows of angel hair.1 Does the gas “know” that it’s being sculpted? And if it did know, could it do anything about it? Nope.
Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy has been living in music for a long time — at least a half-century. He got his first guitar when he was six years old, a totem which he apparently felt earned him the label “guitarist” even though he couldn’t play at all. A few years later, thanks to a serious bicycle accident which laid him up for months, he started to take it all very seriously.
Now in his mid-50s, he’s had a musical career2 just about anyone would be proud of…
…and he’s been thinking, thinking hard, about all the music he’s absorbed in that time, and also about all the music he’s created, with others and solo. The result: this, his newest book (of three so far), whose contents I first considered a couple weeks ago3. Superficially, it simply consists of reflections on songs and performances important (for good or ill) not only to Tweedy’s own musicianship but also to his life in general.
Yet the book’s most concise summary lies buried almost three-fourths of the way in. He’s writing, of course, about how songwriters work — here, specifically, about Carole King and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” But he adds that he wants to go beyond what a song’s originator has done to create it; for now, he says (emphasis added):
I’m much more fascinated by the blurry area between a song and the mind that receives it, puts it back together in a shape that fits their own life, and allows the heart to take ownership.
If you think about it, this sentence marks a dismissal of music criticism as usually practiced. It’s not concerned with a song as an artifact, something produced, something to be studied, picked apart, annotated. The subject now — throughout the book actually, just not so explicitly — is instead that mystical and intangible, semi-permeable membrane surrounding the human soul but allowing sensory impressions to pass through, there to be acted upon by the forces of memory, experience, aspiration, desire, disillusion: all that. Hence the book’s subtitle, which I’d argue is more important than the main title: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music.
That first post of mine about the book focused on the list of songs Tweedy includes in the book, not on overarching themes about music in general. I don’t know — will probably never be familiar with — every song on the list. But I recognized a lot of those songs, and appreciated his reads of them. (Especially, I appreciated his jargon-free approach to describing them. You won’t find herein many, if any, references to codas, major and minor keys, sixteenth notes and demisemiquavers, and all that!)
He writes of disco, for instance, that he curled his younger lip at the very thought of it. But then some years later he re-listened with his whole, open heart to “Dancing Queen”… and it blew him away:
It’s important in life to admit when you were wrong about something. And although I bristle at the notion that there could ever be such a thing as a “wrong” musical opinion, I was relieved when I finally was able to admit I was colossally wrong about this song (and ABBA in general). I’m happy I can admit it. Maybe even a touch proud of myself for not digging my heels in and hating this song for even a second longer than I had to, unlike some friends I know who are still holding out. To me the weird part is ever feeling like I had to hate something so clearly irresistible…
There are wrong opinions about music! And to this day, “Dancing Queen” is the song I always think of when I THINK I don’t like something. It taught me that I can’t ever completely trust my negative reactions. I was burned so badly by this one song being withheld from my heart for so long. I try to never listen to music without first politely asking my mind, and whatever blind spots I’m afflicted with today, to move aside long enough for my gut to be the judge. And even then, if I don’t like something I make a mental note to try again in ten years.
(In fairness, I should add that I myself now need to re-listen to “Dancing Queen” a few times — interpret that as you will!)
A fun angle to a few of the chapters, contrary to the sense of that just-quoted passage: Tweedy actively does hate some music for which he’s never “moved aside along enough for his gut to judge”… and says so, in more or less those words.
One brief chapter, for instance, is nominally about Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” Tweedy insists that he loves Dolly Parton, reveres her, both as a musician and as a person. But:
I don’t like this song. I think it stinks. Doesn’t matter who sings it. It fries my nerves. If I had to single out one main offense, it’d be the AAAAAAAYYYYYY-EEEE-EYE part. I hate that. I think I have a tough time with extra syllables being added to long notes in general. Maybe because, as a singer, I’m not very good at it. That’s definitely something I’ve learned over the years…
[But] I might as well share this part, too . . .
One of the things people always marvel at about Dolly is that she wrote this song and “Jolene” in the same day. When I heard that for the first time, I thought to myself, “That’s pretty impressive, but at least one of those two songs sucked.”
(laughing)
Tweedy makes a single exception to his “one song per chapter” rule: the music of The Beatles, considered as a whole. He grants, “having the Beatles in the world can feel pretty daunting as a musician. Everyone doing what I do kind of knows the world already has the Beatles.”
So what’s the point, then, a musician might ask?
Tweedy’s answer is the Beatles Anthology project — three albums, a book, and a TV documentary, with release dates running between 1995 and 2003, i.e., decades after the band’s breakup and everything which followed.
…when these collections of demos, early takes, rough mixes, and outtakes came out, I felt I’d been handed a treasure map. A schematic of love, clear and readable enough to reverse-engineer any type of tune. Did “Strawberry Fields” always sound like music made by an underwater candy orchestra? Why, no. Here you can listen to it how it was written. Like a normal song strummed on an acoustic guitar. What about “Helter Skelter”? That must have just been lightning striking, right? First take, perhaps? Visionary proto-metal, quantum-leap guitar onslaughts like that must be born of a clear bolt out of the blue. Nope. Just a tepid blues trudge here. Fascinating nonetheless, because YOU know they’re onto something, even though they don’t quite sound like they’ll ever get there.
Tweedy doesn’t expect that you — if you (like me) are a non-musician — will have the same experience of The Beatles Anthology as he’s had. Which is the point, really, of all his analyses: by definition, lots of people have appreciated every single thing under the “popular music” umbrella… but no pop song has ever been equally appreciated by everyone.
Everyone’s musical filter is their own, because it’s a product not just of the music looking for a way in but also of the person on the inside, looking out. Those mysterious interstellar winds will continue to blow, whether you let them in or not; but the shape of everything they touch, including you, will still be ever so slightly — or profoundly, but in any case inexorably — buffeted, massaged, and molded into something it wouldn’t have been otherwise.
World Within a Song is worth a read. Tweedy’s style is breezy and informal, and he interleaves the song-specific chapters with “rememories” of his life and career. It’s hard not to feel grounded while reading it.
More importantly, if you keep your mind open, it’s also not hard to appreciate anew the ground on which you’re standing. Recommended!
See, e.g., this marvelous video — an animation constructed of images and other data received from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the 3D structure of the Veil Nebula (per Wikipedia, “a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus”):
Wikipedia: Jeff Tweedy’s career