Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy Wants You to Be Bad at Something. It’s for Your Own Good.

Recently, I picked up Jeff Tweedy’s “How to Write One Song.” It was a bit of a lark. Tweedy is the frontman for Wilco, one of my favorite bands, but I’m not a songwriter, and I don’t plan to become one. But, unexpectedly, I loved the book. It’s the most generous and approachable guide to the creative process I’ve read. It’s also relentlessly practical: To Tweedy, this really is a process, replete with practices that you can enjoy doing daily. As a writer of a very different sort, I’ve had a blast with them. So I asked Tweedy to come on the show to talk about creativity, ands his approach to it. He debunks the idea that suffering is necessary (or even useful) for the creative process, talks through his relentless search for inspiration, sings and analyzes a few of my favorite songs, analyzes his relationship with his mother, shares some of his tricks for finding fresh language for old ideas and even convinces me to write some poetry. This is a fun one. Book recommendations: Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes A Temple of Texts by William H. Gass The MacGuffin by Stanley Elkin

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:17Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:33Ezra Klein?

  There are these ideas about creativity that I've always been suspicious of. For instance, that making art requires immense suffering. I've been depressed. It never seems to me that the optimal mind state for difficult acts of creation is I can't get out of bed, but you know, your mileage may vary. But the idea that art comes from somewhere mystical, that it is the product of profound and ineffable talent and inspiration, I don't want to believe that one. But, but at the same time, I've seen what happens when I try and draw and I know people who are great artists and, and so it lurks for me. And in some ways it intimidates me. I can't do what they can do. So why do any of it at all?

• 1:17Ezra Klein?

  Recently, and pretty randomly, I picked up Jeff Tweedy's book, How to Write One Song. If you don't know Jeff Tweedy, he's the front man for the Grammy award winning band Wilco, which is a band I love and have loved for years. He's played in Uncle Tupelo, released a bunch of solo albums, produced other people's great records. And so that got me to pick up the book, but I, I really didn't expect it to be such a delight. I really didn't. Tweedy's just simple joy in the creative process is infectious. He's got this insistence that it can and should just be part of a balanced life, just part of a balanced day. And he's specific on what that means. For him, it really is a process, a set of practices, a way you can spend your time

• 1:58Ezra Klein?

  with no expectation of judgment or riches that will just be nice, just nicer than other ways you could spend your time. I loved it. And one thing that was striking to me about it, Tweedy has spoken publicly, and it is part of his public mythos about his struggles with mental illness and addiction. And so I'd always chalked up at least some of his music to being the product of agony and suffering. But he really doesn't see it that way. And in How to Write One Song, and then also in his memoir, Let's Go, So We Can Get Back, he really makes a case and makes it convincingly that it is gentler motivations and conditions, a love of wordplay, a good night's sleep, a regular space on the schedule that really foster creation, particularly sustained creation.

• 2:42Ezra Klein?

  How to Write One Song is not actually a self-help book. That is not where you'll find it in a bookstore. It's not how it is written. But I will say it is my favorite self-help book I have read in a long time. So I asked Jeff Tweedy to come on the show, talk about how you create something every day and how the rest of us can too. I will say as a preview here, this actually did get me to go and write some poetry. And no, you will never, ever hear it. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:14Ezra Klein?

  Jeff Tweedy, welcome to the show.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:17Ezra Klein?

  So there's a line in your book that I just loved. You say that, quote, "disappearing is the most sustaining part of what I do." Tell me about that.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's kind of what everybody wants all the time is to be free from worry, you know, unburdened by a sense of self. Or that's what I think of as disappearing. I think people do it a lot of different ways that I don't think are particularly creative or productive. And I would argue maybe not as good for you. I think people disappear when they play games on their phone and do things, you know, like watch sporting events. And I think that's good. I think everybody kind of needs to check out a little bit. But I think it's kind of incredible when you can do that and somehow be present at the same time,

• 4:11Speaker 01

  which is what I think happens when you create.

• 4:15Ezra Klein?

  What makes it more or less likely for you that during a creative session, you'll be able to disappear?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  I think it's really the, when I'm asking the least of it, you know, I think if I'm putting really high demands on what I want to come out of myself, or when I'm just coming at it like wanting to get something out of it, basically, I guess, you know, like thinking, oh, I'm gonna get a song out of this, I, I feel like I'm aiming at the wrong thing. But when I allow myself to just discover, looking forward, focusing my eyes more on just the act of what I'm playing around with, I guess it's just a difference between play, I guess, and some sort of mistaken notion that you can kind of direct your creativity all the time.

• 5:03Ezra Klein?

  I thought this was a pretty interesting tension, at least for me in your book, which is, there are a lot of things where we get into it because it starts as play. That was true for me in writing.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:15Ezra Klein?

  And then, over time, it becomes a job, it becomes a career, it becomes an, an identity. And you have throughout the book, this very intense focus on the, the play, the process is the point. But on the other hand, you got a band, you got a label, you finished songs, you have like Grammys. I mean, there's gotta be some work that, that went into that. So I'm really curious how you manage that, that tension between, you know, it works best when you ask the least of it, but when it works, it begins to ask more of you.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Well, all, all of that other stuff is work, and I enjoy it, too. I don't disappear in it the way I disappear in, in the creative side of things as much. But I do think that you can look at a lot of those aspects of, of it being a business with creativity also. You can figure out a way to put your records out that is, feels in, of a piece with what your, what your art is. I think that you can- You can organize your touring organization or your crew or your, the way you do things. There's some aspect of creativity that can be incorporated in all of those decisions.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  You know, when I was younger, I think a lot of bands looked at it as being uncool to actually be even aware of a lot of the commerce side of things or thinking of it as a business. And I always thought that that was sort of just pretending to be dumb or something, you know? Like, I think it was worn as a badge of authenticity or something, that you didn't care about those things. I think that they're afraid of those things sometimes and afraid that it is gonna get somehow mixed up in the stew of this beautiful thing that they get to do and it was discovered through play and through, you know, just like exploring.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  And yeah, I think people get worried that it's gonna poison it, but I, I, I think it's much, much simpler to look at them as a part of the same type of creativity and at the same time, keep them somewhat separate in that you, it's not that hard to distinguish which, what things are running a business and what things are making something up.

• 7:32Ezra Klein?

  I, I hear what you're saying, that it can be done creatively, but maybe I'm just speaking too much from my own experience here, but, but I have certainly found that as the structure around the core creative work expands, it can be pretty overwhelming. Have there, have there been times for you when it has stopped feeling like play and begun feeling like work? And if so, how did you get back from that?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think the number one job of anybody that ends up being in a position where they're making music and putting it out into the world and it does become somewhat of a business and you have a band to run and all those things. I think it's something that you have to consciously be aware of, protecting your inspiration. That's actually part of the job, I think. And to do that, you have to... Relieve yourself of those burdens in whatever way you can. Some, you know, for us, over the years, we've never toured more than a few weeks at a time. We've like really made a point of trying to have lives and not go out on tour for six months. You know, that's a pretty simple decision and it's not a good financial decision because you actually,

• 8:37Speaker 01

  it's, it costs more money to start up each time you start a tour. But it was a good decision in the long run to protect the feeling of being excited to play music. Same thing for writing music. I don't like to feel like I'm under the gun, so I do it all the time. And I have amassed so many songs that I never really worry that I, that I, I'm gonna need to, need a bolt of lightning right now to get a song done, you know? And, and so that's just like being kind of prepared, but also just making time for it as a practice. That's been my strategy as a way to protect this side of what I do that I find really gratifying.

• 9:20Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk a bit about how you make time for it as a practice. But before we get kind of into the strategies, I want to talk about the kind of mystical nature of it. Because when you describe like your creative state, it's very similar, the way you talk about it, to these various traditions that are about like getting a couple of layers down into intuition and like associational thinking, you know, sort of Freudianism and Zen. And, you know, it had a lot of resonance to that for me. And so I was curious about that, if, if some of those are actual like influences. I mean, a lot of your, the way you talk about songwriting actually remind me of the way people talk in, in therapy. Like, is that a, is that something that has taught you about tapping into these parts of you?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I'm really fascinated with consciousness. I'm fascinated with a lot of bigger, big ideas that I don't completely comprehend. You know, I've never been, I'm, you know, I'm an autodidact. I have never really been successful in an academic environment. But I've read and probably misread tons of psychology and philosophy of all kinds. And I love thinking about things and I love thinking about how I think about things. So it's something that I think has always been. An inclination of mine to kind of live inwardly, you know, and I spend a lot of

• 10:44Speaker 01

  time in my head, you know, and so I think it's all of that must inform some of what I wrote about in my book, and it's definitely informed, you know, how I think about what I do and how I think about other people doing what I do. But they're jumping off points. I find myself reading a lot of books like that and, and skimming over dozens of pages, really kind of only entertaining my own thoughts.

• 11:12Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me, let me locate this in your book, because one of the striking things to me was that it's really practical. I mean, you're, you're talking about something that it sometimes feels mystical, but then you have pretty rigorous processes for getting at. So could you describe one of the practices you use to kind of tap into that more associational consciousness and maybe, you know, what's a song that emerged out of that that you could play?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Um, you know, like, like all types of writers, poets, authors, songwriters, I do rely on a, upon a certain amount of free writing and empty yourself every, you know, with regularity, you know, like as a daily practice. So I would start there for anybody wanting to do this, just like exercise the muscle that pushes the ego out of the way, you know, and that, that to me is, is just getting better and better at writing without judgment, without direction, without trying to steer your mind to the specific things that make you feel good about yourself, or make you think you're smart, or make you

• 12:20Speaker 01

  think you're writing well. But if that's hard, there are also things that just are purely process driven, that I think usually end up in me freeing myself into something more exciting and that has the element of discovery. And something like that would be the word ladders I describe in the book where You maybe imagine all of the verbs associated with a profession like a baseball player and you, you know, write down verbs like swing, slide, spit, you know, whatever. You know, there's a lot of different things you can put in the other column of the, of, you know, say you put 10 verbs on one side and you put 10 nouns that are maybe randomly

• 13:05Speaker 01

  chosen, or maybe you could, you know, just pull the nouns out of a paragraph in the newspaper in front of you. And then I just stare at the page and, and think, well, how does this verb work against this noun? And I start to draw lines between, not directly across, but, you know, looking at the 10 words on each side of the page, thinking, okay, you know, how is the star spitting? How did I slide into love? Or, you know, like the verb, when you like kind of dismantle all of the, the ways we kind of simplify language for ourselves, we, we tend to group verbs with nouns. We tend to think of certain adjectives and certain adverbs in more compartmentalized chunks that makes language a little flat.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And for me, when I start to look at how different verbs work on different nouns that shouldn't, shouldn't go together, it just unlocks a world of thought and a world of like a, you know, a story emerges sometimes, or, or just at the very least, images that I never anticipated. And before you know it, you're daydreaming. If I'm going to play a song that, that kind of illustrates this, you know, it's not exactly the same as what I just described in a word ladder, but I think I started the song with the idea of somebody trying to talk to a cop with a plastic beer cup in their teeth. And that emerged through some of these same types of exercises.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  The song also has the lyric about the sun coming up like a trombone, a big trombone. Or, you know, later in the song, it come, the sun comes up like a piece of toast. And those are all things that if I sat down to try and think of something that made me smile or laugh.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Probably wouldn't have happened, but they were discovered through not asking that of myself, but just playing with language. And, and do you want me to play the song?

• 15:05Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:30Ezra Klein?

  So what I love about that song coming up like a big trombone, so I'm a writer. I write a lot of words. They're mostly about politics, but they're really linear for me. Like every word is a brick in an argument. And so I'm always like pushing for clarity. But you use them really differently. You have a lot of fun with them. You have this other one you talk about in the book that I remember from the song where you talk about assassinating down the street.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And like, that's somehow truer than the sentence I would use, right?

• 17:00Ezra Klein?

  Like, it doesn't work. My editor, and I love you, Aaron, my editor would like, cut that out of my column, because like, that's not what the word assassinating means. But like, how would you describe that? That role where words begin to say something that they don't mean, but that is still right?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I mean, I may mean at a different truth than you are. I think I'm aiming at things that feel true, and you're aiming at things that are factually true. So that's the magic of language. I mean, is that it can get at different layers of emotion with very slight manipulation, you know? It's like, it's less manipulative than, I think, some of the ways that prose is written a lot of times. I think it's less reliant upon logos and really kind of surrendering to our myth-making abilities and our abilities to see what isn't being said.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  And the way haiku works, where you use a very, very sparse amount of syllables and you end up seeing the entire scene, including things that are not explicitly stated. That's why poetry exists. That's why songs exist. They say things that we can't say with linear language, the way you describe it. It's just using the texture and the feel of language to, I don't know, reach parts of who we are that our intellects don't really have much control over.

• 18:32Ezra Klein?

  I'd like to take a look at one of your songs that I've always loved and just ask you to break it down a little bit for us, so we can see how it came to be. So I was wondering if you wouldn't mind playing a verse of "Impossible Germany."

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Impossible Germany, unlikely Japan.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Wherever you go, wherever you land.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  I'll say what this means to me.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  I'll do what I can.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Impossible Germany, unlikely Japan.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  The fundamental problems we all need to face.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  This is important, but I know you're not listening. Now I know you're not listening.

• 19:57Ezra Klein?

  Where did the phrase "impossible Germany, unlikely Japan" come from?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  I don't remember exactly, but I think it's in something by William H. Gass. It might have been The Tunnel, because that book is really related to the history of the Third Reich. And we're meta-version of a historian just digging himself deeper into himself. I think there is the phrase "an unlikely Germany." So this happens a lot when I read, and it usually becomes like a cognitive loop. I'll read something that just feels, not like, "Oh, wow, I could write a song around that."

• 20:45Speaker 01

  But it just becomes like, "Unlikely Germany, wow. That's amazing." And I'll find myself 10 pages later still thinking, "Unlikely Germany, man. That's, I gotta think about that. What does that mean?" And just being so moved by how much is contained in just two words being put together, and how much it can evoke. So I think it definitely grew out of that feeling.

• 21:19Ezra Klein?

  It's funny because for me, that song, and I don't, I mean, I think it's clear like how I started getting it here in my head. But it became a song I loved listening to when I traveled. That song feels like the whole mood of the movie Lost in Translation to me. It's like that kind of weirdness of being in other places and communicating. And then when I actually like listened to the lyrics, I wasn't sure that's what it was about at all, actually. And I was curious for you if it's like, do you feel like you understand when you write these, like what ends up on the other side of the relationship of the interpretive relationship? Or is it just like it means something to you and other things to other people and you just sort of like let it loose to have that, have that life?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's hard to, it's, I mean, people really want to know what things mean and I'm, I'm no different. I think that's, I rely upon my brain really craving meaning. But in the case of some of these lyrics that I write that tend to be more abstract, what they mean to me is the feeling, the shock of mystery that happens when I say them out loud or when I sing them. And that's what it means to me. It becomes this thing that's much more like, again, what we were talking about earlier. It has this flexibility to feel very specifically about a different thing on an, on an any given night.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  I have elaborated in the past and I have told different versions probably of what I think the lyrics to that song mean to me in a more didactic kind of or storytelling sense. But I think if I'm being completely honest, it's just, I always want a song to sing. I always want a new song to sing. And what I think of as a song to sing is something that makes me feel like I've been electrocuted a little bit when I say it out loud. Or when I put it, when it, when it's attached to a melody. And it doesn't just work with any two words. You, you know, you can put any two words together and I'm pretty confident that it's going,

• 23:24Speaker 01

  if you look at them long enough, you'll, they contain worlds and you can find a million different meanings for. Lots of different combinations that are unnatural or maybe shocking in a way. But they don't all do that thing when you sing them. And those lyrics did for me, this thing that I'm always looking for, whether it's the direct lyric, like, um, please be patient with me. That definitely has that, even just saying that phrase out loud to you just now, I still feel like, oh, okay, I mean that, you know? And I mean impossible Germany, unlikely Japan. I don't, I don't know how, but I mean it, you know?

• 24:09Ezra Klein?

  I love that. And in some ways, I'm, I'm happy to not know quite what it, what it didactically meant because I could allow me to mean it too. I also love how in the exercise you describe, but also a bunch of them, this idea that you're pulling apart the patterns we've gotten used to in our own language. I did a conversation once with a science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, who's amazing. And I hope I'm not going to misremember the term he used. But he talks about, he talks about science fiction as creating cognitive alienation from the world you're in. It's like your world, but it's unlike your world. And so the, the normal ways that you would absorb patterns and gestalt begins to erode and you can see the same things anew. And it's an interesting idea that, that that's what you're doing with language,

• 24:51Ezra Klein?

  that I think even those of us maybe who think of ourselves as pretty facile with it, that in some ways, like the process of becoming good at language is a process of getting yourself baked into patterns of knowing what goes with what. And that we begin to lose that, that playfulness. And that it's worth creating a, a practice about getting it, getting it back.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  And people get good at bullshitting by being good at that.

• 25:12Ezra Klein?

  That's a good story.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  That's my experience of watching lots of TED Talks. And I'm like, this, this person really sounds like they know what they're talking about. But if I think about it a whole lot more than just listening to the structure of how they're putting their words together. I don't think they're saying that much a lot of times, you know, or it's like, it's like, oh, I get what they're saying. It's pretty, it's a, that's common sense, I suppose, or something. But yeah, I think in science fiction, you know, it sees around the form of a novel, you know, it sees around the artifice of it in a really kind of poignant way that a lot of novels don't even attempt. You know, there's, there are all these constructs with, with

• 25:56Speaker 01

  the way we encounter fiction that rely upon us just pouring into the story, our own experience. And that's the way filmmaking works. A lot of times there's this language of cinema where, okay, they get in the car. Now you know they're somewhere else, but you don't see them go over the bridge to where they're going. Or, you know, we, we fill in the gaps all the time. I was like, was really thinking about this a lot because of that movie, The Room, that terrible movie.

• 26:27Ezra Klein?

  The terrible, amazing movie, The Room.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Terrible, amazing movie. And that's one of the most beautiful things about that movie is that it just completely turns all of that cinematic language on its head. They get in the car, you see them on the bridge, and then they're still in the same room in the next scene. You know, like, I, I love that.

• 26:46Ezra Klein?

  The, the way you put about it, science fiction, subverting the novel is, is really interesting. It makes me think, so I've been reading, I've just read like a thousand pages of this great sci fi writer, Adrian Chekhovski. But he, his work got recommended to me by, by a listener of the show. And it was a real trip moving over to it, given like that I normally read about politics. I read, you know, novels about this family, but, you know, I grew up in it, but it's unhappy. And he's just like, what if civilization, but it was entirely spiders? Like, what if all of civilization were built around spiders and spider aptitudes and spider biology? And it's like, wow, that is a really different place to put your brain for a while. Like, it really blows up some of what you take for granted. I just, I just loved it. So let me ask you a little bit about this as

• 27:31Ezra Klein?

  a practice, because I was saying a minute or two ago that You know, often getting good at something, it can create a lock into patterns, but it can also create something you talk about in the book, which is a fear of feeling bad at that thing or at other things. And I'll use myself as an example here. Like, I'm like a skilled writer. I get like paid to write words for the New York Times. And partially because I'm a skilled writer, I've been trying to read a lot more poetry over the past year and a half. And sometimes I will sit down to try to write poetry. And like, I can't get over how bad it feels to me, right? How bad it feels to be so bad at it? And then to look at it and be like, this is childlike, this is ridiculous. Or like, I'm like this with drawing too.

• 28:15Ezra Klein?

  And you talk a lot about this feeling of like, there's a, you can take a joy in being, in being bad at things. How do you get to that point?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, let me just help you out here for a second.

• 28:27Ezra Klein?

  Please. Put me on the couch.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  How much different would it feel if you were setting out to write the worst poem you could think of? Would you feel good if you succeeded in writing a poem that you thought was terrible? It's also subjective and strange to even want to do. But I like to do that sometimes. I think a lot of the things that I think I do to avoid writer's block is I write through songs that I don't like. I get an idea for a song, I just go ahead and do it, even though I don't think I'm gonna like it. And I feel like that frees me up to go to the next song. And so you've identified one of the main things, I think, that keeps people from doing creative things is this idea that it's bad, or that they're not going to be good at it

• 29:15Speaker 01

  and it's gonna hurt to not be good at something. Even today, after writing thousands of songs, maybe, I don't know, hundred, at least hundreds of songs, I know that I still have to go through being bad to get to something good.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  And I think people have this mistaken notion that people that do it in a way that they admire from the outside, they've somehow sidestepped that part of, of how it works. And I don't think you ever really do. I think that you always have the potential to make something good or bad. But I think that that's an example, what you're describing is an example of asking way too much of something that should be fulfilling.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  In your being able to get lost in it and disappear. It doesn't sound like you're really getting to the point where you disappear. Otherwise, you wouldn't really care if it's good or bad when you're done. Does it feel good while you're doing it?

• 30:13Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I don't do it that often, in part for, in part for these reasons. I chase the feeling of flow, which I think is sort of similar to your feeling of disappearing. And, you know, it is harder the more I can't turn off the part of my brain that is critical. But as I've gotten older, I think that part has gotten bigger. You know, I think when I was young, one of the things that felt really good is feeling like I was attaining a bit of mastery over something. Right? I wasn't good at anything. So the idea of getting good at anything was like amazing. But then you become a little bit more used to that feeling, to knowing what's going on, to having a certain level of facility. And then it becomes very hard to do the other thing because that begins to feel aile. And you spend so much time in the things you now know how to do.

• 30:58Ezra Klein?

  That going back to, to be zen about it, going back to beginner's mind. Like I'd say, it's a pretty different way to think. And I will say that I always have a little bit of skepticism when I hear from, you know, great writers or a great songwriter like you. Like, well, we all go through the part where the draft is bad. Because I don't think that you're bad and my bad are the same on this. You know, you're, you're bad until you're willing to, to sing into a, into an iPhone and I wouldn't. And that's a thing that like quieting that self-conscious part of your brain. Like, do you do things you're really bad at? Like things like, not like you're a songwriter and you write some songs you don't like, but stuff you just truly have no facility at?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Of course. I think one of the daily reminders I have that I can be better is like trying to learn. For, for me, it's like trying to learn really hard guitar parts. I've never really had the aptitude that I wish I had for playing guitar. And so there are these moments where I, I remind myself of that striving, you know, to get good at it. And it's a lot of the time for lyric writing, it's through reading really great. Books that remind me where the bar is for really great writing, or listening to great records and thinking about where that bar is that I'm aiming for. But striving, God, it's a really rewarding part of it, too,

• 32:13Speaker 01

  if you're willing to accept that you may never get there, you know? And I think that most of the people I know that that have become really accomplished at certain things are it's that way because they continuously strive for a better, excuse me, while the ambulance pass.

• 32:34Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  My ride's here. I'm sorry.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  That's my old joke. Anyway, I think that that striving really never stops. It doesn't sound like you really want to be a great poet.

• 32:49Ezra Klein?

  No.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  So I don't know, maybe it's maybe it's not a something not something you can fake. But I bet you if you really wanted to be a great poet, you would be willing to put yourself through some of the discomfort of striving to get better at it.

• 33:02Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that motivation part I think is really is really important. And not that I don't want to be a good poet or do want to be. It's more that I actually have been, you know, more recently, like trying to rebuild just a kind of outside of work, creative practice. A theme of this in your book actually got me thinking about this question, which is there are certain kinds of hobbies, practices, pursuits, where we have a cultural sense that you're good or bad at them. And we impose that on people and then certain ones that we don't. So like you never hear somebody, you never say to somebody who's going to play frisbee in the park. Like, I don't play frisbee. I'm terrible at frisbee. Like, no, everybody's terrible at frisbee.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:36Ezra Klein?

  To a first approximation, you just like, that's the point. You go throw it around or like, I watch TV like, well, I'm just terrible at TV. I never have good, critical thoughts about The Office. No, you watch TV, you chill. And then we have particularly in creative pursuits, writing and poetry and music making and art. Like, there actually is a lot of judgment. And I'm curious where you think that comes from because it's not there in everything we do.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I talk about it in the book a little bit, like it doesn't stop people from playing softball.

• 34:04Ezra Klein?

  Right. Maybe this is your idea that I'm sending back to you, actually.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it might be in there, but I don't remember exactly what the analogy is. But yeah, people give themselves the freedom to be bad at sports and a lot of other things. We create a lot of latitude for ourselves in some things and not in others. And the initial feeling I have is that it might have something to do with an anti-intellectualism that is pretty provincial in a lot of places. I know where I grew up, the idea that you were going to be a writer or a poet or something like that is just asking people to beat you up. And, you know, like, I think it's just, like, you think you're better than me? You're gonna write, you're gonna write words?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  It's book learning? I don't know.

• 34:55Ezra Klein?

  But you had, you had a fair amount of that around you. I mean, you have a very moving story about your dad, who you described that he'd, you know, get upset and then go down to the basement. And I'm quoting you here, that he'd sit and write a poem and then come upstairs, half drunk, and read a simplistic, heavily rhyming, but not entirely artless poem about the Alton and Southern Railway, or our neighbor who died, or something else that he'd been stewing about. Like, that's a kind of interesting and really productive way of dealing with a bad mood. Can you just tell me a bit about that?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's just kind of re-centering a creative act as having a function other than art for art's sake, you know? That maybe that's where some of the distaste of those endeavors comes from, is this idea that it's frivolous and you better be really, really good at it before you rub my face in this thing that you have deemed valuable. That's a reminder that it can be a natural impulse and it can have like a really direct, natural function in someone's life. And my dad just accepted that as being a part of how he coped.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  And I would argue that that's probably close to the, how all of this stuff originated, you know? Certainly, poetry originates from storytelling and wanting to get things off of someone's chest and make sure that people know how they're feeling somewhere in generations to come, you know?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Oversimplifying, obviously, but yeah, I think that was a really great lesson my dad taught me without trying to.

• 37:06Ezra Klein?

  You had a lot of people in your family, as I read your memoirs, who had very deep, personal creative practices. Your dad and his poetry, your brother, who wrote novels that he wasn't able to finish. But they were never able to make that creative practice a center of their lives. So how do you process having the ability, or even luxury, to be able to make that kind of creative work the center of yours?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  I probably have survivor's guilt for a lot of reasons other than what I ended up being able to do in my life and where I ended up career-wise. For me personally, just being one of the lucky few that's been able to get help for some of the addiction problems and mental health issues I've had in my life, that creates a sense of that survivor's guilt that I can't really separate from my good fortune outside of that. It's not just random. My brother and other people in my family have had choices. Not necessarily the choice to become, you know, a successful recording artist or someone that's able to put their work into the world.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  But they've had choices to maybe take better care of themselves. And that, to me, has been probably my...

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Saving grace, my main focus and the things that I did before I was able to manage those issues in my life, I look at those things as being created in spite of. And that's more of an anomaly to me than where I ended up through the work I've done to take care of myself.

• 38:45Ezra Klein?

  You have very little patience in the book for the idea that it's through suffering that great art is created. Could you talk a bit about that?

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a horrible cop out and it's a pervasive myth and I understand how it gets proliferated. And I think that there is some therapeutic effect from writing and creating and art that makes sense to me that someone suffering would turn to it. And it's kind of like along with what I describe as disappearing, it's really helpful to disappear when you're, when you're suffering. And so it doesn't surprise me that a lot of art gets made by people that are experiencing profound discomfort in their own skin. But if that was all it took, there'd be so much more great art, there'd be so much more of it.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And also it just belittles to me the idea that everyone struggles. There's a, it's part of the condition of life and most people's lives are touched by some type of suffering or some type of struggle. It's almost impossible to live a full life without having that experience. But I do think that there are people that think, well, I could write, but I'd have to be messed up like that guy. Or I could do, it's like, I think there's a little simplicity to that idea, but I do think it's true to some degree that people like that myth for the built in excuse it

• 40:17Speaker 01

  provides to not challenge themselves, to dig deeper into their own thoughts and who they are.

• 40:26Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a really interesting thought that, that instead of the suffering being the driver of art, that the art is self-medication for the suffering. I've never heard it put like that.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  That's something I notice in my own life. I tend to create a lot more of the, when I'm struggling a little bit with my, my own issues or with, for the last five years or so, the world at large has been so discomforting that I've, I almost can't keep up with the amount of energy I have for writing. It is like a healthy addiction to me. It is like some obsessive behavior that is benign compared to other maladaptive choices I've made in the past. I mean, I do am able to look at it as somewhat of a habit, you know?

• 41:14Ezra Klein?

  One of the things you say in one of the books is it something that's really helped you as a songwriter is this bone crushing sincerity, this ability to be vulnerable in a way that that others aren't. And I'm curious to hear a little bit about that because I do think it's a block for a lot of people, like the unwillingness to say what it is they're really feeling. Are you like that in your normal life and it's just true in your songwriting too? Or is it something that's true in your songwriting that is not true if I were just talking to you on the street?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  I've always really wanted to think of myself as an honest person. And I've always struggled with the idea that I was capable of dishonesty and capable of things that I didn't like. And I wasn't able to make myself be the person that I thought I wanted to be. But one of the areas where I was able to start making progress towards that idea of myself was to really, I don't know, like in interviews, when somebody asked me a question, I always try and answer it.

• 42:26Ezra Klein?

  Thank you, I really appreciate that.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  I do. I think that, oh, God, somebody's interested enough to, I mean, there's a people pleasing aspect to who I am that that has always been there. And it's like it has a relationship to being very dependent upon my mother as a child and my mother maybe having some unhealthy boundaries about having me as her pal. And before I was able to form an autonomous identity, you know, I did have this sense that I was making someone else's, someone else happy. I was, you know, I was my responsibility even to make someone else happy. And along with that comes my mother's interest in basically anything that I would

• 43:09Speaker 01

  say or do or, you know, or think about. So sharing all of those details, you know, it's kind of is this, uh, this hybrid mom, boy, chi- or thing. I'm sure that there's psychoanalysis to accompany all of these notions, but I, but I think that that did give me a sense that I wasn't just myself and that everybody must like hearing all of this stuff and that everybody must feel these things that are unsavory or like things that we maybe wish we didn't think or things that we, I would see other people being embarrassed about.

• 43:49Ezra Klein?

  One, I think we had very similar relationships with our mothers and now you're making me wonder if this is why I'm a podcast host who thinks people would like to hear what I think all the time.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Everybody that does something similar to what we do, I think, has been indulged in some way.

• 44:03Ezra Klein?

  It's a very, it's a very, it's a very interesting point, but I do, I really do kind of admire the sincerity. I'll note something even before I make this request, which is that, so one of the songs of yours that I love and I listen to a lot is Please Be Patient With Me. And I wanted to get a play a bit of it because I wanted to talk about it, but it's like, it's such an intensely sincere song that it almost feels like too much to say that I like it and want to hear it played. Do you know what I mean? Like, and I wonder how you walk around with these songs like out there. Like, do they feel like you have revealed all this or do they have, do you have separation from them?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Well, I, I mean, I feel like other people listening to it oddly enough gives me some cover because if it resonates with someone else, then it wasn't something worth concealing. You know, it wasn't something that was so aberrant, you know, that, that you should be ashamed of it.

• 44:53Ezra Klein?

  Do you mind playing a verse from that song?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  I should warn you when I'm not well.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  I can't tell.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  There's nothing I can do

• 45:29Speaker 01

  to make this easier for you.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  You're gonna need. See, I can't remember that part.

• 45:39Ezra Klein?

  It's funny, because I can. Is that strange to have people who remember your songs better than you do?

• 45:44Speaker 01

  No, I don't think that's strange at all. I mean, I would be able to remember it if I wanted to play it for an audience. You know, and it wouldn't take very long at all to... I'm sorry. Do you want me to try and remember it a little better?

• 45:59Ezra Klein?

  No, no, no. That was beautiful. That was great. Because that song has a directness to it, I was curious how the writing of it differs from some of the songs that are more associational, right? That's a song that it feels like you're communicating something really, really specific, not like a word ladder. Is that a different process?

• 46:16Speaker 01

  It's hard to say. A lot of the songs I've written, I don't entirely feel equipped to talk about their genesis because precisely because I was able to disappear and come back with something that that felt worth singing. Mostly, I just want another song to sing. And sometimes it does come out as having a much more direct feel. But a lot of times, the actual process isn't that different. I might have stumbled upon that song, for all I know, just obsessing about the phrase, "Please be patient with me." You know, I might have been in a doctor's office or a lobby where there's like, "Pardon our dust," or something, you know, like,

• 47:02Speaker 01

  "Please be patient with us. We have a trainee," or, you know, it was unrelated, but, you know, it made me probably disappear into some associations on my end. And then there is like, "I'm this apple. I'm this I'm this stone," or something. There are some lyrics in there that are very... Oblique, I think, because getting more direct than what it already was felt less honest. Songs need to be adaptable, not just to like other people's consciousnesses, but your own consciousness

• 47:42Speaker 01

  as it changes and travels through time. And so I think maybe this is more in the realm of craft than a lot of the creativity discussion we've been having. But I do think that I consciously try and leave some room for me to grow and change in my lyrics. And by doing that, I think it allows a listener to, to maybe color it in with their themselves a little bit more. It just becomes a vessel for someone else to pour themselves into because you haven't, you haven't written them out of it.

• 48:17Ezra Klein?

  One of the things I was thinking about while I was reading your book is that you're very like touch when you talk about yourself as a, as a songwriter. And it's something you believe sort of like anybody can do. But there's this whole other part of it, which is maybe it's not quite craft, but it is the, the process and the consistency that you bring to it. And it made me think of an idea I heard from, from Natasha Lyonne, who's a creator of the great Netflix show Russian Doll, among bunches of other things. But, but she talked about this idea of like having the talent to use your talent, that there's like the talent to do the direct thing, right? Screenwriting or songwriting or comedy or whatever it might be. And all these things around it that allow you to use that. And that often what is not there for people is the talent to use a talent. And I'd be curious

• 49:02Ezra Klein?

  if, you know, you have reflections on, on that part of your work, that kind of sticktuitiveness, that ability to create structure in every day, because that's a, actually in some ways, I think. More rare than a lot of people give it credit for.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I mean, that would have to be the case because I think I've maybe made more of a career for myself than a lot of songwriters and artists that are far beyond what I'm able to do. So some of that has to come from an aptitude at the craft side of things and the ability to kind of, I wouldn't say promote myself, but to be confident in sharing what I've made. And, you know, looking at it as a gift, you know, the notion of a gift implies some responsibility to not squander it, not like take it for granted. But I like the idea

• 49:58Speaker 01

  of having the talent to use your talent. I don't think that there's a quality to my songs necessarily across the board that someone else couldn't do. But there's a certain meanness to what I've, what I'm putting out into the world that is something you have to be somewhat focused on and willing to share.

• 50:21Ezra Klein?

  And willing to share and then also willing to not take it too hard when it's pushed back at you. I mean, something that I thought of reading the book was that you're pretty good at handling disappointment and rejection. Like you got some real stories about that in there around, you know, I think the famous one is around Yankee Hotel foxtrot and your label, but, but, but there are others too. And I don't know, I know a lot of writers and have known a lot coming up who I think are just like extraordinary writers. But it's very hard for them, one, to get it out because they really want it to be perfect. And then if the reaction to that isn't what they hope it is, it's really gutting, right? I mean, that's part, part of the problem with doing something where you're putting so much of yourself, your meanness out there. Because then it's like, if people say, no,

• 51:04Ezra Klein?

  I don't like it, like they don't like you, right? That's how it can often feel. And so you seem to have like both a lot of sincerity in putting yourself out there, but a little bit of a lighter sense of what it means if, if others don't like it. Like, is that natural? Or is that cultivated?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I don't think that I am just my art. I'm, I don't think that I'm just the things that I put out into the world. And I'm certainly not just the products that I have put into the world for people to consume. So that's been fairly easy to navigate because I don't look at it that way. I like the way it makes me feel when people like the things I make. And I'm okay with it when people hate it because I can do something with that. I think that energizes me. The thing that is much more difficult to handle and cope with is indifference. That's intolerable in a lot of cases. You know, like, I mean, it's obviously tolerable because I keep doing it.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  And no matter what you do or who you are in this world, there are a fair amount of people that are going to meet it, not with just pure dismissal, but with indifference and not going to accept it in the spirit that it was intended. And that is much more troublesome. But the idea of somebody hating it, I like, all you have to do is think about how much stuff that other people love that you hate and realize that there's room for a lot of opinion about almost any work of art. I mean, read, um, one of my favorite bedside books is a, this book of all the reviews written

• 52:40Speaker 01

  of like Mozart and, and Beethoven and, and, you know, Charlie Parker and, you know, all of this is a compo- a compendium or whatever of, uh, of these different dismissals of, of incredible, canonical works of art that were written contemporaneously with the release of the record or with the first performance of an opera or something like that. And it's just an invaluable thing to be reminded of.

• 53:08Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me ask something that's related to it because we've been talking here about the things you do, but, but are there things that you don't do? For instance, I think social media has become really tough on a lot of writers I know because like then you've got this incredibly intense, uh, rush of feedback of how people receive what you do. Um, are there things you try to shut yourself off from or, you know, like don't let into your airspace so that you're able to maintain a kind of? You know, middle, middle approach to this?

• 53:37Speaker 01

  No, I feel like I should be able to take it, you know? I think that a lot of things like social media, me trying to imagine what people are saying sometimes could probably be worse than what they're really saying. So I don't really have any hard and fast rules about it. I do feel a responsibility to kind of check in with, with some things. If like there's some problem with ticketing for a Wilco show and people are really pissed off, I want to know about it, you know? Cause if there's, there might be something we can do to sidestep that before it becomes this pervasive thing. But um, things personally, people talk about your weight and things like that.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  I mean, that makes me sad, not necessarily for myself, but I just can't imagine how painful it must be to need to do that, you know? I guess it's funny to some people sometimes to make a joke about someone's appearance. And I'm certainly not above it, I guess, but I don't know if I would share it with the world. But I mean, as far as like, that's where I would stop. I wouldn't, like just kind of checking in, just kind of being aware of it. And I don't spend that much time with it and I definitely don't ever engage, even when somebody maybe says something that really pisses me off. I have one tweet loaded that I've never used that, you know?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  I'm just waiting for the right time, you know? Just basically going to say, I took the time to search my name on Twitter. The least you can do is fuck off.

• 55:14Ezra Klein?

  It's very, very funny.

• 55:42Ezra Klein?

  You have a great riff on a Chuck Close quote. And you say that, "I think it's my job to be inspired." And so I want to talk about that other side of it. We've been talking about the creation side of it. But there's also what you like pull in that that leads to the creation. And you seem to treat that pretty systematically, too. So so tell me a bit about what it means to do a good job at being inspired.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it's just, you know, finding some balance between not overwhelming yourself with other people's work and art and and not feeling like it's a job to consume all of it, but just kind of faithfully understanding that when I need inspiration, it's really never that far. We have such an immediate availability for discovering new music, discovering new authors, discovering poems. I mean, it's it's just easier than it's ever been, certainly than it's ever been in my life. You know, I think even if it wasn't easy, even before it was easy, I looked at it as like, that's kind of how I keep growing and keep going.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  That's how I feel like doing what I do is just being reminded, like I said before, of where these where the bar is. And like, I don't think it's my responsibility to listen to every record that comes out, but I like trying to. And I almost and I really do. And I think inevitably, I am challenged by something I didn't think I would like, or I discover something I really, really love, or I'm led back to some other artist through the ref whatever cross referencing where this music that I hadn't heard before came from. It's just impossible to get to the bottom of it. You know, you're not going to ever get to the bottom of it. And the same with literature.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  And my natural reaction to this has usually been in my entire life, has been to kind of get excited somehow through this exploration of other people's work.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Up until the point, I just can't take it anymore and I want to do something. I want to make something. And it works every time. It just like, it just always works. It's always, I always feel better. I always feel inspired. It's just like, you just can't. I'm enthusiastic about it and I always have been and I feel like I still am as much as I ever was. And at the same time, I'm old enough now to know that sometimes you're just exhausted. And sometimes there's just nothing anybody can do to make you feel inspired. And those are the times where you listen to your body and go to sleep and relax. And relax and you know, maybe I wasn't able to do that when I was younger.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  So there was much more of a risk of burnout or something at an earlier stage of my life. But now I think it's generally pretty balanced.

• 58:37Ezra Klein?

  You were talking a minute ago about how easy it is now to like, listen to everything, to read everything. Do you think anything's lost in that? You write in the book a lot about growing up in record store culture and having to track down an album. And I remember doing that too. And I feel like I listened to things differently when I had to put some effort into getting them. And I wasn't going to have all that many. Whereas now it's like, if the first five seconds of a song don't do it to me, like unless I'm like really being intentional about it. It's like, well, on to the next 52 five second snippets until I find what I'm looking for. Do you think we listen differently in ways that affect what people end up liking or creating or making?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  I think we value things differently. I don't know if we listen differently. I think in some ways you could argue that maybe we listen better because I do think that we bought records when we were younger and we had sunk cost into them psychologically. And for a lot of us, that forced us to find some way to value it and not feel like we got screwed. We weren't taken advantage of by a bad record and being out that amount of money. But I also think there are maybe other organic ways to do that outside of commerce. If you just, you know, try a little harder to come at things with a little bit more of an open mind

• 59:58Speaker 01

  and willing to accept that your first impression might not be correct. But it is interesting, you and I have straddled this weird time in history where there's almost complete opposite experience with how we consume music in general.

• 1:00:16Ezra Klein?

  I mean, everything, right? I remember getting a personal computer in my household, right? I remember before we had a computer at home. I remember before we had the internet at home. And if like my son is going to treat that the way like I would treat somebody talking about like, oh, I remember when electricity came to the town. Like, it's a real, pretty big thing to live through.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah, like cable TV too. I remember not having cable.

• 1:00:39Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  I think the other thing that that could teach someone is that when you, for us, when we were younger, say, you have this sunk cost evaluation of something that you bought that is art, you know, it's like someone else's creative output. And because of that, you take the time and maybe in some cases, you take enough time for it to actually become a really powerful, important piece of your life in terms of, you know, it just becomes indispensable as a record that you own and basically like almost like a friendship emerges with this piece of art. But the weird thing about that is, is that there was so few things

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  to go look for and with so much, you had limited amount of money, for most people, to go to the record store and find that little bit of inspiration and make that friendship or make that relationship occur. That says to me, at this point in my life, that there is almost an equal amount of yearning from the listener to find something that will do that as there is a possibility that some great work of art has been bestowed upon the world. In other words, I think if you need it, there is a deep desire to find it. And that's what makes me value people making art more than any one work of art.

• 1:02:06Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. I mean, my intuition about this, and I'm not sure it's true, is that Like the trade off here is you can sample more things, but that the relationship with things that are difficult is going to be more tenuous, that things that are more challenging to listen to or read, I think I have gotten worse at that. It's actually something I've been trying to rebuild over the past couple of years where, you know, before if I got something, not before, but you know, when I was younger, I gave it a chance, I think. Because as you say, like, I couldn't buy endless CDs. Like, I couldn't, you know, get like every book I wanted in the world. So if I took a flyer on something, I was, you know, invested enough to try it. Whereas now, I think that I'm way better at finding things

• 1:02:50Ezra Klein?

  that I like. And now there are all these algorithms that are trying to tell me what I'm gonna like. But in terms of learning how to like something that I'm not instantly attracted to, I think that is a muscle that is withering a little bit. And I'm not saying, like, I don't want to be like the old guy being like, and the world is gonna, like, I don't know, like, maybe it's totally fine. Maybe there's a cost, but there's a benefit on the other side. I don't know how to weigh it. I just think that it's true.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. What I do is I fuck with the algorithm. I think that, um, like, music streaming algorithms are pretty easy to confuse, you know? So I will spend a week just listening to, like, grindcore, heavy metal, and it throws everything into total disarray. And then I'm much more likely to have something weird, you know, come over the transom, you know? It's actually kind of a fun challenge to make those algorithms not work the way they're supposed to. But it's also just, that's only one way that we experience music, you know? Like, you still have friends telling you about things.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  You still probably see reviews of things in the paper. One thing that's taken out of it quite a bit lately, I think, is that album art probably doesn't have as much of an impact as it once did, you know, as terms of what you're willing to give a listen to. And albums themselves aren't really the same thing as they used to be. You know, everything's much more single driven and playlist driven. It's definitely different than the experience we had growing up.

• 1:04:30Ezra Klein?

  All right. So let's say you're listening to this and you're persuaded. You want to have a creative practice, maybe a songwriting one. Where do you start? Like, what is like the minimum viable practice that you would recommend to somebody where you think they could start feeling some like generative gains from it?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I think you would feel generative gains from it immediately if you're in the right mindset. I think if you come at it with an open mind and an open heart and just look at it almost like a detox or something, just flushing some thoughts out of your system. Do some free writing. I think that's enough to be, not necessarily writing songs even, but just having a daily habit of, it's like thinking with a pencil or thinking with some meditative intent is really beneficial.

• 1:05:19Ezra Klein?

  And so when you talk about free writing, you're just saying, you know, put aside 10, 15 minutes a day and just sit and write whatever comes into your head, sort of like morning pages or one of those practices?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Before you get out of bed, everybody picks up their phone and tries to figure out what kind of horrible thing happened before they woke up, you know, instead of doing that.

• 1:05:38Ezra Klein?

  Stop, stop watching what I do before I get out of bed.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  You know, well, I mean, I think that's a pretty shared experience for a lot of people. But, but I started kind of rewarding myself with getting to see the horrors of the world only after I was able to just allow myself to remain in a dream state and write for a little while, you know? Outrage is a drug, obviously. You know, we are incapable of resisting it. And you're better to just kind of go through it than try and imagine that you're above it. But I would, I would kind of ration out the outrage by making myself write a little bit before I got to the, the deep, sweet feelings of fury.

• 1:06:22Ezra Klein?

  But let's say that your brain is broken by neoliberalism.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Ezra Klein?

  And so maybe you've tried morning pages and I'm not going to name any names here or any podcast hosts and that you did it as a practice and that you find yourself repeatedly accidentally writing up to do lists as you, in your non judgmental way, try to write through your subconscious. And so you're so used to using that part of your brain, right? That highly logical, highly systematized, that it's hard to get out of it. Do you have a prompt that you recommend people use? Like, how do you get into that space where you're actually using the associational part as opposed to the shit like, I gotta take the dog to the vet and, you know, if I don't get, you know, this piece in today and, you know, I've got, you know, the endodontist keeps sending me a bill and I keep forgetting

• 1:07:09Ezra Klein?

  to pay it. Like, that's always my morning pages problem. It doesn't end up feeling creative. It feels like an immersion in everything that's coming down on me during the rest of the day. Like, how do you get away from that?

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  I don't know. My first thought about a lot of things like this is that sounds like you're you're discomforted by the way your mind normally behaves. And my inclination, when that's the case, is usually to not fight it. So, I don't know, maybe there's a way to transform it from being practical list to maybe make a list of wishes. Or if you like the idea, the feeling of making some to do list, make a to do list for the for the universe. I don't know. It's like, there's a million, a million ways to just kind of go with it, but also just like, let it not knock you down into some sort of judgment

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  about that being the wrong way to think about free riding. I would advise you to accept it as being something your mind really likes and has habitually been drawn to and still see if there's some way to work within that in a more ambiguous and imaginative way.

• 1:08:21Ezra Klein?

  Let me end us here, which is always the last question of the show, which is what are three books you've read that have meant something to you that you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Well, the book that I feel embarrassed to like, say it again, because I almost always, it's almost always the book that comes to mind is Don Quixote. I just think that it explains a lot about the world, I think, in ways that are

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Kind of life-affirming and sad at the same time, and that things haven't changed that all that much. I think if you look at it solipsistically, I used to believe that it was, you could perfectly transpose the life of a rock musician over the story of Don Quixote. But over time, it's, you know, just become something I see that really is easily overlaid over a lot of different types of lives and experiences. William H. Gass, I like a lot of his writing on writing, his books of literary criticism.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  There's a compilation of forwards to people's books and writings about other people's work called Temple of Texts that I like a lot. I kind of like all of his work, but that's a good entry point because it's a little bit more straightforward.

• 1:09:47Ezra Klein?

  Jeff Tweedy, thank you very much.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:10:09Ezra Klein?

  This is a Clanshow, a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Gelb, Raja Karma, and Annie Galvin. Backtracking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Gelb.