Jeff Tweedy - How to Write One Song

In June 2024, I got to go to the Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, which is organized by the band Wilco. I performed some of my new songs, and I got to interview Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of Wilco, on stage as part of the festival. Jeff, in addition to being in Wilco and the band Tweedy, and putting out his solo albums, has also written three books. And this conversation was focused on his second book, which is called How to Write One Song. And even though it’s called How to Write One Song, I think it actually contains a lot of insight about creativity in general, and life in general. I’ve recommended it to friends of mine who aren’t songwriters. And, as you’ll hear, the conversation gets pretty personal for me, because I got so much out of the book personally. It helped me with some of the blocks that I’d been facing in my own songwriting, at a pretty profound level. And when I was listening back to this recording, I’d kind of forgotten about how much I put out there in front of Jeff and the thousands of people who were there watching. But I’m glad the conversation was recorded, partly just so I could revisit it, but also so that I could share it here on Song Exploder. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too. You can buy How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy here (via Bookshop.org) https://bookshop.org/a/88375/9780593183526 or here (via Amazon) https://amzn.to/43PtqrM or on Wilco's website https://wilcostore.com/products/jeff-tweedy-how-to-write-one-song-book. You can listen to the Wilco episode of Song Exploder here. https://songexploder.net/wilcoI also interviewed Jeff along with his son Spencer, who is also his bandmate in Tweedy, about their relationship and musical partnership, for an episode of my podcast Partners. You can listen to that here https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jeff-tweedy-spencer-tweedy/id1494790308?i=1000474486797. Thanks to Sonos for their support of the podcast. Check out sonos.com. https://www.sonos.com/ For more, visit songexploder.net/jeff-tweedy. https://songexploder.net/jeff-tweedy

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

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carry. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode is sponsored by the podcast, What It's Like to Be. Do you ever think about what other people's workdays look like? Satisfying some of that curiosity is the idea at the heart of bestselling author Dan Heath's podcast, which is called What It's Like to Be. In each episode, Dan interviews someone from a different profession to find out what it's like to be a professional Santa Claus, or a Secret Service agent, or a long haul truck driver, or an aerospace engineer at NASA, just to name a few examples. The show gives you an insider view into all kinds of jobs from a wide range of industries, answering questions like, what do mail carriers learn about us from our mail? There are so many jobs out there that exist only as titles in our imagination,

• 1:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  if they even register that much. This show is a chance to reach beyond what you know or think you know. If you're curious to learn more about the work lives of other people, check out What It's Like to Be, wherever you get podcasts. This episode is sponsored by LinkedIn. Anyone who's ever had to spend money on marketing knows how tricky it can be to feel like you've spent that money wisely. Well, with LinkedIn Ads, you can be sure that you'll get a great return on your investment. You can target your campaigns by company, industry, job title, and more. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/songexploder. That's linkedin.com/songexploder.

• 2:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Terms and conditions apply. This episode contains explicit language. Last summer, I got to go to the Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, which is organized by the band Wilco. I performed some of my new songs, and I got to interview Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of Wilco, onstage as part of the festival. Jeff, in addition to being in Wilco and the band Tweedy and putting out his solo albums, has also written three books. And this conversation was focused on his second book, which is called How to Write One Song. And even though it's called How to Write One Song, I think it actually contains a lot of insight about creativity in general and life in general. I've recommended it to friends of mine who aren't songwriters.

• 3:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And as you'll hear, the conversation gets pretty personal for me because I got so much out of the book personally. It helped me with some of the blocks that I'd been facing in my own songwriting at a pretty profound level. And when I was listening back to this recording, I kind of forgot about how much I put out there in front of Jeff and the thousands of people who were there watching. But I'm glad the conversation was recorded, partly just so I could revisit it, but also so that I could share it here on Song Exploder. I hope you'll enjoy it, too. Here it is.

• 3:48Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Thank you so much for being here. So I make a podcast called Song Exploder. This is going to be a little bit different from what that show is. That's a show about how a song gets made. But for this, I wanted to talk to Jeff instead of about how a song got made, about how his book, How to Write One Song, got made.

• 4:07Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Part of the reason why I wanted to talk to Jeff about this is not just because it's really well crafted and has a lot of wisdom in it, but because, yeah, it had a profound effect on me. I started making podcasts 10 years ago, which, not coincidentally, is also the time when I stopped making music. I'd been making music for about 12 years professionally, to the extent that I could manage that. And then I ran into some really rough writer's block. And I didn't know if I was going to make music again. I didn't know what I was gonna do. I started making Song Exploder in that time. And then, after many years of being in that place, I started to slowly emerge and started to write again.

• 4:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And Jeff's book helped me a lot. So, this is a special experience for me because I am going to get to talk to the person who really made that happen for me.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  That is so sweet to know. I really, I'm excited to talk about that. Thank you.

• 5:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Great. Well, I first wanted to just ask, where did the idea to write this book in particular come from?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Well, I was asked to write a book. It would never have occurred to me, the first book, the memoir. And the question with that book was, I'm only half-done living as far as I'm concerned. So, do I have enough life to write about? And we had a family discussion and I think mostly my kids were like, "Yeah, you should do it." And I usually listen to them when they say I should do something. So, I learned how to write a book. You know, I didn't know how to write a book. I started a couple of different ways and then I ended up writing Let's Go So We Can Get Back.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  And I enjoy, when I finished it, I thought, "Oh, my God, that is the best feeling in the world, finishing a book." That's like, that's honestly better feeling than finishing a record. It's like so arduous and uncomfortable, but it's really rewarding to feel like you actually did it. You know, it's an accomplishment. But when I was thinking about it after the fact, and the book did well enough for my publisher and my editor to ask if I was interested in writing another book, I thought about the part of the book that I had the most. Fun writing, the part that I felt like I had the most to say, but wasn't necessarily the context to say it in. And that was about the parts about creativity and the parts about

• 6:44Speaker 01

  why it means so much to get to do what I get to do. And, and then I had some reinforcement from my friend, George Saunders, who, he, he was very, very complimentary about, in particular, those passages in the memoir that were about creativity. He thought that they were really insightful or, or I don't know. He just, he was just very, very generous and encouraging. And so I thought, well, where would I start if I was going to write about creativity? And I would just say that I think the, the title alone is basically all I want to say. So everything in the book is in elaboration on it. But it's very similar to the philosophy of life. How to live one day, how to write one song.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  You don't write songs, you write one song. You write through the song. It's the song that is given to you and you honor it and finish it and, and, and move on to the next songs, like we do with all of our days and with all of our, our, our lives. And, um, and, and so I thought that I really grew out of the title after that point. You know, after I thought, well, how do you write one song? And then give yourself the permission to write another one, I guess, you know? By the way, if you bought the book and you've written one song, you need to buy another book to write another song. That was also part of the marketing plan.

• 8:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Had you ever done anything like teaching songwriting to other people before?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  No, uh, no, it's just something, I, I mean, realized writing the memoir, that it's the one thing I've thought about the most in my life, not, um, a lot of people that are musicians, I think, spend a lot of time thinking about gear, and I do that too. And how do you get to a certain place where you make a certain sound and, and things like that? And I guess I've always been a little interior and a little philosophical about it. It was like, it's not like, how, what did the Beatles do to sound like they did? It was more like, why did the Beatles sound? Like they did, not based on gear, but like, what's the, I don't know. How do you, how do you do that? How do you give yourself permission to do that?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  It's always been the biggest question on my mind, I think.

• 9:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Well, normally, you know, at a book talk event, there's a reading by the author. But one of the things that I really

• 9:13Speaker 01

  But I can't read, so.

• 9:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Which makes it so really exceptional that you've written now multiple bestsellers.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  I realize that I can write at a 12th grade level and then doing the audiobooks, I realized that I read at like a 4th grade.

• 9:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Well, then you're in for a treat because rather than have Jeff do a reading, I have taken clips from the audiobook

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 9:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  To play back.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Heavily edited.

• 9:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I wanted to start with a bit from the book that comes towards the end. But really, again, this is part of what hit home for me because as you heard me describe, I had been in what I called writer's block.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  I guess now is the time to admit that I've always been skeptical of the term writer's block. Not because I've never experienced a period when I've felt unproductive or uninspired, but because I recognized that it isn't really a block, it's a judgment.

• 10:08Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I started to be like, Jeff, are you in my house? Are you in my head? And there were several moments like that where I felt like you were writing directly to my experience and the, and the things that were preventing me from, from writing, which had, had come from, you know, a decade of making music and not getting to the place where I'm like, ah, I've made it, I can sit back and, you know, everything is fun in the sun now. And, and then when I started making this podcast, talking to people like, like incredible songwriters, incredibly successful musicians, it sort of reinforced the feeling that like, oh, maybe this is not, maybe this really is not the path for me.

• 10:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I need to leave this to the people who are the geniuses, the certifiable auteurs. And, and so I'm going to play this other clip.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Primarily, you're going to have to respond to the merciless interrogations that your doubts and insecurities are going to hit you with daily. Like, who do you think you are? And are you kidding me with this bullshit?

• 11:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So I'm wondering, because it felt so personal to me, but there are also lots of moments in the book where you make reference to the sort of breadth of experience with songwriting that someone might have. You address folks who, you know, maybe you don't play an instrument, or maybe you play an instrument only a little bit. I sort of managed to kind of skate past those things on the first listen and just to think about how you felt like you were writing exactly for me. But I was wondering, were you imagining a specific audience when you were writing this? Was there somebody that you thought, I'm writing for this person or this group of people?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think as a songwriter, I've learned to think about myself as the audience and what I would have liked to hear if I hadn't figured out how to give myself permission to write. Or I think a lot of the musicians, the songwriters that I've responded to the most over a long period of time are the ones where I get the feeling that they don't see themselves as geniuses or something super apart from the rest of the world. I like getting the sense that they're identifying something that they can admit makes them

• 12:29Speaker 01

  not so special. I like the idea of really normal people doing extraordinary things. People that feel like that they're very, I don't know, not extraordinary, but able to summon this thing that I think we all have in us, this creativity. And then a lot of people say, you know, I don't think everybody has that level of creativity. And surely there are levels of giftedness for certain aptitudes in songwriting and things like that. But we're all creative. We all improvise our conversations every day. We all improvise what we're gonna do when we're trying to get home from someplace and something goes

• 13:12Speaker 01

  wrong. We have the ability to think around problems. We have the ability to make shit up. Most of you are liars.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  When you need to be a little bit, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. That's a human part of your brain figuring out a way to construct a reality that is tenable, you know? But I just think that, um, I just like the idea that every, maybe I'm wrong. I just like the idea. So there's nothing going to stop me from saying that I think this is the way people are because I think it's a better way to live. And if I'm, if I can keep myself believing that, then I'm one less person that doesn't believe that.

• 13:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to play one more clip here.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  For me personally, the writing itself has definitely become the primary goal. Being fully engaged with a song I'm working on is what I look forward to the most in my life. Yes, I still have goals and desires. I want to finish albums and be able to provide myself with new songs to perform. But the feeling I get when I write, the sense that time is simultaneously expanding and disappearing, that I'm simultaneously more me and also free of me, is the main reason I wanted to put my thoughts on songwriting down in book form to share with everyone so inclined.

• 14:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You spend a lot of time in the book talking about getting to this state of being able to ignore your ego, really harnessing the subconscious and letting it come forward in a way that your normal conversational, critical self might not allow. How did that kind of creative state that you describe so eloquently here and is so much of the book, were you able to access that at all and get to that kind of place when working in a medium like writing a book? Because to me, from the outside, it feels very, I mean, both things feel very distant. But is it something that you could incorporate in writing prose?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I think the state of mind that I'm describing, people have described as a flow state. I think it works in sports. I think it's a thing that people, certain people figure out how to do it, just because they love doing something so much. And then later on, they identify that when I'm doing this one thing that I love to do, time is different. I'm different. I'm not as burdensome to myself when I'm writing. I'm not as aware of the things that are upsetting me. And so therefore, I want to spend as much time in that place as possible. And so I just kind of gravitated to that,

• 16:10Speaker 01

  maybe out of not being the happiest person sometimes. And that was something I learned. And then I guess just observing other people, just figuring out that, well, maybe not everybody has made that connection yet, that there's a place you can go. I've actually talked, I talked to a physicist on a different podcast one time. And I said, "Don't you ever disappear when you're working on a problem or something?" He's like, "Nope."

• 16:40Speaker 01

  And I'm like, "Yes, you do." He's like, "Nope, I'm always fully aware of where I am and what I'm doing." And I'm like, "Okay, well, it takes all kinds, I guess." But I just think that that's, I think you also have practices, like meditation and prayer and exercise, other things that people do to get in a state of mind that's like that, where time isn't as oppressive, where time does feel like it just slips away, but it also feels like you have this expansive moment that you get to be in. So yeah, that's the part that I think that has led me to write a song every day, or try to write a song every day,

• 17:25Speaker 01

  because I just like, I don't know, it really sounds like you don't like yourself when you say this, but I like not being weighted down by my...

• 17:37Speaker 01

  My identity, my ego in particular, egos are really, really, really helpful. They make us do a lot of shit that we wouldn't do if we weren't embarrassed of like, you know, weren't afraid of looking dumb and stuff like that. That's good for us, but they're also really, really damaging and really, they really inhibit you from doing beautiful things too, you know? So yeah, I just, I like being out of the room, not having that person that's inside of me in the room at the same time. He's here right now on stage for sure, but.

• 18:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I feel like I have a better understanding, uh, having from one, reading this book, but also just my own experience with, you know, music and being a fan of music, of how things can open up when you relax from some of the rules and relax from some of the self in that medium. But that idea of sort of being gone enough from, from yourself, is that something that you could also experience while, while working on this book? Did it feel like you had to also kind of put aside your, your critical mind?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, honestly, I've written three books now and, and all three of them, when I did finish it and I had this really lovely feeling of having accomplished something, I did also kind of go, how did I do that? How did that, especially the last book? Cause I just wrote, I literally wrote it the way I write songs. I wrote a chapter every day for a long time and then just picked the 50 best ones. And, and it was just kind of like, wait, this is done, you know? Which is a really good feeling too. But I wanted to go back to something you were asking about. Did I picture other people, you know, where did I start from?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  In terms of picturing an audience and what they wanted out of, of a book about songwriting? I wanted to start at the, at the most broad definition of a song that you could possibly imagine. That's what, that was my goal is to like, have it be something that did not define a song at anything other than a moment that you felt like you could recreate.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  You know, and, and I, and just like I used examples in the books, book that we do things like this to make a like, I know how to make my wife smile, you know? I think that's a song. So I know how to, I know how to do that reliably.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  And that, that makes me so happy. And so I look at songs the same way. I think that there's a, a lot of songs that we play, I wouldn't play if it wasn't to have somebody to play them for, you know? Because I know that I get to, I can make that moment happen again, or be a part of making that moment happen again. And that's, that's a song to me, you know? But I think you could fill a room with balloons and that's a song. I don't know. Just like, I just think that it should be, it's just a better place to start than thinking, I need to write a day in the life. You know, I need to write something that's gonna sit alongside Baba O'Reilly.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  It's like, good luck, you know? That's just not how it works. And yeah, so many, so many of my favorite songs I've ever written, I was confronted with them early on, saying, this is the stupidest shit I've ever written in my life. I hate this. But for some reason, I'm lucky to be dumb enough to just go, but I can't not finish it, because then I'm putting myself in the position of making a judgment on it that I shouldn't get in the habit of.

• 21:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I was wondering while you were, while you were writing the book, as I said, while I've been writing new songs myself, like this has been such an important reference for me, did you have books or other things that you turned to, to help you with book writing?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Uh, no. Not really. Uh, just, I, I trust my editor, Jill Schwartzman. I trust Jill.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  She's read a lot of books. And she says, "My book is not an embarrassment to the company." I'm happy. But I've read a lot of books, too. I've listened to a lot of music. And I think that that's all. I really kind of figured that was the only experience I really needed. And then the other thing is, I made a decision early on, writing the first book, that I wasn't trying to blow the doors off of literature. I wasn't gonna try and revolutionize the printed word. But I wanted it to sound like me. And so I read out loud a lot. And if you read what you've written out loud,

• 22:28Speaker 01

  it's really easy to hear where things don't sound like the way you really want to come across. I think.

• 22:36Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I have to say, I've read the book, but I also, I've listened to the audiobook many times. And I do think there are parts of the book that feel extra special to me in the audiobook form. So if you've read the book, but you haven't listened to the audiobook, I'd also encourage that. And some jokes just feel funnier when you say them. I'm gonna play one of my favorite parts. I'm just gonna preface this. This is when you're talking about a sort of...

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Daily schedule?

• 23:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, schedule your ideal creative day.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  This was Jill's idea. 10:00 PM to 12:00 AM. Take a break. Spend some time with the family. Do my crossword puzzle. Yes, I'm a crossword puzzle nerd, addict, but it sure beats the hell out of when I was an addict. Addict.

• 23:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I have a specific question about this because I'm also a crossword addict. And I think I'm always trying to justify my crossword doing. You know, like, oh, I'm staving off Alzheimer's. I'm, this is not actually a waste of time.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Building dendrites.

• 23:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Have you ever found that doing the crossword has ever actually led to some creative idea for you? Has a song or anything else ever come out of the experience?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  No, it's really not words. I mean, I mean, you learn a lot of words. You learn a lot of things doing crossword puzzles, but the the structure of crossword puzzles, as you I'm sure you know, is just based on a trick, you know, like it's it's the the words don't get harder, the clues get harder. So learning how to do crossword puzzles is just a bait like it's accumulating enough words that you understand how the grid is put together, I think, you know, and I'm a person, let's see, I'm just gonna do a little bit of humble bragging here, like, my longest streak was eleven hundred days, eleven sixty eight,

• 24:38Speaker 01

  one thousand one hundred sixty eight days. My current streak is three hundred and ninety three, because I forgot to do it one day during some part of a tour, it really bummed me out. Yeah.

• 24:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What bums me out is, this is the thing that I turn to, to fill, you know, I basically know how much time it's gonna take me, depending on what day of the week it is. There's a part in the book where you talk about how you are punctual, in fact, early oftentimes, and that you give yourself this exercise in songwriting, where you're like, I have twenty minutes before everybody else shows up for the bus. Can I write a song in that time?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  You can.

• 25:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And you said a really beautiful thing, I did not clip it here, about how, even if at the end of it, you don't have a song that you love, you have found a pleasurable way to pass the time. And now, every time I take out my phone to do the crossword, I think I should be writing a song instead.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  No, no, you're doing some, you're not hurting anybody. That's the point. I think that's the main gist, is to find stuff to do that doesn't hurt anybody. Just like, please find something to do to stop hurting yourself, you know, too.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  I'm honest, I will say, there have been many songs that I've written in that in that scenario where I know that I have to be down in the lobby in 20 minutes and I'm sitting around with my bags packed and looking at everything and going, well, I still have my guitar here, I'll try and write a song. But very, a lot of my favorite songs have come about because of that, just like that, like just open-ended permission. This, no way that you could write a great song in 20 minutes. But it's like, so often, that's just the door that opens. And it reminds me of, I don't know if this is in the book, but it's something I learned, maybe talking about the book afterwards. In writers' rooms for comedy shows, they tell people, sometimes the prompt is, write the worst joke you can

• 26:41Speaker 01

  imagine. And everybody writes the same jokes that they've been writing, but they have permission to just show them to each other. So it opens up a lot of creativity, you know?

• 26:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  One of the other bits from the book that I also love is, you know, while you're going through the exercises of getting somebody jump-started, or breaking out of a mentality or something like that, you have this conversation that you recorded with your brother, and then you pull certain words and phrases from it, and then you rearrange it into a poem. I'm just gonna play a little bit of that.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  I've talked to some who don't want to talk. They think talking might break the spell. Somewhere in the universe, you don't worry about. Where I wasn't free, but I was getting well. And as you left, I started wondering if you would ever be able to tell there is a difference between you and me from your point of view.

• 27:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You know, again, I have the audiobook, so I've heard the actual conversation that you pulled this from, and I saw on the page how you arranged it. I think it's so beautiful, and I'm wondering, when is that gonna be a, have you made that into a song?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  I forgot about that. That's the beauty of doing the things that are described in the book, is that guy sounds smart, you know? Like, I don't, like, I get to experience it in a way that-

• 28:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, well, I'll put it out here. I think you should turn that into a song. I was Googling bits from that to be like, Wilco lyrics, and those phrases. And I was like, no, no, this song is not-

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 28:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Not been born yet.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  But yeah, now I'll, now I'll take a closer look.

• 28:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This was another piece of advice that really, really hit me. This is a little passage from the book that just lives in my brain all the time now.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  But what's good? Isn't it a little strange that we enjoy doing a lot of things in life without the type of good versus bad judgment? Do you ever toss a frisbee? Does it ever enter your mind to stop when you realize you suck?

• 28:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And I think about it when I'm doing all of the things that I suck at and don't ever think about it. You know, now I sort of, I stop and think, well, I kind of suck at this. And I, and it doesn't bother me.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Because nobody, nobody's gonna judge you if you suck at throwing a frisbee. I mean, I am, but, but it doesn't, it's lower, it's lower stakes. And I just think that people, a lot of times, they, they wrap up so much of their self-worth in wanting to be really, really good at something that they just have poured themselves into.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Nobody really pours themselves into frisbee throwing unless you're a total jerk.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, that's, that's a hill I'll die on.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  And I would base this on one experience with some frisbee, uh, disc golf guys I ran into on a hike one time. All right, they're the worst.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  But yeah, I just think you should give yourself a break. I mean, that's basically, if I could just have written the book as a pamphlet, it'd be, give yourself a break.

• 29:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  How much was it on your mind that what you were writing was not just a book about songwriting? Like, how much was it a present thought that you were also writing a book about how to live?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I didn't really think about it, except that, I mean, there's an awareness that it is how I've lived. And, and again, starting from the point of view that you don't think that you're that unique or that much more special than somebody else, that gives you some confidence and sharing that maybe some strategy for living that I've discovered would be beneficial to somebody else. And, and so, yeah, I guess on that level, I was aware from the very beginning that it's kind of a book about how to live. But, um, yeah, I don't know, I'd venture into self-help territory a few times, I think.

• 31:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  In the book, you reference these techniques, a lot of which you've used over years. And you've had a long career writing songs, you've written so many songs. But I was wondering if you felt like 15 years ago, if someone had said, here's the opportunity to write this book, would you have been able to assemble a collection of exercises and like this? Or do you think you really needed the framework of having lived the life that you'd lived up to that point to even start to put these words one in front of the other?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't think so. I think that one of the advantages of getting older is having just more evidence that certain things work and that certain things don't last forever. You just have more information, you have more data, you know? And 15 years ago, I probably would have already had a lot of this practice in place, but nowhere near as much confidence that it's a sustainable enterprise, you know, or that it has some sort of durability that comes with time. The thing that fascinates me about getting older is every day of your life, as you get older, I'm sure everybody knows this, but they think about it, but every day of your life is a smaller fraction of your whole

• 32:14Speaker 01

  life, every day. And that, that always blows my mind and always keeps things in perspective, you know, that, that that's why things seem so much like the end of the world when you're... You've only had a little bit of world that you've experienced. And as you get older, it's just another little sliver of this thing that you've gotten to, you've endured, you'd survived to get to that point. But this also comes from migraines and comes from addiction and other things, just like, you know, go like, oh, they, yeah, I actually do know pretty confidently as panic issues and stuff like that, that I'm going to feel normal again, you know? So I don't know, songs help.

• 33:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  My conversation with Jeff Tweedy continues after this.

• 33:07Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 33:54Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 34:38Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You can use filters and reviews and photos from other customers to help you find the perfect thing. When you're refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com. Today's episode is sponsored by Function Health, and I've been a Function Health member for over a year now. I have to say, I'm pretty grateful to have a service that lets me track my health, because it's not really my natural inclination to do it myself. And especially around the holidays, and holiday feasts, and travel, and vacation, I have to keep my health a priority. There's a saying that I think about a lot. "That which can be measured can be improved."

• 35:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 35:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  One of the other things that I turned to to get out of the place that I was and get someplace better, besides your book, was therapy. And there are parts of the book that veer dangerously into my therapy sessions, like this really beautiful, but also haunting question.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  In the end, learning how to write songs is, in large part, about teaching yourself to fail and being okay with it. But you have to stop thinking that you're going to make something great, or something that might make you famous. You have to stop thinking about anything other than what happened when you were a little kid, and you laid on the floor, and you drew. And you lost yourself in that drawing. And in the end, you absolutely loved that drawing, because you made it yourself. And the drawing got hung up on the fridge, regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you, and everybody loves you. Why can't you be that kind to yourself? Forgot about that part.

• 36:58Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It's a hard question to be asked.

• 37:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And I want to go back to what you had said about you being your first audience. That you're writing songs that you wished you could hear and you were writing a book that you wished you could read. And I wanted to go a little bit deeper into this kind of territory of talking to yourself with compassion like that. Is that a sentence that you needed to hear at a certain point in your life that you had not heard? Like was there, is there a before and an after version of Jeff where you didn't have that question?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean,

• 37:37Speaker 01

  we need help. A lot of people like myself need help. We need help from other people to help us identify things. Like in therapy in the hospital. It's 20 years ago now that I was in the hospital. I still think about it every day and I'm still acknowledge that one of the biggest changes in my life was that I was doing a lot of things in my life for a long, big portion of my life, without being aware that there was a choice to be made. And when, and you don't make good choices when you don't know that there's a choice to be made.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  And, and so as you get better at knowing yourself, you are able to identify that there's a choice to be made and you have a better, better shot at making a good choice. You know, this is therapy, by the way, all of us. Pay attention, everybody.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  I'll ask you about your mother in a minute.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  But no, I think it's, I think that that's really, really key. And then the end goal, in my opinion, my assessment of it, is to be able to tell yourself which part is your fault.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  And what part isn't your fault? Because I think it's for a lot of us, we don't know. And we tend to blame ourselves for all of it. But there's a lot of shit, I'm telling you, it's not your fault. I feel so much better, being better able to distinguish what's my fault than what's not my fault. And, and acting accordingly from that point on, you know? Not to say you don't take some responsibility for the things that aren't your fault and correct. But you, but you also, I think you treat yourself better when you, when you are aware that not everything that happens to you is your fault.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  And, or, you know, all, all your whole life.

• 39:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I think there's this need to sort of step outside yourself, like what you're talking about there where everybody loves you. Why can't you be that kind to yourself? Where I think it's very easy to give that kind of love to other people and not turn it inward. Actually, I've been tracking a record for the last week and a half before coming here. And two days ago was the first day that we listened back to all of the takes. And the producer and engineer who I was working with said, okay, we're going to listen to this stuff. But the way we're going to listen to it is you didn't write this. Your best friend made this. And they're just saying, hey, I'm really excited to play this thing for you. Can you just listen to it?

• 40:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So we weren't going to take any notes or anything and like try and listen to it without that kind of judgment. And it's very hard to, to have that, despite how easy it is to have that with other people.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, I mean, it's really almost impossible. But that's where I think that the, some of the tricks, I think that are helpful are described in the book, like, I think that's one of the, one of the reasons I make so much and put it away and forget about it so that I can come back to it with some sense of discovery or like a little bit less investment in it being great or, you know, like you just feel like more objectivity about like, I could listen through stuff I, I have on my phone that I tracked, like just guitar parts or like a song I wrote three years ago, have no memory whatsoever of writing it. And most of the time it's just like, what was I thinking? You know, that I don't even really hear a song there anymore.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  And then sometimes it's like, Oh, wow. This is like, you know, this is gold. I can't believe that this this has been sitting here on my phone and like, and now it's now it's ready for me. Now I'm I'm I'm I understand it now.

• 41:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I think perfectionism is probably at the root of a lot of what was my hangup. And so this there's another section here that really I thought beautifully articulated the thing to try and let go of.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  The craftsman part of me understands that as a song crafter, I could probably be OK looking at it as if I were building tables. But I personally think that I'm where I am because I aspire to make trees instead of tables, because there's something higher in my mind about doing so, and that I've accepted the fact that it's also impossible to make the perfect tree. There's no perfecting it. There's no reaching some conclusion that you've made the tree.

• 42:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, that really like put a dent in my brain in a great way. And I've been trying really hard to to to hold on to that idea. But I wanted to go one step past this because the scope of the book is, you know, writing one song. But you do make references here and there to the idea of like, what will come next, the point where you're going to have to make an album and things like that. And when you have successfully had the process of seeing your songs as trees, these things that can be judged for just on their own merit and their own beauty.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Well, a tree can't fail. That's really the point. Yeah, like a tree is going to be a tree and do the tree things it needs to do without anybody saying it's failed at its job, you know?

• 43:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. What is it like for you then when you have 50 songs and in front of you and you're and you're trying to whittle down what the 10 or the 12 are that are going to make an album or even maybe, you know, some subset that you're just going to record? How do you introduce judgment when you've worked so hard to erase judgment to get to the point of creation?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not gonna sound as confident about talking about this because I don't, I don't have as much confidence about my judgment when it's come down to putting 12 songs together to make a record. I go back and think that why, how was that left off? When we were putting together for tonight of all deep cuts and things that were left off records that made me go, how did that get left off of that record? That's so much better than so many of the songs on that record. So I don't really feel like, I just, I feel like you just do your best. I feel like it's pretty intuitive. A lot of times for me, it's, it's more interesting to me what the band is responding to, what other people are responding to in the room, what the immediate audience, the first people

• 44:13Speaker 01

  you see responding to it is, you know, your bandmates and, and, and Tom Schick, our engineer, and Mark Greenberg, and people that are hearing these things right as they're happening. I feel that. You feel the, the energy of different songs and you like start to think that those fit together, that's gonna be great. I mean, in the end, I kinda err on the side of putting almost every, I mean, how many, I've put out so much music and, and a lot of people would maybe stop and just say, maybe you should take more time deciding what's better. But that feels wrong to me. I don't know. I think I'd rather

• 44:54Speaker 01

  just keep, keep moving than spend time with a focus group or something.

• 45:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Have you been surprised at all by how this book has been received?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Oh, it's been very, very rewarding, meeting people at, you know, like on the book tour, but the book was, I think this book tour was virtual because it was during the pandemic. And then meeting people on the more recent book tour that have read this book. And then meeting other musicians when I hear that it has helped somebody. I mean, I mean, I, I don't know what else it was, was the point. And that makes me feel really, really good. Yeah, like it's like, it's a very, very. I don't... I always try and picture what... This is actually another thought about why I wrote the book. I always tried, I tried to picture what kind of book would have been really nice to have

• 45:50Speaker 01

  when I was a kid. And there weren't many books that came at songwriting from a creative point of view. There were songwriting books that were based on music theory. And there were a lot of music industry books and things like that. When you go to the library, I'd try and look up books. And there were just no books that just said, "No, you can do it. No, you don't need, you don't need to know anything at all. Do you like songs? Good. There, you write songs then, okay? Go." That didn't exist. And, you know, same way, try and, try and keep that kid in my mind.

• 46:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I, I know you've had so many people in your life respond to your songs in ways that have been very profound and, and deep. And it's amazing to me that you've managed to do that in another medium as well. I guess I'll, I'll close with, I'm gonna steal a bit from the book again. It's out of context from how you used it, but I, I also, once again, feel like it, it sums up how I feel for the book and you.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  It's hard to express sometimes because I think it might turn people off. The overwhelming gratitude I feel for it all.

• 47:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Thank you so much. And thank you all for coming.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Thank you, Rishi.

• 47:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  To learn more, visit songexploder.net. You'll find links to buy How to Write One Song. The book is great, and as I mentioned in the interview, I really love the audiobook. So if you like listening to stuff, check that out. And if you want more, there's a Song Exploder episode that Jeff did about the Wilco song, Magnetized. We'll link to all of that. Thank you so much to Jeff and everyone who put together the Solid Sound Festival for inviting me there and for recording the conversation and letting me share it here. This episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

• 48:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter. You can find it on the Song Exploder website. And you can also follow me and Song Exploder on Instagram. And you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Keshi-Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Radiotopia.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  From PRX.