THE READING ROOM: Jeff Tweedy Preaches the Power of Songs

With World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music, Jeff Tweedy completes a trilogy of meditative books that offer windows into his life, his songwriting, and, now, his deeply personal take on how songs shape a life.

In 2018, Tweedy conducted readers on a tour of the ups and downs of his life in the often humorous Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. (ND review). Two years later, Tweedy dove deep into his songwriting soul and reflected on his evolving understanding of himself as a songwriter and the essence of writing songs in 2020’s How to Write One Song (ND review). Whether he knew it or not, he had already written in that book some thoughts that could serve as a preface to his new one: “No one writes songs — plural. They write one song, and then another. And it’s also a reminder of what you really want. Or what I think you should REALLY want, which is to disappear — to watch your concept of time evaporate, to live at least once inside a moment when you aren’t ‘trying’ to do anything or be anything anymore. To spend time in a place where you just are. … That’s something that doesn’t happen through songs — plural. It happens only when you’ve lost yourself in the process of making one song.”

In World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music, Tweedy spends time in other people’s songs and the places where he was when he first heard them. He also reflects on the times in his life that shaped his initial experience of each song and his later reactions to the song. Tweedy serves as a gracious host, inviting readers into his vast basement filled with LPs, pulling out one song at a time and gently encouraging them to listen to it as he spins his tales about why the song changed his life. Each of the 50 short chapters in the book engages readers in a conversation about how we choose songs, and that songs choose us. In short, Tweedy offers his take on why that one little piece of music we heard when we were 5 years old has stuck in our hearts and ears and returns to us in moments when we least expect it. We may love the lyrics and music fiercely or hate the opening notes just as passionately, but the song has shaped us and even the ways we hear music.

Jeff Tweedy (photo by Sammy Tweedy)

Tweedy admits, “This book is probably the one I would have written first if I were more ambitious, and if I had been a little more clear-eyed about what I care most for in this world, and what I’ve thought about the most by far: other people’s songs. And how much they have taught me about how to be human — how to think about myself and others. And how deeply personal and universally vast the experience of listening to almost anything with intent and openness can be. And most importantly, how songs absorb and enhance our own experiences and store our memories.”

He also avers that this is not a book that delves into the specifics of songs, looking deep into sonic structure or the ways the notes in the refrain or chorus coalesce into a certain musical architecture. He chose the songs because these are the ones that came to him first. He writes that he could have chosen other songs to write about but that he would have regretted not writing about the ones he left out. As he writes, “The specifics of the songs themselves aren’t really the point. What’s important to me to convey is how miraculous songs are.”

Tweedy first hears Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as a child, and the gorgeous yearning of the song has stuck with him because it calls up a certain scene: “My mother watching Judy sing. Me watching my mom … loving her so much and being so happy to see her look so different, knowing even at that age how important it was for her to get to be somewhere else, if only for a moment. It’s as perfect a memory as I have of my mother, and it’s a perfect song. No one will ever write one better.”

Some songs are unforgettable, he writes, both for their lyrics and their music. He feels this way about Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” though he first heard Judy Collins singing it. “There are some songs so perfect it’s impossible to imagine them ever not existing. Melodies so seamless that it makes no sense to contemplate how they were constructed … Here long before us, and sure to survive long after we’re gone. Music that arrives not as something new but as something that finally has a name. This song feels like it’s been part of me for as long as I’ve had a me to feel.”

With his humorous candor, Tweedy admits that he doesn’t like every song he hears, and he feels strongly about his aversion to Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”: “I don’t like this song. I think it stinks. Doesn’t matter who sings it. It fries my nerves.” He adores Parton, but in his intense dislike of this song he confirms that “it’s okay to admit everything isn’t made for you.”

One of the best chapters in the book focuses on Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas’ “I Love You.” In it, Tweedy reflects on why listeners often find it hard to get into newer music as compared to the music that’s been part of the soundtrack of their lives. This often results in a refrain such as “they just don’t make good music like they used to.” Tweedy resists such thinking. “A song that works usually keeps on working,” he writes. “New songs find new people. And they tend to find the people who need them the most.” Reflecting on Eilish’s song, he writes, “music is the only language being spoken here. And when a melody is this profound and beautiful, it makes belief transferable. She and her brother believed it enough for all of us to feel it. There is no greater feat a songwriter can achieve. When a song works this well, we’re not alone anymore, we are in the presence of greatness.”

Every chapter of World Within a Song is a little gem, offering insights not only on the song on which it focuses and the reasons it sang and continues to sing — or not — to Tweedy, but also more depth on what it means to write a song that continues shape listeners’ lives.

Jeff Tweedy’s World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music was published Nov. 7 by Dutton.