Couldn't get enough of Bud Scoppa's Jeff Tweedy Q&A? Here's what we couldn't fit in the magazine...
Paste: People use “noise” synonymously with “experimental” when they talk about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born. But as far back as Being There, you used the term “drawing outside the lines” to describe what you were going for. That’s been a big component of what you’ve been doing ever since, hasn’t it?
Tweedy: My comment to that, generally, and unchanged after all these years, is—that’s kind of the whole point of rock music. And in a lot of ways, there’s a classicism to Wilco that people don’t see; they’re comfortable with it being alt.country. But Wilco’s pretty firm believers in the power of rock music to be transcendent and freeing. And having rules can run counter to that in all kinds of ways. But at the same time, there’s overwhelming evidence that noise is a healthy element that contributes to rock music.
In the early days of Wilco, my belief was that this was the band that was going to take up the mantle of the great American rock’n’roll bands, starting with The Byrds and extending through Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. You’ve surprised me a number of times along the way, but as I look back on it, that initial impression may be more true than I realized.
I don’t know. I was preparing myself to apologize to you for letting you down [laughs]. Well, anything that would happen along those lines has nothing to do with what our goals or ambitions are—I don’t really know what else to say about it. I mean, Wilco, like any band should in my mind, aspires to be a great band. But aspiring to be a great band generally makes it pretty difficult to... I think it’s pretty difficult to be a great band that’s modeling itself on other bands exclusively.
About AM—I’ve often wondered whether you’ve disowned that record or consider it “pre-Wilco.” Do you still relate to the original sound that you came up with in terms of Wilco?
Oh, absolutely. I actually feel a lot more connected to AM than, say, Summerteeth. I honestly think that AM is maligned for no good reason. I’ve never felt anything other than really proud of AM, to be honest. There are a lot of songs on AM that we don’t play, and it has more to do with the key that they’re in. At the time, I wrote a lot of songs just sitting on the couch, and I could sing them wonderfully just sitting on a couch, because Uncle Tupelo had broken up, and I wasn’t really testing this material live or anything. It was more just me and acoustic guitar. And those arrangements went on the record. And live it’s really hard for me to sing low enough to sing “Box Full of Letters” or “I Thought I Held You.” That kind of stuff just isn’t comfortable for me to sing anymore. “Passenger Side” is in a totally different key. “Casino Queen,” a couple of things from that record, remained live staples over the years. But mostly, any idea that we don’t like that record has come more from us not playing a lot of that material live.
But I’m very proud of that record. I don’t think that there’s any other record that sounds like AM. I really don’t. I think it’s a unique-sounding record, and I don’t think that I’ve ever written a song better than “Passenger Side” in terms of just making a totally straightforward narrative happen in a song, and making it all work and putting it all together. That’s all I’ve ever asked of any song—that it accomplishes that.
One of the reasons I asked is that you don’t go back to that album, nor do you really tap into Being There—although it seems significant that Kicking Television, opens with “Misunderstood” from that album. What led you to place it in the opening slot?
Well, it worked once [laughs]. The set list that we wanted to play the fourth night at the Vic and didn’t get to play because of a lot of technical difficulties—it was a really disastrous night—but that set was similar to some of the ones that we had played throughout the year that we really liked. So it’s really based on trying to make sure the live album followed the same type of arc as the live show, at the same time paying attention to the fact that it’s two discs, and you still have to sequence things for each CD.
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You seem to finally have the band the way you want it now. You couldn’t come up with a more ideal player for the lead guitar slot than Nels Cline.
Everything has really fallen into place in a lot of ways in the last year and a half. And yeah, I feel that way. The reason the reason I’ve struggled to get things “the way I want them to be” [laughs]... part of that is because I’ve given up that struggle, and part of it is that a lot more things are just kind of effortlessly the way I want them to be. I just feel a lot of chemistry and sympathetic vision for what sounds good or what we’re trying to do. And yeah, Nels is a huge piece of that puzzle because of how much, musically, he has access to. I don’t think Wilco’s been about pastiche or anything like that, but certainly, over the years, Wilco has been more inclined to spread out laterally rather than hone in on something. And I always think there’s probably more fun in life to learn how to appreciate more stuff than to focus on tiny little pieces of things... I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Kierkegaard said, “Learning to love one thing is to learn to love all things.” And music is one thing enough.
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To me—and this goes all the way back to when I first met you in 1995—I always believed that Neil Young was your avatar. In terms of letting your own internal wheels carry you to whatever that next point is. He’s the primary example of that impulse, along with Dylan.
Dylan and Neil Young I would definitely say are my main inspirations. Neil Young would certainly fit that bill without Dylan, but I think having Dylan in the world makes Neil Young look that much more approachable. Right or wrong, I don’t think I could aspire to be either of those gentlemen. But Neil Young has a lot more human face. Until now—Dylan all of a sudden has become a human.
Did you see No Direction Home?
It’s so great. I didn’t think I could love Dylan more, and now it kinda hurts.
As the narrator of the film, he seems forthcoming, but the enigma is still there.
Yeah, but it really feels like the enigma is kind of what we all have inside us, you know? That is what has been projected on him, and for me that just highlighted the fact that it comes from us. Because not many of us know ourselves very well. Why do you wanna know Dylan so desperately?
Obsession is part of being a fan.
Yeah, I know from experience.
Well, you’ve been on both sides of that story.
I don't know about that.
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In this political climate, if I can watch The Daily Show once or twice a week, I can feel a little bit saner.
It's almost surreal how the political and cultural anxiety has ceded to natural disasters in recent weeks.
If you look at the human body, when you have emotions, a lot of times they amount to physical manifestations; it doesn’t surprise me at all that the world would be like that, on a much larger scale. And also, in a less esoteric and New Age-y way, it’s no accident. There’s tons of really horrible environmental decisions that have been made that absolutely contribute to that.
We’re living in an age where it’s hard not to be cynical. It’s insane not to be cynical, actually.
I kind of disagree with that. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and it certainly does feel like it’s hard not to be cynical. But I think what we’re experiencing is the worst kind of cynicism that there is. You could not have a more cynical philosophy than the people that are running this country. And what’s so cynical about it is they’re asking everybody to give up completely on the notion that the future could be better. And because of that, everybody is scared to death, trying to do everything they possibly can to hang on to the way things were. I just don’t think you can motivate people to do anything other than destroy when they’re terrified of the future. If there was a lack of cynicism; if you could combat that cynicism with something like... At one point, we were all kind of working towards helping feed the poor, for example. I know I’m sounding totally naive, but this is a mass movement that we’re witnessing, and it’s a mass movement of people that are f—ing scared to death about the future being worse than it is now. Other movements in our time have been based on thinking that the future could be f—ing great, and generally those movements have done a lot more good, even though they could definitely use some perspective, as well.
I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to start lecturing. But if people could find something that could give them some kind of hope that you could make it better, if you really ask people to start thinking in a really concerted way about conservation and [the idea] that the children’s future could actually be really bright, I think you’d have a lot more people willing to vote for people like Obama. I got to meet him not too long ago; he introduced us at Farm Aid. It’s pretty hard not to wanna hang on desperately to someone like that as a life raft. Please save us. [laughs]
(To read the the full Paste Conversation with Jeff Tweedy from issue #19 click here.
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