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ON AND ON AND ON
I HAD PUT TOGETHER the band, the Wilco that you see onstage today, right before I went into rehab. Leroy had left the band not long after we finished A Ghost Is Born, and it was another one of those moments where bad news became an opportunity. I really love Leroy, and I miss him, but when he left, it was a disappointment, but it didn’t destroy our relationship. It was one of those transitions where I got to ask myself, “Wow, who could I get? Who might be interested?” I thought about people I’d seen, musicians I’d been excited about. And I decided, “Let’s ask Pat and Nels,” and they both said yes.
I realized it would be really helpful to have a lot of hands on deck. When we toured on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot we were a smaller band, just a four piece, for a lot of the tour. We were trying to cover a lot of different sounds from the record by triggering samples onstage and trying to use technology in ways that we weren’t really adept at or comfortable with. We pulled it off, but that experience made me think that more hands would be better than us triggering things with our feet.
Today, we’re a band full of music lifers. It’s a little small orchestra put together not just to play A Ghost Is Born, but Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and everything else we’ve done. There’s John and I, who’ve been there since the beginning; Glenn, who came in halfway through Yankee; Mikael, who started during the hazy post-Yankee/pre-Ghost period; and Pat Sansone and Nels Cline.
Pat had been playing in a side-project band with John Stirratt for a while and had become friends with all of us over the years. Whenever I would see him and John play and sing together, I would marvel at his mastery of all the great pop and rock guitar and keyboard tones and styles. Just a gifted musician. I can’t think of any band on earth that Pat couldn’t adapt to and stay afloat in, chops-wise.
And speaking of chops, Nels Cline. I’d first seen Nels when he played with Carla Bozulich in the Geraldine Fibbers. Truly a one-of-a-kind talent. The parts he played in that band were built around pushing the guitar into a purely sonic realm that transcended the traditional roles a guitar would normally play. It was astonishing and unforgettable, but I didn’t start daydreaming about making music with Nels until a few years later when I saw him backing up Carla again. They were touring Carla’s remake of Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger album and Nels was playing beautiful and understated lap steel guitar and lovingly skewed country licks all night.
I’m always impressed when I come across a musician who’s found the passion to embrace seemingly contradictory approaches to music making, and it was obvious that night that Nels might just be able to play anything. I sent him an advance copy of A Ghost Is Born so he could have an idea of where we were at musically, and anxiously waited for him to say yea or nay. Talking on the phone a few days later I began to worry he was turning us down when he kept talking about my guitar playing on the album, how he loved it, and didn’t know what he could add to the band. I thought it was a really sweet way to let me down easy. I was wrong, though. It was just Nels being his typical generous and humble self. He wanted in.
One thing I think all of us have in common in our band is gratitude. We all know how hard making a band work really is. When things are going well, and I don’t just mean commercially—when you’re enjoying it and you can feel everyone is working toward and excited about some common cause—it should never be taken for granted. Almost immediately, this lineup of the band felt whole. By the time I got out of rehab and started practicing with everyone, they had already gelled into a living, breathing rock band, thanks to John’s leadership in my absence, his unflagging loyalty to me as a friend, and everyone’s belief that Wilco was a cause worth fighting for. As we toured and grew, we just got tighter and tighter. I was worried some of the material from the earlier albums would suffer with this band’s strengths being more organized around playing the last two albums, but even those songs sounded better than they ever had to my ears. Aside from being able to nail the current album, A Ghost Is Born, the band’s takes on the more complicated arrangements from Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot seemed to add vitality and improve upon the studio-reliant recorded versions. A lot of nights I’d be onstage thinking, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” “Why didn’t we put together the right band first and then knock it out live in the studio?” Every song felt so much more immediate and exciting.
So that’s where we started on Sky Blue Sky. We gave ourselves a few very simple guidelines. Simple songs with highly considered group arrangements built off the ground and performed live in the studio. We did end up allowing an overdub or two per song, but for the most part we stuck to those parameters. I can remember the thinking behind setting some loose boundaries; the obvious one is that it really was a new band and it just felt like the appropriate way to introduce this lineup on a record.
The less obvious reason is that I thought I would lose my mind if I tried to sort through the infinite possibilities this band would have access to in a studio-as-instrument scenario. Nels Cline alone seemed like he could cause permanent damage to my fragile post-hospital psyche just by running through his repertoire of pedal combinations. Playing live forced everyone to be decisive when choosing their parts and sounds and to stay focused on how the band sounded as a collective thing. One sound we were all making together.
The songs themselves were written as an attempt to keep things simpler as well. After a few records of getting more and more comfortable with an abstract and at times cryptic approach to lyric writing, I felt in desperate need of some clarity. Life’s complexities had overwhelmed me to the point of hospitalization after our last record, so going into this one, I didn’t have much of a taste for pushing myself to any extremes artistically.
By now you’re probably beginning to notice two distinct and alternating goals in the way my songwriting has progressed. One seems to stem from an impulsive need to be heard and the other from the conflicting desire to avoid any outright detection of that wish. For most of Sky Blue Sky (with some exceptions, like “Impossible Germany”) I found myself actively avoiding my instinct to hide. In a lot of ways I can see it now as a fairly typical recovery-themed record. “Either Way” is basically a rewording of the Serenity Prayer, for crying out loud. It’s an important record for me in that regard. I think letting down my guard and getting things off my chest in a more humble and plainspoken manner helped me reset an idea of myself as a creative person. Leaving behind as many of the myths surrounding suffering and art as I possibly could was the only path forward.
The fact is, I wasn’t sure I still had it in me to write at all. Intellectually, I could point to dozens of authors and musicians who lived lives that bolstered a belief I was fostering that pain and brokenness were inessential and overhyped components of how great art gets made, but the appeal of the tortured artist archetype didn’t become ingrained in my imagination overnight so it was unreasonable to expect it to have left my heart so soon. Keeping everything more simple and direct seemed like the perfect place to start over and break free from old habits as a person and a songwriter.
When Sky Blue Sky came out, some people seemed disappointed by the simplicity and the overall gentleness of the record, but I was thrilled. It was an amazing feat to me to get six humans, much less musicians, to work that closely together for such long periods without any tumult or dysfunction. It was such a gratifying and triumphant feeling. It was way harder to pull off than a lot of the heavily layered and experimental-sounding arrangements from the previous few albums that people cited as being more complex.
Sky Blue Sky also came at a time in my life where I was still learning how to take care of myself. I had made so much progress by the time we had started. One of the main goals of recovery—and maybe the only essential goal of any kind of psychological intervention, whether it’s through meditation or talk therapy or even an AA meeting—is to become aware enough of your thoughts and emotions to see when there is a choice to be made. Addicts are compelled to do things by inner thoughts and feelings that are mostly invisible to them. The subconscious can steer the ship for a long time without your conscious mind ever noticing. It was a revelation when I started to be able to see that there were choices to make, and that it was a hell of a lot easier to do the right thing when you’re aware that you have a right thing and a wrong thing to choose between. I’m oversimplifying to some degree, but it really works to look at it this way when you have a history of finding yourself dialing the phone to a connection before you even thought about getting high.
This is also the album I was making when my mom died. Everything had been feeling so exciting and perfect, and then I got a call from my dad at 3:00 a.m. saying, “She’s gone, boy.” So sudden. So unexpected. One of my initial reactions was so selfish, I’m embarrassed to admit it. I felt cheated. Why wasn’t I being allowed to enjoy this wonderful period in my life where my band and my mind finally seemed to be working? I felt sorry for myself. “Can’t I get through one record without a tragedy?” I felt pathetic.
These are the kind of moments that can be disastrous for people in recovery. But I had a choice, and the choice was easy to make for the first time in my life. I was grieving. People grieve lost loved ones every day. I realized that I wasn’t being denied something, I was being given something no one gets to avoid. There wasn’t a way back from, or around, the pain of losing my mother. The way out was through it.
I finished the lyrics to Sky Blue Sky in this state of mind. “On and On and On” in particular was written for my dad in an effort to console him with some thoughts I wasn’t entirely sure I believed but found comforting nonetheless. Do we find each other in some other realm to spend eternity, as promised, in love? My dad thought so. When he was dying and fighting to not die, even when he was unconscious he seemed obstinate, almost stubborn in his refusal to let go of life. His girlfriend, Melba, would get right up to his ear and she’d remind him, “It’s okay, honey, you can go. JoAnn is waiting for you.”
I might not have mentioned this yet, but my dad was a pretty morbid guy throughout his life. My siblings and I all had moments with him where he would tell us exactly what songs he wanted played at his funeral or what color casket lining he thought wouldn’t look cheap. But my sister was the only one who was organized enough and took him seriously enough to write his requests down and file them away on note cards. So when my dad died we knew exactly what to do. There were two things that he had told her that took my breath away. The first: Jeff is not to perform at my funeral (I had tried to play a song at my mother’s service at his request and had broken down halfway through and he still felt guilty about it). The second one was: My grave marker should read “On and On and On.”
WHILE WE WERE finishing Wilco (The Album), we realized that our record deal was going to be up pretty soon. I was really starting to question the notion of what the record companies were doing for a band like Wilco. I can see what they’re doing for a younger band. There is something to be said for not being troubled by the business aspects of any of it for some bands. But as a band, we had already taken on a lot of that work, just out of a desire to have some autonomy and agency in business decisions. It felt like we were already doing a lot of what a traditional record company would do for a band in-house. We had our own publicist and we had a pretty strong Internet presence. A lot of shows would sell out without us having to do much promotion.
It became clear to us that how the financial pie was being divided up wasn’t really reflective of how the work was being divided up.
So we presented the label with an idea. We didn’t expect them to embrace it, but we thought maybe it would be a good starting point for a negotiation. “We think that maybe you should be getting what we’ve been getting and maybe we should be getting what you’ve been getting,” in terms of how we divide the profits. And on principle, they said they couldn’t do it. That it’s a precedent, contractually, that they weren’t willing to upend.
We were disappointed, but not surprised. If I were them, I would have had a hard time not laughing us out onto the street. It’s the kind of arrogant and cocky shit we always try. Not because we think we’re that great, but because we think the whole business is that lame. That’s what led to us starting our own label. So far it’s been pretty great. Everyone always asks if we feel like we have more creative freedom, and it’s hard to explain that we really don’t. For a long time we’ve been affording ourselves a fair amount of creative freedom, whether we deserved it or not.
The thing that’s most positive to us about having a label is that we have more autonomy in how we conduct our business. People get sick of the music business for the same reasons they get sick of any business. It’s predictably awful sometimes. Any job, no matter how great it is, can become a job someone hates. I don’t know why that is, but it’s true. Having more of a hand to play in our own business transactions has taught us that the inverse is true as well. No part of being in a band and making records and putting them out on your own label is so awful that you can’t find a way to make it more creative and interesting. I highly recommend it if you have the energy and opportunity to do so.
I DIDN’T WRITE THIS book to give testimonials about the joys of being an entrepreneur, but how drastically owning my own label contrasts with my earliest days of duplicating demo cassettes on my dad’s karaoke machine does lead me to reflect on just how much change I’ve witnessed since I started making music.
Musically, I feel like I’ve played a part in bridging a few distinct musical generations. I’ve had the honor of working with Woody Guthrie’s words and collaborating with the mighty Mavis Staples, but I’ve also toured with Sonic Youth and recorded with Vic Mensa. I’ve cut records to a lathe, recorded to tape, recorded to computers.
I know I’m not the only one who can claim this, but I feel like I’m a part of some connective tissue between two worlds that don’t really interact the same way anymore. I feel like I might be a member of the last tribe that made it across the divide before time changed, before people started listening to every era of music all at once because of the Internet. When I first started making records, each new thing was built on the things directly before it. Time was linear. Musical styles would evolve and distort with the passage of time. It was hard to maintain access to bygone generations of music because it would literally disappear. Now time feels almost circular. It still moves in only one direction (unfortunately), but it’s all still happening and almost anyone can access any era of music at any time. So instead of being influenced only by the recordings and generations of musicians most accessible and obtainable to study, musicians today can draw upon almost anything ever recorded and track down and share artists and techniques in an instant that would have taken my generation years to piece together.
The most time my kids will have to spend finding a piece of music is ten minutes. On some of the streaming sites they might have to work a little bit to find something rare, maybe it’s on YouTube, maybe you have to find the torrent or something. For us, some albums would have had such small initial pressings and have been so scarce that the only way to even know about them was to read about them. We would spend years kind of trying to imagine what Big Star’s “Third” sounds like. Based on “It’s really tormented, it’s got strings on it, it’s really tormented.”
There’s obviously something really nice about the democratization of it, that everybody is able to find everything. There are probably some upsides to that. But we probably benefited from having digestible chunks of music to consume in ways that allowed us to be very familiar with one piece at a time, or even a song or two at a time, in the case of 45s.
I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of my heroes who aren’t around anymore. I bought a Minutemen T-shirt directly from D. Boon at a show in St. Louis. One time I had Rick Danko from the Band tell me that I sound desperate when I sing, and that I should never allow myself to not sound desperate. I guess the most miraculous encounter of all would be when Uncle Tupelo opened for Johnny Cash at a club in Santa Ana, California, in 1993. We didn’t meet him and June Carter before the show, but we could hear them during our set, watching through the curtains on either side of the stage and shouting, “Woo-hoo,” between songs. It was startling. There is nothing in this world that can prepare you for Johnny Cash shouting “Woo-hoo” at you while you’re trying to remember how to play the bass. Backstage after the show they were so complimentary and sweet. They were impressed we were playing old songs like “Moonshiner” and “No Depression,” which was written by June’s father, A. P. Carter. I don’t know about the other guys, but I don’t remember saying much. What was there to say to Johnny Cash? It was like talking to the Empire State Building or a bald eagle.
They invited us to a songwriting barbecue they were hosting in Nashville. I’d never heard of such a thing, but it sounded amazing. June kept saying she just wanted to take us home and give us all baths, and I wasn’t sure if that was part of the deal, but it didn’t sound the least bit dirty when she said it. The offer seemed so genuine and crazy, we seriously contemplated canceling the rest of our tour so we could drive two days straight through, all the way to Nashville, and be able to say we wrote songs and ate barbecue at Johnny Cash’s house. Then the financial impracticality of that plan set in, so we took a rain check and stood dumbstruck in the parking lot behind the club, waving goodbye to their tour bus.
I met Johnny Cash again years later when Wilco played a CMJ showcase in New York City. We’d just finished recording Being There and were planning to play our new songs for the first time publicly. Maybe an hour before the show, our dressing room door opened and Johnny Cash wandered in. He was noticeably weaker-looking than the last time I saw him, and his hair had more gray, but his aura was undiminished.
“Where’s Jeff?” he asked.
I just about fell out of my chair. He knows my name?! When did I get on a first-name basis with the Man in Black? How?! He told me he wasn’t feeling well and asked if it would be okay if we switched slots with him and let him open up the show. I said, yeah, of course, that’s no problem. He smiled and kindly patted me on the shoulder with one of his gigantic hands. “Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate it. Good to see you again.”
What had just happened didn’t fully hit us until several moments after his presence had evaporated from the room. What?! Oh shit. We have to follow Johnny Cash?! This is ridiculous. Can’t we just leave with everyone else when he’s done? No dice, the powers that be told us. We had to play even if it was to the custodial team. In a lot of ways it was freeing. You don’t get on a stage after Johnny Cash has left it and feel like you owe anyone a return on their entertainment dollar. The stakes haven’t been raised; they’ve been obliterated. You’re like a four-year-old walking out onto Wrigley Field. Nobody’s expecting you to hit a home run. It’d be a miracle if you just managed to hold a bat upright. When we played “Misunderstood” and “Sunken Treasure,” they sounded awful, we were dissonant and loud and childish in the glee we were getting from not giving anyone what they wanted. We just assumed the audience wasn’t into us. And we were right.
Afterward, Joe McEwen, our A&R guy from Reprise, came backstage and asked, “What the hell happened? You guys used to be so good.” His outrage was heartwarming. Pissing everybody off in a memorable way was our best-case scenario. Nobody should ever follow Johnny Cash onto a stage. It was never going to be a reasonable way to arrange the universe. We did the best we could do, and the best we could do was fail spectacularly. What were our options, though? Say no to Johnny Cash?
Just a few years ago we were asked to do a summer-length tour opening for Bob Dylan. I’m sort of surprised, writing this, that I haven’t talked about him yet. Maybe it’s because his importance to me feels like it’s too obvious to bring up. Kind of like “Human, you say? Let me guess, you like oxygen?” I write songs, and Dylan is the peak I’m going to keep climbing toward.
There really wasn’t a whole lot of interaction with him, but the contact I did have was memorable, including the first day of the tour. In the backstage area, we had all been warned that in the minutes leading up to Dylan’s set time, everyone was to stay clear of the route from his dressing room to the stage. We were also told not to gawk or try to talk to him. So we did our best to look casual hanging in the doorway of our own dressing room so as not to miss at least getting a first glimpse up close. Craning my neck out the door, I could see his band walking toward us with Dylan trailing a bit behind. As they got to our door I heard what sounded like a Bob Dylan impression. “Hey, Jeff, how’s it going, man? Good to see you!” Bob had spoken to me. Without breaking stride. And I was left in his wake trying to play it cool, but I could feel all of the other folks around us looking at me. It was impossible to play it cool. “Dylan talked to me. Did you guys see that?!” I immediately undid any credibility I had just accrued by being visibly rattled. I had to sit down. Later, when I had collected myself, I called Susie to let her know Bob and I were already best friends.
DOLLY PARTON ONCE said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people I find myself drawn to work with and stay close to. People who have figured out who they are and are good at being that on purpose. Like Mavis Staples. Don’t get me wrong; I also believe she has a grandiose desire to change the world with her songs. But I’ve never met anyone with more graceful humility and who is more comfortable in her own skin.
Our first meeting was an arranged marriage. Her management was telling her, “Jeff Tweedy wants to meet you,” and my management was telling me, “Mavis wants you to help her make a record.” I still don’t know who came up with the idea or set the wheels in motion, but however it happened, I’m thankful. We planned a first date; I agreed to meet her for lunch in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago, and we drank iced teas and talked about our families for more than three hours.
I wasn’t sure if I’d made any impression on her at all, but she told me later that she was worried I might be another Prince. He had produced two of her records—1989’s Time Waits for No One and 1993’s The Voice—she adored him, but the process hadn’t been easy. He was shy and reclusive, she confided, and she sometimes had to communicate with him by writing letters, because it was the only way to reach him. When I wasn’t as immediately outgoing as she’d hoped, the thought went through her head, Oh Lord, don’t send me another Prince! But then she tested me; she told a joke, and I apparently could laugh freely enough for her to believe I was worth taking a chance on.
Mavis and I have now made three albums together, four, if you count the album Pops Staples left behind when he died, which Spencer and I helped Mavis finish. She treats us like family. She calls Susie her daughter and Spencer and Sammy her grandkids. As for me, she calls me Tweedy; not once has she used the name Jeff. She calls Bob Dylan “Bobby,” which makes me a little jealous. But Dylan asked her to marry him in the sixties, and she said no, so they have a history there that’s predated me by a half century. In fact, one of my other interactions on tour with Dylan had been him telling me to “Tell Mavis she should have married me!” I told him I would, so I relayed the message to her and she asked me to remind him that she’s still available. When I saw him stage-side the next night, I told him what Mavis had said, and he laughed and said, “Yeah? I wish!” Being a literal go-between in a playfully flirtatious conversation between Mavis and Bobby is probably the pinnacle of my career. I should probably hang it up. It’s not going to get better than that.
Writing and producing songs for Mavis has given me the courage to take chances I wouldn’t normally have tried. A middle-aged white guy from the Midwest should definitely think twice about writing a song like “If All I Was Was Black,” and I did. When I first shared the song with Mavis, I admitted my misgivings to her. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t putting any words in her mouth she didn’t believe or feel accurately described how she feels.
“We can’t let anybody know I wrote this,” I said. “They’ll tear me apart. They’ll say, ‘Who does this Caucasian think he is?’”
“Tweedy,” she told me. “As far as I’m concerned, you are black.”
I bragged about it later to Susie. “Mavis says I’m black,” I said. In any other situation, if I’d claimed to be African American to my wife, she would have mocked me mercilessly, and I would have deserved it. But with Mavis’s seal of approval, Susie didn’t object. “Well, if Mavis says you’re black, you’re black,” she said.
Working with Mavis made me less cynical. Not that I was an indie rock Ebenezer Scrooge, but there were things about the music industry that I could never bring myself to believe in, like the Grammys. Just to reiterate what I said earlier in the book, I’ve never dreamed about being nominated, I’ve never dreamed about winning—it’s nice when it happens, but my mind never really goes there. But when our first record together, You Are Not Alone, won a Grammy in 2011, it was a big deal for her. She’d been making music for six decades, recorded classics like “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There,” and never got so much as a nomination. We weren’t there, but Susie and I were watching the live stream on a computer in her office when Mavis walked up and accepted that award, with such sincere gratitude and shock and appreciation, and bursting into tears while telling the crowd, “It’s been a long time coming.” I couldn’t help but get choked up.
Her willingness to take chances and try new things outside of her comfort zone has always been remarkable to me. This was not a person I considered a musical equal, but we’d be recording at the Loft and I’d say to her, “You need to sing this out in the staircase so we can record it with that great natural reverb.” “Are you crazy?” she’d fire back. “It’s freezing out there.” A valid point, because it was December in Chicago and the temperature outside the studio, even in the relatively protected staircase leading down to the street, was maybe twenty degrees at best, and that was only if the sun was out.
But I persisted, saying something insane like “Somebody get Mavis a coat and scarf and let’s do this.” She agreed to try it, even though a musical icon who’s been making music for longer than I’ve been alive shouldn’t have to stand in a hallway in a scarf and jacket to sing a damn song, with temperatures so cold she could see her breath, just because some jackass said he likes the stairwell reverb better than the twenty other reverb sources we have inside the warm studio. But she did it.
When we work together, I give her demos to take home so she can get a general sense of the songs before we record them. I’ll sing her vocal parts on the demos, just to give her a rough framework of what I’m thinking. But Mavis is Mavis, and I always assume she’ll make the songs her own. And the same thing happens on each record her first run-through of the first song of every session. Her voice loses its husky contralto and she sounds more like, well . . . me.
“Um, Mavis,” I’ll say, stopping her mid-song. “I appreciate what you’re doing, but it’s sounding a little, um . . . nasally.”
“Does it really?” she’ll ask.
“You know, you don’t have to do it exactly like the demo. No one wants to hear Mavis sing like Jeff Tweedy,” I say.
“Oh good, good,” she says, seeming honestly relieved. “I wasn’t sure how close you wanted it to sound to the way you sang it.”
I don’t think you could find a better example of how we all should be. Mavis sang behind Martin Luther King Jr., she was in The Last Waltz, and Bobby Dylan and she smooched (her words) back in the day. If anything, she has earned the right to walk into a studio, barking orders and telling everyone exactly how a damn record is supposed to be made. But instead, she approaches it with humility, assuming she isn’t the only talented person in the room, and maybe isn’t too old to try something new.
I want to live in a world filled with people like Mavis.
IN 2012, WILCO started putting together our own festival, Solid Sound. At first, we intended to have it every year, but after the first two years we decided every other year would give us more time to plan and save enough energy to make it truly special every time it happens. We invite our favorite bands, all of our side projects and other collaborations we’ve worked on outside of Wilco perform, and we all contribute and curate installations and activities that we’re interested in. The event takes place at MASS MoCA, a contemporary art institution in western Massachusetts, which is housed in a gigantic old textile mill. It’s an incredible space and a beautifully curated and unparalleled showcase of living artists from around the world. We feel extremely privileged to be able to use it as Solid Sound’s home.
After doing it a few times, I think Solid Sound is maybe the purest expression of what Wilco is to us. Wilco at this point in time is really an art collective, and that’s a fact much more evident in our festival than on any one record, or any one show outside of that environment. Being afforded an opportunity to present ourselves alongside the music we all make outside of Wilco, other musicians and bands we love, beers we like (well, not the beers I like, since I don’t drink, but you get the idea), comedians we love, in a brilliantly curated world-class art facility is a dream.
Sort of like a State Fair for a state of mind. It’s as close as Wilco can get to being a place, a physical space you can walk around in and explore.
The other thing on display at Solid Sound is our community of fans. It’s hard to take too much credit, but it’s also impossible to not feel some pride looking at the vibrant, multigenerational and diverse crowd that has gathered around our band. They’re generous, thoughtful, and loyal, not just to us but to one another, as well. Without their commitment to the experiment, their willingness to be exposed to new things, and their caring for one another, it would be just another rock festival.
I have had some difficulty understanding our fans over the years. Wilco has always played songs from every era. We’ve never really shunned any part of our catalog. So there have been times when you could sense different factions in our audiences. Not everyone at our show would be there to see the same band. Our records were very different from one another—drastically so, in some cases—and it used to feel as though specific records had their own fans.
Now it doesn’t feel that way. It seems these days that if you like our band, you’re ready for changes. I’m glad we went through the more difficult period without ever turning our backs on anyone, though. There’s an amazing opportunity that so few people ever have in their lives to fulfill a wish for somebody. It’s so rare that such a simple act, like playing a song someone loves, can make someone so happy. If you have that opportunity, that power, to do that for anyone, that’s an incredible gift. All songs rely on a collaboration with a listener. Someone other than you has to put the song and its meaning together in their consciousness for it to have any meaning outside of yourself. I think I should always err on the side of acknowledging that fact and honoring it. I don’t always feel like playing “Jesus, Etc.,” for example, but if doing so can complete that circuit for someone else, what good reason would I have to deny them? I play the song one more time, and I’m always glad I did.
THESE DAYS, I do most of my work at the Loft, the magical recording studio/bunkhouse I’d dreamed about while watching The Monkees. I walk there most days—it’s just a few miles from my house—and when I get there, it’s all about work. I’m not necessarily crafting a new album, but I’m always working on new songs. I have dozens of songs—too many songs, maybe. I make batches of songs and then put them away for later. Maybe I’ll release them someday; maybe they’ll just stay lost until I die.
I sit up in the Loft with my friend Tom Schick, who’s been the full-time engineer there for the last six or seven years. Most days, it’s just my buddy Mark, who manages the studio and is my most trusted friend, and Tom and me up there. Sometimes Spencer, if he’s off from college and feels like recording. I like working on too many songs at once, because you’re never focused on one thing for too long. If a song starts to lose its magic, and I start telling myself, “I don’t know what I was thinking. This sucks,” we just let it go and move on. What else is there that needs another listen? If I stay away from a song long enough, when I come back to it, it sometimes feels like I’m hearing it for the first time. That’s a beautiful place, if you can get to it, where you’re mesmerized by the potential in a song you don’t remember writing, and you finally have the energy and enthusiasm to finish it. About once a month I cut out early and go see the same doctor who took care of me when I was in the hospital. For fourteen years now, I’ve been happy to be in his care, and I feel that that consistency gives my life a lot of balance I wouldn’t have if I started pretending that I didn’t still have room to grow and things to learn about how distorted things can appear to my addict mind.
Back at the Loft, Tom and I know when we’ve been tweaking a song for too long. He says it’s when I start focusing on things that “Will not affect sales.” If I’m thinking about what the hi-hat sounds like, it’s time to stop. I’ve gone too far and I’ve lost my mind. Nobody in the world gives a fuck what a hi-hat sounds like. As long as it doesn’t break the spell, nobody cares. If somebody does care about it, then they work in a recording studio and they’re already too far up their own asses to ever truly like anyone’s record anyway.
Making these songs, arguing over the minutiae with Tom—it’s all that matters. Whether any of it comes out or doesn’t come out doesn’t ultimately concern me. I mean, I’d love to have people hear as much of what I create as possible, but I don’t worry about it too much. I think that’s the secret to this line of work—you have to be okay with music being a great thing to do, and not rely on it to be the thing that makes you rich or even the thing that pays all of your bills. As long as it’s something that makes you feel better and you wake up every morning wanting to get back in the studio to make something else, then there’s not much anyone can fucking do to ruin it. You can find an audience. You can take your time. You can find your voice. You can find new ways to express yourself. You can explore it. You can get better at it. If you keep it close, no one can take that from you. It exists. The beautiful part has existed and it will continue to exist.