Email interviews with famous musicians usually suck, as they’re more like corporate correspondence than human conversation. But the email interview you’re about to read with Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco doesn’t suck.
Tweedy’s known for his vivid songwriting, fearless creativity and his raw instincts and believability as a singer. See Wilco classics like “Casino Queen,” “Forget The Flowers,” “Impossible Germany,” “Heavy Metal Drummer,” “Handshake Drugs” and so on.
Wilco’s a band of artistes. But they have a sense of humor, per albums titles like “Wilco (The Album)” and “Schmilco.” In addition to Tweedy on vocals and guitar, the band features original bassist John Stirratt, longtime drummer Glenn Kotche, keyboardists Pat Sansone and Mikael Jorgensen and guitar-mad-scientist Nels Cline. Wilco aren’t pop stars but they’re beloved enough the name of their rehearsal space, The Loft, is common knowledge among their devoted fanbase.
Based in Chicago and formed in 1994, Wilco began as rootsy upstarts, as heard on their Gram-Parsons-backed-by-Big-Star-style early albums “A.M.” and “Being There.” On fourth LP “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” they molted into avant-garde auteurs. That 2001 release, and the record label drama surrounding it, led the federation of goateed rock-critics to anoint Wilco with the lazy tagline “America’s Radiohead.”
Over the years, Tweedy and co. have turned to unlikely sources of inspiration ranging from Krautrock to jam-bands. In 2022, they returned to twang with the well-received double-album “Cruel Country.”
The thing is Tweedy might be an even better author than songwriter. You don’t need to be a Wilco fan to enjoy Jeff’s books, which are written in his smart yet unpretentious voice. His 2019 memoir “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)” winds through his Belleville, Illinois youth, his time with alt-country forging group Uncle Tupelo, Wilco’s ups, downs and sideways and Tweedy’s relatable personal challenges.
He followed that up with 2020 tome “How to Write One Song,” an insightful glimpse into his creative process and an onramp for readers to pen their own tunes. This November, Tweedy’s third book will publish. For, “World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music,” he’ll riff on music that shaped his own, including songs by obvious influences, like ‘80s punk & rollers The Replacements, to surprising touchstones, including dark-pop princess Billie Eilish.
Wilco’s engines are revving up again. The band’s 2023 tour includes a hometown run at Chi-town’s Riviera Theatre, as well as shows from Iceland to Florida to Mexico. Full list of tour dates at wilcoworld.net/shows.
Two Alabama dates are in the mix: 6:30 p.m. April 22 at Birmingham’s Avondale Brewing (tickets $47 and up, plus fees, via ticketmaster.com); and 7:30 p.m. April 24 at Huntsville’s Von Braun Center Concert Hall (tickets $26 and up, plus fees, via ticketmaster.com). Art-folk duo The A’s is the opening act.
“We’re working on a new record and will let people know when it’s finished, too,” Tweedy wrote in a recent email interview with AL.com. “Generally, Wilco keeps moving forward.”
In an email, I ask Tweedy what he remembers about Wilco’s early shows in Alabama, on the “Being There” touring cycle, writing that I recall he wore a toboggan onstage at Huntsville’s Big Spring Jam and a cowboy hat at Birmingham’s Five Points Music Hall. Tweedy replied, “Thank you for paying attention to my headwear. To be honest, anything from the ’90s—I have a very fallible memory from that time period. But thanks for coming!”
Below are more edited excerpts from our email interview with Jeff Tweedy.
Hi Jeff, thanks for doing this and hope you’re well. To start: What do you love about singing and writing country and country-tinged music? To my ears, the latest Wilco album “Cruel Country” is one of the rootsiest sounding albums the band’s done. And you have such a great feel for singing country with some edge yet playful, like on the new song “Falling Apart (Right Now)” and going back to early songs like “Forget the Flowers.”
Jeff Tweedy: I love country music. I think my songwriting probably developed from listening to so much country music and realizing that writing in that form came naturally to me. I think country is my default form—those are songs that come to me most frequently when I pick up an acoustic guitar. And I don’t fight it.
What do you think’s the single most underrated thing about country music? From the start of Wilco and even going back to Uncle Tupelo, you embraced country music and wove it into your music. I always thought that was cool because back then, outside of dedicated country music fans, country was often seen as cornpone, particularly by the rock community, and not as “cool” as other roots forms, like blues, folk and jazz. I feel like country gets a little more outside respect now partially due to artists like Wilco.
Everybody has a different definition of country music. I think there are some deserved criticisms of a lot of it, both now and then. There’s always been a pop element to country music that isn’t as interesting to me as its ability to tell stories, as well as its relationship to folk music, and to an older, weirder version of America. Back then, country music was an activity, when the community wrote songs and sang them to each other.
I love country’s ability to subvert. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. For a lot of people, country music reads as very conservative because it’s been associated with conservative viewpoints. And when you’re doing something that’s an old form, a lot of people assume that you want to be regressive and embrace an imagined past that was perfect. But when you add your own voice to the genre and incorporate challenging thoughts to that form—that’s extremely effective. You’re generating positive change in the world. You’re looking at country music, and the world, and saying it doesn’t have to be like this.
Since your voice has this appealing raspy character around the edges a lot of times, has losing that rasp ever been a concern of yours? Like if your vocals got too good or clean sounding, that you’d lose the character that made you an interesting singer?
As I get older, that’s not one of my concerns.
Song titles are like clothes, I think. They’re only cool if it doesn’t seem like you tried too hard. Are there any of those evocatively titled Wilco songs that almost had more humdrum or different titles? When do you know when to quit tinkering with a song title? When to use the obvious title and when to avoid the obvious?
Most frequently, a song’s title is obvious. The song usually has a chorus that makes it clear, or you know what you want people to go into a song thinking about. Almost always, the title is in the song. And sometimes, you have to honor what people are probably going to call the song if they hear it and go looking for it somewhere. It’s nice to have a name that fits.
Other times I can’t bring myself to call it something different than the name that’s already attached to it from early demos, before it’s finished. It’s like naming a dog.
For example, “Jesus, Etc.”—I thought it was a funny way to say that it’s a song about Jesus, but not about Jesus the historical figure or the biblical figure. More about “Jesus” the interjection. “Jesus, that’s a good song.” But it’s also provocative. You use everything you have access to, to get people to listen to you. And that’s important to me—I want to give every song a chance to be heard, and sometimes an interesting title does it.
What’s your general philosophy on how many new songs to include in a Wilco setlist, where it’s satisfying for both the band and the fans? I’ve seen some artists where just one more or one less new song really swings the balance of what works in the set.
We’ve been playing at least six to eight songs from “Cruel Country” a night. Wilco always tries to believe in itself, and in doing so feel confident that the Wilco onstage that’s confident in itself is the best show that we can do at that time. Sometimes you can feel the audience drift away, and then maybe it’s a little harder to play that song the next night. But for the most part, we gauge our performances on what it feels like to play the songs onstage. In general, we play the songs that we know really well and are excited to play. Wilco’s audience, especially in the last ten years or so, has been really primed to accept new music from us. There was a time when the band would change so much from record to record, and you could feel the audience pull away from a new record, like “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” But at this point, Wilco has fans that have come to us from a lot of different records, and the overall feeling is that people have come to hear us do what we want to play.
If you were going to hear a well-known hard-rock/heavy-metal band cover the Wilco song “Heavy Metal Drummer” off “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” who’d be at the top of your list? Part of what makes the original great is it’s not rock or metal at all. But I’ve always thought a good, rocked-out cover could be awesome too.
I can’t quite see it fitting any of the bands I like … I want to say Mastodon, but the subject matter is just too light to make a good Mastodon song. The band Darkness isn’t exactly a metal band, but they lean metal, and they have a good sense of humor. So maybe they could make something better out of it.
The song “Handshake Drugs” off the 2004 album “A Ghost Is Born” is a sort of coming-of-age song a lot of people relate to. It’s easy for many listeners to put themselves inside that song, like it’s about them. Where exactly where you when you wrote that song, like your kitchen in Chicago or the band’s rehearsal space or whatnot?
I have no recollection of where I’ve written most of my songs. If you’re aware of your surroundings, I don’t think you’re really writing a song. The process requires you to not be so beholden to your atmosphere. You’re supposed to be in your imagination, apart from where you’re physically present. Which is a long way of saying that I have no idea where I was.
What’s something you haven’t done related to music you’d really like to get to at some point? Maybe something that’s already in the works?
Look out, Broadway!
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