Thankfully, at some point I stopped giving a shit. In a good way. I don’t mean I stopped caring about music. I stopped caring about things that don’t matter. Or at least things I can’t control. For instance, I don’t have control over how someone judges a song I write. If I can entertain myself putting a song together, and several months later still care for it enough to share it with the world, and then it turns out someone takes a strong dislike to it, those are pretty low stakes. No one gets hurt. I didn’t leave a surgical sponge in someone’s abdomen. It’s okay.

I just like writing songs. It’s a natural state to me. I like to believe that most people’s natural state is to be creative. It definitely was when we were kids, when being spontaneously and joyfully creative was just our default setting. As we grow, we learn to evaluate and judge, to navigate the world with some discretion, and then we turn on ourselves. Creating can’t just be for the sake of creating anymore. It has to be good, or it has to mean something. We get scared out of our wits by the possibility of someone rejecting our creation.

It bugs me that we get this way. It bugs me a lot. I think just making stuff is important. It doesn’t have to be art. Making something out of your imagination that wasn’t there before you thought it up and plopped it down in your notebook or your tape recorder puts you squarely on the side of creation. You are closer to “god,” or at the very least the concept of a creator. I understand destruction can be creative, too, but I think it becomes a lot more thoughtful and intentional when you’ve allowed yourself to be a creator. I’m pretty naive, I admit, but I’ll always believe that destruction would be an impulse a lot more difficult to indulge if more people were encouraged to participate in their own tiny acts of creation.

I also kind of believe that even the greatest works of art created mean almost nothing individually. If a work of art inspires another work of art, I think it has fulfilled its highest duty. People look for inspiration and hope, and if you have it, you share it. Not for your own glory, but because it’s the best thing you can do. It doesn’t belong to just you.

— From Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), by Jeff Tweedy (Dutton, 2018)

Jeff Tweedy writes the way a good song feels—simple, true, and quietly profound. Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) isn’t just a memoir; it’s a meditation on making things, breaking things, and finding your way back to both. I also recommend the audiobooks—he reads them himself, and hearing his rhythm and pauses makes it feel like he’s talking straight to you. The same goes for How to Write One Song and World Within a Song—each one full of humor, heart, and the kind of wisdom you don’t have to be a Wilco fan to appreciate… but seriously, if you don’t like Wilco, we probably can’t be friends. I promise I’m not an asshole… it’s just basic quality control.

And for the love of whichever gods still care about songwriting, listen to Tweedy’s new triple album Twilight Override. Start with Feel Free and Lou Reed Was My Babysitter—or just start at the beginning and settle in. You can thank me later.

— Nick Allison

Twilight Override: https://jefftweedy.bandcamp.com/album/twilight-override