Jeff Tweedy on Rock Criticism, the Pitfalls of Music Snobbery, and His New Book – Warungku Terkini

Sodomsky: Another theme throughout your book is nostalgia. You write about the basic truth of how the music that hits us at a formative age is important to us throughout our lives but also battle against any impulse towards sentimentality. Do you consider yourself a nostalgic person?

Tweedy: I really don’t think of myself as a nostalgic person. There’s a comfort level for me that comes with listening to, say, the Replacements, because it hit me at that formative time, the most open window that we all have in our lives—I think it’s scientifically proven that you’re more receptive to those types of epiphanies about the world at that moment. But I’m not the kind of person that feels like I need to fight to hang on to it.

I feel like there’s a regressive impulse a lot of people have to reimagine the past as something more glorious than it was, and to act out of fear of the future or change, in a way that makes them want to wrap their arms more tightly around their past. In music, it just makes people close ranks and shut off their mind, and I would argue that it’s worth it to dig yourself out of that rut if you can, because there’s so much great stuff to find your way into.

And it’s OK for it not to be for you. But when you can find your way into something like that and appreciate something about it, be excited about it, or have your expectations subverted by it, it creates a new expectation of what you can ask for from a song. That’s just a great thing.

Sodomsky: Specifically regarding nostalgia and Wilco, in 2022 you did a handful of anniversary shows where you played Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which seemed like an uncharacteristic move for you guys.

Tweedy: When we did those shows, I was happy that we weren’t doing more of them, because it isn’t something that we’ve done a lot of. As a band that’s been around for almost 30 years, the world really wants you to accept a role as a legacy act. And understandably, there probably is a sizable portion of the audience that would be just as happy if we were out just playing songs from those records that came out in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when they fell in love with the band. But I also don’t think that that’s all of the audience, partially because we haven’t surrendered to doing that. I see younger people in the audience and people that are accepting of the band thinking of itself as an ongoing creative entity. We see ourselves as that, and we try to honor that by leaning into our new material when we go play.