Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy on why writing scares him, what we lose from streaming

Описание: (3 Nov 2023)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Los Angeles - 6 October 2023
1. Broll of Jeff Tweedy posing for portraits
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Jeff Tweedy, Wilco:
"I've always been really afraid of prose because I wasn't, I wasn't good in school. I was always underachieving in school. And part of it was I always felt overwhelmed by how much there is to say. And songwriting is condensing things and giving yourself the freedom to omit lots of things, just to try and get the essence of an emotion or the essence of a story to come through. And writing prose always felt to me like, ‘Oh my god, do I have to describe the walls?’ And like to me, all of the great writing that I was reading and being inspired by, I’ve always been a really big reader, felt so majestic and so, so detailed and perfect that it overwhelmed me when I would –so I couldn't even finish writing an essay for a class, you know."
3. Broll of Jeff Tweedy posing for portraits
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Jeff Tweedy, Wilco:
"Not living up to what people told me my potential was in school I think filled me with some—I am trying to find the right word. It's not like shame—a little bit of an insecurity about not knowing stuff that people were good in school knew. So I put, I don't know, I kind of assigned myself a curriculum of everything when I finally dropped out of college and the early years of touring, I read all the things I felt like you're supposed to read and enjoyed it, you know, and like, felt like— they tried to get me to read these books at a time when I wasn't ready for a lot of that. And I feel like that happens to a lot of people. And then over time, you get, you have more experience and you can read a book, you know, like a Jane Austen book and have some better understanding of what the world is."
5. Broll of Jeff Tweedy posing for portraits
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Jeff Tweedy, Wilco:
"I'm always hesitant to be a doomsayer about technological changes because I know enough about the history of just the music industry to know that’s a perennial thing. Taping is killing music, I mean, if you're talking about just the industry side of it, money-making, sure –there's lots of things that have had to be adapted to and have affected the bottom line for people. But where music rests and people's lives and importance, I don't think can be changed very much. That being said, I think that there was something really important about the way my generation and previous generations invested themselves in music. The only way to get it was to pay for it. And once you had made just even that outlay of cash a part of your investment, you made time to find a way into it. You know, you would listen to it a lot. I mean, now, I think it's – if you don't like something immediately, there's 10,000 other songs that you want to go to and find something that's going to hit you right away. And I think that you do miss something when that's –I don't know, when you don't have to work for it."
7. Broll of Jeff Tweedy posing
STORYLINE:
Jeff Tweedy is known to fans as a prolific songwriter and poignant lyricist. So it may come as a surprise that the frontman of the Grammy-winning band, Wilco, has long found the act of writing intimidating.

But as he gears up to release his third book on Tuesday, Tweedy admits the task of writing no longer daunts him the way it once did. Having already tackled a memoir and a how-to book on songwriting, Tweedy now shifts his attention to other musicians and the ways their art has influenced him in “World Within a Song.”


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