Photo by Chris Sikich – CC BY 2.0
A review of Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. by Jeff Tweedy
I’m partial to the occasional rock star biography, so when I saw Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), by Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer and songwriter of Wilco, one of my all-time favourite bands, amongst the pile of books for sale at the 2019 Auckland Writers Festival, I snapped it up.
There’s no guarantee that just because you can write great songs, you can write great books, but on this occasion, Tweedy manages it. As is usual with rock star biographies, some space is devoted to exploring the personality conflicts between bandmates, but there’s a warmth and humility to the writing that is atypical for the genre. There’s no braggadocio to these anecdotes, nor does Tweedy have any axes to grind. He’s happy to admit that he only got to where he is today with the assistance of others, most notably his family. The book includes a couple of transcribed conversations with his wife and children which provide an authentic insight into their family dynamic. It’s a little gimmicky, perhaps, but it works. It also delves into Tweedy’s struggles with mental health, drugs, and addiction in a way that is refreshingly honest.
What I most enjoyed about the book was the personal exploration of both Tweedy’s dedication to songwriting (he tries to write a song every day), and his songwriting process. Tweedy’s lyrics are often open to interpretation, and it’s no wonder when one of the lyric writing exercises he uses is to take a list of random verbs and another list of random nouns and then pair them up. “It might start as gibberish,” he says, “but it’s amazing how hard it is to put words next to each other without some meaning being generated.” Inclined to agree, I thought I’d try it out. Here’s the list I came up with (I swear these were the first words that popped into my head):
Nouns
Chicken
Refrigerator
Tractor
Laptop
Children
Verbs
Run
Fry
Smoke
Swim
Love
And here’s the resulting ‘lyric’. Appropriately, for a verse inspired by Jeff Tweedy, I can hear it as an Alt-Country song called something along the lines of The Modern Farmer.
Hangry
Laptop fried and tractor smoking,
I run inside and scan the refrigerator.
It’s empty.
Aside from a lone chicken wing,
Swimming in brown sauce.
I love my children
But man, can they eat.
Anyway, back to the book. If you’re a Wilco fan, then I highly recommend it. If you’ve never heard of Wilco but like rock star biographies, you might enjoy it too. Then go listen to some Wilco. They’re awesome.
Are you a Wilco fan? Do you like rock-star biographies? Read any good ones lately? Let me know in the comments.
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A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
