About Jeff Tweedy: Jeffrey Scot is an American songwriter, musician, and record producer best known as the leader of the band Wilco.
I think art is a consolation regardless of its content. It has the power to move and make you feel like you're not.
I was never at my best when I was at my worst. When I did do good stuff in the past, it was because I was able to transcend the parts of my being that weren't healthy.
I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.
Even the most dismal and hopeless-sounding Wilco music, to my ears, has always maintained a level of hope and consolation.
I like making songs up. Whether or not they're great songs or good songs, whatever. It's something I've always done, and I definitely feel like I've gotten better at it.
I don't think you can be good in life without acknowledging the part of you that isn't good.
The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, ...
I guess I don't think there's any reason to feel guilty about having joy in your life, regardless of how bad things are in the world.
I've been obsessed with seeing life through music. My records, my relationship with records, my relationship with rock stars, everything that surrounds it, has been really one of the only ways that I ever started to understand the world.
We'd been noticing how much more important the internet had become - once information is out there in the world now, anyone can get it. Since that was beginning to happen with the record anyway, we figured, OK, let's just stream it for free ourselves...
I don't believe every download is a lost sale.
I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.
Sometimes it's liberating to confront horrible things in lyrics as a way to master the shadow-self that exists in everyone.
Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.
I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful.
I didn't want to admit that I was falling into a cliche.
You have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive.
I've been buying instruments and musical gear for a long time.
You obviously don't really forget how to play the old songs; you just don't have to spend so much time convincing yourself that you remember them. Way less mental energy is spent swimming around in lyrics you've already written and chords you've alre...
Stop trying to treat music like it's a tennis shoe, something to be branded. If the music industry wants to save money, they should take a look at some of their six-figure executive expense accounts. All those lawsuits can't be cheap, either.
