Jeff Tweedy Famous Quotes
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I think that there's a lot of good will that exists between musicians and the people that support them and listen to them.
It seems to me that the only wrong thing I could do with whatever gifts I've been given as a musician or an artist would be to let curiosity die.
I think I always thought of the guitar as the vehicle to be able to make some musical idea up. The only appeal to learning more chords was having more chords to put into songs. I never got too wrapped up in becoming technically good. So writing songs happened pretty simultaneously with learning how to play the guitar.
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.
Once you're an addict, you're always an addict, so just because I found something good to do doesn't mean I'm not going to hurt myself doing it.
Sometimes it's liberating to confront horrible things in lyrics as a way to master the shadow-self that exists in everyone.
I've never been healthier. I haven't had a cigarette in two years. I run four or five miles, four or five times a week. I've been healthy and having a really good time.
What you once were isn't what you want to be anymore.
I still love poetic imagery. I love the idea of using surrealist speak to generate lyrical content and I love the way English can be exciting in and of itself.
Anybody who'd expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It's so antithetical to being a musician.
When you listen to most of the records that really had an impact on you, they always seem to be from a different era.
Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.
It's rooted in things that maybe older people or people my age remember as being rock music. But at the same time, I don't think we're stuck in the past or retro. I think we've tried to push ourselves and experiment with what we can call Wilco music.
To be honest, I'm more concerned with living my life than writing about my life. I feel like that's really the main thing I know now that I didn't know when I was younger - and that is that you have to have a life to write about one. If you're more worried about having experiences so you can write about them, I think you're kinda being ridiculous, and I think a lot of young people look at it like that.
I think the songs are more about relationships that are endless.
If you were me, which I am,
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, to be able to make something without being good or bad.
You have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive.
I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself.
I still have a lot of faith that there's very few people who are savvy enough to actually produce a good sounding copy of the record.
I don't think there is anything hard at all about having a lot of songs. It makes it easier to be less precious about them, and know that everybody's going to want to work on some of them.
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 don't think you can be good in life without acknowledging the part of you that isn't good.
Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything.
That's something that I think as a songwriter you have to ask yourself - why you're doing it. The world certainly doesn't need more songs. Are you doing it just for your ego?
I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful.
For the most part I stand by all of records. I just always like the one I've done most recently the best and I think that's the whole point.
I like to believe 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.
We live in a connected world now. Some find that frightening. If people are downloading our music, they're listening to it. The internet is like radio for us.
I spent a fair amount of time editing the lyrics and allowing the song to kind of evolve ... anytime there's anything worthwhile, it certainly 'feels' like it happened on the spur of the moment, but it's a composite of lots of spurs of the moment, hopefully. And over time, you catch up with those, and then you have a full set of lyrics you've thought of and you feel comfortable singing.
I don't like being in public with headphones on. I don't know how people can do it. It seems like you're so cut off from your environment. I feel like I'd get hit by a car.
I don't know where people get the idea that every Wilco record is supposed to have drama. OK, I guess historically speaking we've had our fair share of ups and downs.
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 think art is a consolation regardless of its content. It has the power to move and make you feel like you're not.
I didn't want to admit that I was falling into a cliche.
Music isn't a loaf of bread.
There's an amazing opportunity that so few people ever have in their lives to fulfill a wish for somebody. It's so rare that such a simple act, like playing a song someone loves, can make someone so happy. If you have that opportunity - the power to do that for anyone - that's an incredible gift.
I always think its easier for me to write without thinking about the strict meter that's required for songs and song structures and things like that. It's much easier to just write on the page.
I don't really feel like you're making a record unless you pay attention to it.
I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.
Melody is king. Songs are ruled by melody. I believe that melody, more than lyrics, is what does all the heavy lifting emotionally. When I write lyrics, or when I adapt a poem to a song, my goal is to interfere as little as possible with whatever spell is being cast by the melody. At the same time, I hope, at best, that the words enhance the song somehow, add meaning or clarify and underline what the melody is making me feel.
Even the most dismal and hopeless-sounding Wilco music, to my ears, has always maintained a level of hope and consolation.
I always listen to records that I've been a part of with a grain of salt.
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 am an American aquarium drinker
I have always thought it was important to maintain some connection for myself to what it takes to make a song work by myself, to put a song across to an audience by myself.