“I’m open to being ridiculed…”
Jeff Tweedy bares all to John Mulvey.
In your memoir, you suggest this album has a more personal and vulnerable kind of songwriting… “Yeah, you have to make a leap of faith to write a memoir. I had to come up with strategies to convince myself there was something worth sharing, and that opened up a certain type of songwriting as well. It gave me more confidence that my experiences are more universal than I give them credit for. I think everybody should talk about things that bother them. A lot of needless suffering happens because people have a difficult time reaching out, so in that regard I have this exalted platform by being a singer people listen to. If you’ve suffered through any kind of addiction or mental health issues and you’re a public figure, I honestly feel you have some sort of responsibility to be as clear and open as you can be about those things. If you spend any time in your life being an addict, you’re a sociopath. You lie and you’re deceitful, because that type of illness requires it, it demands to be prioritised. The good news is that if you can get some kind of help, that type of sociopathy tends to evaporate.”
On Having Been Is No Way To Be, you claim that some of your fans wish you still used drugs. “That’s fixating on their own selfish desire to have things not change, even at my expense. They’d rather have a record that they like than have someone be healthy. That’s fucked up, man.”
Do some of those fans fetishise an idea of realness and authenticity to such a degree that a catalogue of details about addiction is a big turn-on for them? “I don’t have to try to be authentic. I am fucking real. I don’t fucking try to do anything, I’ve given myself license to sing about whatever the fuck I want to sing about for a long time. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Not live my life, make up a different life?”
Do you think in the past few years you’ve tried to show vulnerability in the way your records sound, too? “There’s a style of recording that’s very appealing to me at this point. It boils down to hearing people’s fingers and hands on instruments, as if they were being played in front of me. I’m always intrigued by the idea of giving that to the listener. It’s very powerful to try and capture. I like a lot of records like John Cale’s Fear, records that let a lot of things hang that aren’t refined. And at the same time there’s a very specific artistic vision being executed. I want to underline things and frame them in ways that make it easier for people to hear what I want them to hear. But I don’t want to sand away the things that excite me, and the things that excite me are when I do something I didn’t expect myself to do.”
So the lyrical content is matched by the sound? “I hope so. I’m open to being ridiculed. I’m sincerely out there to do whatever I feel is right. That’s what I feel this record is; it’s the same as the book. My only obligation is to be as honest as I can be, in spite of the fact that our memories are flawed. Our abilities to tell stories are hemmed in by the vastness of truth. There are facts, and they’re very specific. But there is a truth that is vast and somewhat subjective. I’m trying to get as close to that as possible.”