Q&A

Jeff Tweedy on ageing, enduring and feeling liberated by the loss of meaning as time flies by…

were the songs influenced by writing your book?

The lyric writing for the album occupies some similar headspace, you know? I haven’t written a lot of prose, so I’ve been somewhat fearful of attempting to write longer-form stories, and things where I have to figure out where to draw the line and how much I want to colour it in.

was your lyrical viewpoint on this record more introspective than usual?

Um… I don’t know if I could be more introspective. If I was any more introspective I’d have eyes in the back of my head. In our family there’s been a fair amount of mortality being pushed straight up into our faces in the past five or six years. My wife has gone through cancer treatment, my father died of cancer. There’s been a pretty constant reminder that things are fleeting. If there’s any silver lining at all in being confronted with that, it has been the sense that a lot of things mean a lot less, and that is kind of liberating.

what were you trying to say about yourself?

I don’t know – that I’ve endured. As you get older you collect all the evidence available to you that you have that ability. When you’re younger you’re a lot more convinced that you’re never going to make it, that you’re not strong enough to survive.