Jeff Tweedy Quotations

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 didn't want to admit that I was falling into a cliche.

I don't think you can be good in life without acknowledging the part of you that isn't good.

Glenn will probably come out and do a few songs with me, but I kind of like to keep it a surprise if it is going to happen.

I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful.

We try to honestly reflect what we're like, ... You evolve and change over 10 years, and you try and make the music reflect that.

I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.

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.

We never could understand what the problem was with people listening to your music. I thought that was the whole point.

The only way you can sell 10 million Britney Spears records is to convince kids that it's something they need to have as part of their identity. It's not about the music at that point.

We're finishing it this week, ... It's all recorded and is basically down to doing the vocal overdubs and mixing.

Even the most dismal and hopeless-sounding Wilco music, to my ears, has always maintained a level of hope and consolation.

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.

I've been buying instruments and musical gear for a long time.

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've never considered us a country band, ... Even after this record, people still call us a country band. Have they listened to this record?

Sometimes it's liberating to confront horrible things in lyrics as a way to master the shadow-self that exists in everyone.

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 already played.

I know you've been out in the sun all day, but you could help out more.

I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

By the nature of playing by yourself, my repertoire gets a lot bigger than what it is with the band, that's for sure,

A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

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.

It doesn't necessarily matter if I'm onstage or not. I just find the communal experience of a rock concert, or any type of music performance, achieves a kind of transcendence that I associate with spirituality. It's the closest thing to what I think people expect church to be like. Or maybe just what I've always thought church should be. You lose yourself, and at the same time come to the realization or understanding that you're part of something bigger than yourself.

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.

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.

The main thing I learned is that the more I can forget about being embarrassed when I make something, the more it is going to mean something to somebody else. I can't anticipate what it's going to be or how it's going to be perceived, so the quicker I let go of something I make, the better.

You have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive.

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.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

I am an American aquarium drinker

Everything alive must die. Every building built to the sky will fall. Don't try to tell me my everlasting love is a lie.

My highest aspirations as a songwriter are that people would sing my songs or know songs I've written sometime in as far into the future as I feel comfortable seeing.

I know my lies are always wishes.

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.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

I always think I don't have any songs, I don't have anything I'm working on, and I get in the studio and realize there are 20 things I'm thinking about. It's just kind of second nature.

All my lies are only wishes / I know I would die if I could come back new.

I don't believe every download is a lost sale.

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 think there's a curiosity that can make you feel anxious as to what the world's going to make of what you're doing. It's not necessarily what you're going to get back in terms of record reviews or how people talk about your record, it's getting on the road and playing the new songs live.

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.

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 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 think that there's a lot of good will that exists between musicians and the people that support them and listen to them.

I think the songs are more about relationships that are endless.

I'm very, very suspicious of anybody that finds a belief system that they feel can explain it all, for themselves or for anybody else.

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 honestly don't remember the book well enough to register any surprise about anything. I don't remember anything being shocking to me.

I don't know if experimental is a word I would ever use comfortably.

Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything.

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 always listen to records that I've been a part of with a grain of salt.

I'm usually pretty happy. I don't ever really get disturbed in any way, or feel like I need to go back and change something.

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.

When you listen to most of the records that really had an impact on you, they always seem to be from a different era.

If someone uses the amount of time I spend in the public eye as criteria for what my music could possibly mean to them, they probably should take a long, hard look in the mirror and figure out why they need to think they're so special. Because I don't think anybody is that special.

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.

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.

Internet is radio for a lot of people. It's a place to get music and hear music, and no amount of clamping down will change that.

I don't really feel like you're making a record unless you pay attention to it.