World Within a Song
Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
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- €13.99
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- €13.99
Publisher Description
What makes us fall in love with a song? What makes us want to write our own songs? Do songs help? Do songs help us live better lives? And do the lives we live help us write better songs?
Following publication of Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) and How To Write One Song, both New York Times bestsellers that cemented and expanded his legacy as one of America's best-loved performers and songwriters, Jeff Tweedy is back with another disarming, beautiful, and inspiring book about why we listen to music, why we love songs, and how music can connect us to each other and to ourselves.
Featuring over fifty songs that have both changed Jeff's life and influenced his music-including songs by The Replacements, Mavis Staples, the Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton, and Billie Eilish-as well as thoughts on Jeff's own songs, this book is a mix of the musical, the emotional, and the inspirational in the best possible way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tweedy (Let's Go (So We Can Get Back)), cofounder of the rock band Wilco and alt-country group Uncle Tupelo, delivers a spirited memoir centered on his relationships to such songs as "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," and Judy Collins's cover of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." In short sections organized by song, Tweedy holds forth on the ways these tunes—which he often loves, sometimes hates, and occasionally feels indifference toward—have shaped his life and relationships, delving into his own creative process along the way ("When you hear the occasional whistled refrain in my own songs," he writes, "it's only there because Otis let me sit down on the dock beside him" in "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay"). "Shotgun" by Junior Walker and the All-Stars stirs up memories of marrying his wife, Susie (a tongue-in-cheek selection, as she was pregnant at the time); "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five convinced him, at 15, that hip-hop was "a vitally important new form of musical expression" rather than "some pop music anomaly." Tweedy's snappy prose ("I reflexively reject everything Bon Jovi does") and dry wit elevate the proceedings. This entertaining and enlightening survey hits the right note.
