Sodomsky: Another theme throughout your book is nostalgia. You write about the basic truth of how the music that hits us at a formative age is important to us throughout our lives but also a battle against any impulse towards sentimentality. Do you consider yourself a nostalgic person?
Tweedy: I really don't consider myself a nostalgic person. There's a level of comfort for me that comes with listening to, say, The Replacements, because it hit me at that moment, the most open window we all have in our lives—I think it's scientifically proven that you're more receptive to those genres of surfaces for the world at that moment. But I'm not the kind of person who feels like I have to fight to keep it.
I feel like there's a regressive urge that many people have to reimagine the past as something more glorious than it was and to act out of fear of the future or change in a way that makes them want to wrap their arms tighter. their past. In music, it just makes people close their ranks and close their minds, and I'd argue that it's worth digging out of that mess if you can, because there's so much great stuff to find your way through.
And it's okay if it's not for you. But when you can find your way into something like that and appreciate something about it, get excited about it, or subvert your expectations of it, it creates a new expectation of what you can ask from a song. This is simply a wonderful thing.
Sodomsky: Especially with regards to nostalgia and Wilco, in 2022 you did a handful of anniversary shows where you played Yankee Hotel Foxtrotthat seemed an uncharacteristic move for you.
Tweedy: When we did those shows, I was glad we didn't do more of them, because it's not something we've done a lot. As a band that's been around for almost 30 years, people really want you to accept a role as a legacy. And understandably, there's probably a large part of the audience that would be just as happy if we just played songs from those records that came out in the late 90s and early 2000s when they fell in love with the band. But I also don't think that's the whole audience, partly because we're not committed to doing that. I see younger people in the audience and people who accept the band as seeing themselves as an ongoing creative entity. We see ourselves that way and we try to honor that by leaning into our new material when we go out to play.
