Like I said the other day, I've got a small pileup of books—mostly music books, but with a few oddball topics on there as well—that general lack of time and patience has kept me from digging into. Cold anything is a hard proposition, but especially cold reading. Just picking up a book and starting, I dunno, it's not something I normally find myself in the habit of. Desertbound on Kindle did get me going though, and I'm eager to keep it going.

I must've been in a Barnes and Noble last year with my mom around my birthday. Maybe I'm just deprived, but ending up in Wind Gap and going to check out even big box retailers up there is pretty fun. Books! Books I just said in the last paragraph I have trouble reading, but books! She'd plucked a Mudhoney biography from the shelves to get for me (can you believe I've still never owned anything Mudhoney, despite all the time I spent with Superfuzz Bigmuff in high school?), but this one caught my eye a little more, even: World Within a Song by Jeff Tweedy.

I've been slowly getting into Wilco courtesy of dcb, and Jeff is one of those kinds of legacy artists who's just as noteworthy for himself as he is for his music. Something about his hesitant, wary outlook and dry commentary, you really do get the sense he's kinda amazed anyone would want to listen to him, but we do! I wound up getting both books.

World Within a Song is an examination of the cross-section of life and music, the way that music colors the scenes of your life and the way that life colors the way you feel about songs, bands, and albums. That makes it sound really heady, but it's honestly pretty light reading. A lot of it is Jeff's storytelling and memorializing, and the rest of it is a peppering of outlook on the music business, some anecdotes about paying your dues at the crossroads of punk and country, and what music encourages us to do and feel and how it grows with us as much as it stands still, acting as a vantage point as we move through life.

Jeff picks out fifty songs (well, including every song by the Beatles, so slightly more than fifty) that take him through early childhood into his adult life touring with Uncle Tupelo and Wilco. That's the meat of the book, and thankfully, it's his strength. Lightly dissecting music, he's interesting. Telling these stories of his family terrorizing the neighbor's kid with ham radio gear, or the poor orderly at the rehab facility who, with pinpoint comedic timing, in the midst of Jeff's most horrific withdrawal symptoms, wanted to know if Wilco were still playing Coachella, or the Traumatic Toilet at CBGB's, he's quite funny. Not as funny when I retell them, but that's how it goes with these things.

Now for the less-than-positives. Jeff has a kinda bizarre writing style that I'm genuinely amazed his editors didn't clean up first. It becomes transparent fairly quickly, thankfully, but he has this wonderful habit starting sentences off with "and", "but", and "because", leading to what feel like fragments across the book. Apparently this isn't incorrect, as the AI slop articles and gleeful contrarian contrarians like to tell you, but my God, is it choppy. Perfect example, open the book, random page, page 64:

Is this song for everybody? No. It's not a song I would throw on at a BBQ. But it is special to me. Which is the point of this book.

Okay, it's not incorrect, sure, but is that elegant?

Truth be told, though, it's not like he can't write. In fact, I feel the urge to balance the previous example with another snippet I found interesting, about Carole King's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", just so you guys don't think Jeff Tweedy is actually a caveman:

There was a period in my life, back in the early Wilco days, when singing this song as an encore—a ballad that I would often deliver lying on my back while being held aloft and passed by the outstretched arms of fans, crowd surfing in slow motion—felt like I was being as honest as I could ever be with an audience. Will you still love me tomorrow? All of you. Will you? Because this night is forever to me. I can feel you... I sense you mean it right now in this moment... I can allow myself to trust you. But you're going to move on, aren't you?

My only other complaint is that, by the time you get into the final ten songs, it does seem like he stops finding personal anecdotes and experiences to regale you with in the songs, and even he's a little lost as to how exactly to get them to fit in the lattice he's set up for himself. As he says exploring "I Love You" by Billie Eilish:

As the songs I'm excited to write about get closer and closer to the present moment, I'm finding them more difficult to write about.

Is that a bad thing? No, but given that the anecdotes and the way these songs personally shaped Jeff's life were such a driving force at the start, it does make things more diffuse as the book comes to a close. He still finds something interesting in them, though, so I suppose that justifies it. That said, that brings me to another holdup you might have: how much is someone not up on their Jeff Tweedy lore gonna get out of this? Plenty of it is universal enough, catching shows with your mom as a kid or finding shelter from the displeasure of the world in music that seems common only to you, but I dunno—did you know Jeff Tweedy collaborated with Mavis Staples (do you even know who Mavis Staples is?), and is that going to impact how you read her chapter?

Really, that's really the valley where World Within a Song dwells, a book that's deeply personal, and a book where the depth comes from examining what these little things mean to Jeff personally. He'll spend two pages telling you that it's okay if you just never get a song, that it's okay to dislike things as much as it is to like things, only to say "actually wait no, fuck Bon Jovi, you should not like Bon Jovi". He's human! Jeff's book, like his music, is interesting precisely because of how much light he finds in the shards of broken glass. It's imperfect and maybe a little wispy, but that suits it, I think. It's a good book to mail to dcb.