Jeff Tweedy
Let's Go (So We Can Get Back)

Honestly, I still haven't figured out whether I like reading (auto)biographies or not. In the end, it's a bit like peeking into someone else's life, and there's a risk that the impression of this artist or that singer will be completely overturned (do not read Elliott Smith’s biography), or it could deliver exactly the image we had (see Nick Drake).

On the other hand, it is also true that whoever writes an autobiography wants to share something, look in the mirror, drop a mask, or maybe put it on, deliver a distorted image: but perhaps we'll never know this.

Jeff Tweedy's Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) perhaps falls into the first category: "I wanted to write about, and understand, and share the part of me that has always been able to be vulnerable." Reading the book is like listening to him in interviews, with his (self)ironic tone that reveals an underlying shyness, the embarrassment of baring oneself, black on white. In some parts of the writing, the authorial touch found in his songs is also recognizable. You can breathe America, a town in Illinois, then Chicago, you can taste the sweet flavor of soft drinks with which Tweedy claims to have replaced substances that cause far more significant addictions.

And the story of addiction to psychotropic drugs is told with the awareness of a now mature man, but it is not the main theme of the book. He talks about it almost en passant, while the rest is about his family of origin, a childhood spent watching TV at night with his mother while waking his father’s sleep, drugged by his evening dose of six beers. Then record stores, a punk adolescence, Uncle Tupelo, and how it ended with Jay Farrar. Of twenty years with Wilco, and how it also ended with that other Jay (Bennett), on which Tweedy gives his account without morbidity. The fact that fame came through word of mouth, self-sustained (paradoxically, even thanks to piracy), and hardly ever through promotion. The story behind some songs.

And again about family, the repeated tumors of his wife Susie, the relationship with his children, rebuilt after years of absence and largely based on music (see the "family" project Tweedy that led to Suskierae), the intensely moving moment of his father's death.

It talks about music, songwriting, the idea of sharing. Here emerges the first driving force of Wilco (and perhaps of Tweedy himself, as its creative force), that is, the divisive desire to escape all labels, which has always led them to experiment and renew themselves from one album to the next, from the scotch tape placed on the piano at the end of Poor Places, to the arrival of Nels Cline, up to (evidently) the "nakedness" of the latest album to give yet another shock to fans and their expectations, through the covers of Star Wars and Schmilco, created to "deflate" the band's image. (By the way, in an interview, Tweedy mentioned that he hoped the title Star Wars would get him a lawsuit from Lucas or someone in his place, which, however, never came).

There’s no shortage of funny anecdotes, like when his former schoolmates asked if he still played in that little band when he returned to his hometown specifically to perform, already with a Grammy in his pocket. Or when he talks about his sexual experience or that a clash with the record label and illegal music swapping secured the success of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, allowing it not to be released on September 11, 2001. What a mess that would have been, with those two towers on the cover...

But it mainly makes you smile with that humble tone and frequent self-flagellation, Tweedy’s jokes aimed at Tweedy.

The image of Tweedy that emerges from the book is that of the anti-rockstar: far from the jet-set, from women, from the overpowering might of labels (in every sense). Tweedy is an ordinary man, now mature, who has come to terms with pain and has made vulnerability his strength, and he shows it (even if with some difficulty, with a certain modesty) even in the pages of this book.