Jeff Tweedy Says It’s Okay to Be Okay
The famously inscrutable Jeff Tweedy has at last clarified his opinion on American interventionism. Kinda, maybe. “All my life I’ve played a part in the bombs above the ones you love,” the Wilco front man sings over hesitant guitar twang in the opening moments of his first album of solo originals, Warm. “I’m taking a moment to apologize. I should have done more to stop the war.”
In the next verse he sings of having left “behind a trail of songs from the darkest gloom to the brightest sun,” but “it’s hard to say” that what he’s “been through should matter to you.” Then, an anecdote: A drunk man once took him by the hand and told him that “suffering is the same for everyone.” Tweedy reflects, with his voice cracking, that “he was right, but I was wrong to agree.”
As a listener, I felt I understood the meaning immediately. Tweedy is waking up to the puny scale of his problems. He sings sad songs about emotions,
