Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy Wants You to Be Bad at Something. It’s for Your Own Good.

“Recently, and pretty randomly, I picked up Jeff Tweedy's book, How to Write One Song. I really didn't expect it to be such a delight. Tweedy's just simple joy in the creative process is infectious.”

“In How to Write One Song, and then also in his memoir, Let's Go So We Can Get Back, he really makes a case and makes it convincingly that it is gentler motivations and conditions that really foster creation.”

“The song 'Impossible Germany' came as a song I loved listening to when I traveled. That song feels like the whole mood of the movie Lost in Translation to me.”

“The phrase 'Impossible Germany' might have come from something by William H. Gass. It might have been The Tunnel because that book is really related to the history of the Third Reich.”

“I was really thinking about this a lot because of that movie, The Room, that terrible movie. The terrible, amazing movie, The Room.”

“I've been reading just like a thousand pages of this great sci fi writer, Adrian Tchaikovsky. But his work got recommended to me by a listener of the show.”

“The famous one is around Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and your label, but there are others too.”

“One of my favorite bedside books is this book of all the reviews written of Mozart and Beethoven and Charlie Parker.”

“The book that I feel embarrassed to like say it again, because I almost always, it's almost always the book that comes to mind is Don Quixote. I just think that it explains a lot about the world, I think.”

“There's a compilation of forwards to people's books and writings about other people's work called Temple of Texts, that I, that I like a lot.”