https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/11/14/18093626/jeff-tweedy-wilco-memoir-lets-go-review
Some time around the end of the century, Jeff Tweedy was browsing through a record store when he came across a CD called The Conet Project, a compilation of, in his words, “Cold War–era spy transmissions sent over old-school shortwave radios.” This was the sort of thing that sounded cool to Tweedy in the late 1990s, so he bought it and listened to it the whole way home. “The voices were so eerie,” he writes in his candid new memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), “like long-dead ghosts trying one more time to make contact but not really sure anymore how to use language or even who they’d been trying to reach in the first place.”
Tweedy listened to The Conet Project constantly, the way normal people would a pop song. It reminded him a little bit of himself when he tried to talk to other people. “Most of the conversations I’ve been involved in during my adult life are just slightly less awkward versions of The Conet Project,” he writes. “I’ve been to dinner parties and other social situations where I can’t even pretend to get with the small talk.” It also reminded him of the loose thematic thread tying together some new songs he’d been kicking around in his head. “Yankee … hotel … foxtrot,” garbled one of the British ghost-voices on his car stereo. “Yankee … hotel … foxtrot.”
A year or so later, in an exchange forever immortalized in Sam Jones’s 2002 Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Tweedy was backstage at one of his solo shows, trying and failing to explain to some chipper music industry people what his band’s long-awaited fourth record was going to sound like. Tweedy is searching in vain for words; everyone around him is making and laughing at terrible jokes. When he says there are a lot of tape loops, someone kids: Are you making a Wilco album or a Tricky album? People chuckle, so he goes on, to prove he’s serious: “It’s got a lot of drums and … holes. Holes in the songs.” “So, is Courtney Love in there?” someone blurts out. Again everyone but Tweedy laughs. “A lot of big open spaces between what’s supposed to be … the music part,” he says. “I don’t know.” He walks away.
Some time around the end of the century, Jeff Tweedy was browsing through a record store when he came across a CD called The Conet Project, a compilation of, in his words, “Cold War–era spy transmissions sent over old-school shortwave radios.” This was the sort of thing that sounded cool to Tweedy in the late 1990s, so he bought it and listened to it the whole way home. “The voices were so eerie,” he writes in his candid new memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), “like long-dead ghosts trying one more time to make contact but not really sure anymore how to use language or even who they’d been trying to reach in the first place.”
Tweedy listened to The Conet Project constantly, the way normal people would a pop song. It reminded him a little bit of himself when he tried to talk to other people. “Most of the conversations I’ve been involved in during my adult life are just slightly less awkward versions of The Conet Project,” he writes. “I’ve been to dinner parties and other social situations where I can’t even pretend to get with the small talk.” It also reminded him of the loose thematic thread tying together some new songs he’d been kicking around in his head. “Yankee … hotel … foxtrot,” garbled one of the British ghost-voices on his car stereo. “Yankee … hotel … foxtrot.”
A year or so later, in an exchange forever immortalized in Sam Jones’s 2002 Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Tweedy was backstage at one of his solo shows, trying and failing to explain to some chipper music industry people what his band’s long-awaited fourth record was going to sound like. Tweedy is searching in vain for words; everyone around him is making and laughing at terrible jokes. When he says there are a lot of tape loops, someone kids: Are you making a Wilco album or a Tricky album? People chuckle, so he goes on, to prove he’s serious: “It’s got a lot of drums and … holes. Holes in the songs.” “So, is Courtney Love in there?” someone blurts out. Again everyone but Tweedy laughs. “A lot of big open spaces between what’s supposed to be … the music part,” he says. “I don’t know.” He walks away.
