Song Exploder - Wilco - Magnetized

Episode Date: December 3, 2015

Wilco formed in 1994, and 21 years later, they released their 9th album, Star Wars. In this episode, Jeff Tweedy, the band’s singer and principal songwriter, breaks down the song Magnetized. In addition to collaborating with his five bandmates, John Stirrit, Pat Sansone, Mike Jorgensen, Nels Cline, and Glenn Kotche, it turns out Jeff Tweedy makes an active effort to remove his own ego from the process of songwriting. This episode is sponsored by Vinyl Me Please, Turntable Lab, and lynda.com.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi K. Hirwe. Wilco formed in 1994, and 21 years later, they released their ninth album, Star Wars. In this episode, Jeff Tweedy, the band's singer and principal songwriter, breaks down the song magnetized. In addition to collaborating with his five bandmates, John Stewart, Pat Sansone, Mike Jorgensen, Nels Klein, and Glenn Kochi, it turns out Jeff Tweedy makes an active effort to do. remove his own ego from the process of songwriting. Coming up, you'll hear why. Most days I don't come into the studio with an idea for a song. Most days I come to the studio with this interest in discovery or idea that I can't wait to hear what's going to happen today. And I just start making sound

and try and follow where it leads without trying to lead it too much. My ultimate goal is to get out of the way. as much as possible. The joy of it is the discovery. Periodically, I'll just have the guys that don't live here in town come in to just play around in the studio. This was one of the sessions where Mike had come into town. We were just kind of playing around with different ideas. And he was using that synth sound, and I started to hear something melodically in what was there. Like a monotonous kind of chant or something. like that's the idea. I'll do a vocal melody pick refrigerator drum

carrying the shadows I'll do a vocal melody based on just sounds or we call them mumble tracks and I will sit and listen to the first line over and over and over and sketch things on my notepad and try and figure out things that

have the same syllables or the same meter, until I get something that's satisfying, and then I'll sing it. The moment that you thought would murder motions you'd wait, every apprehension alien ache. The idea is to not think too hard at that stage. once you have translated all of the mumble tracks into a set of lyrics that are real words, it's generally pretty jumbled and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And then there's another layer of moving things around and getting closer to some meaning.

And it's a really rewarding process for me. Maybe it's really alien to someone who really wants to come at something with a solid idea of what they want to say. I just trust that some meaning will come out of this process and that something I want to say is going to be harder to conceal when I get my ego out of the way. And I'm not trying to direct all meaning. Your ego isn't really that interested in what's really inside of you. Your ego is very much interested in presenting an idealized version of yourself to the world. And vulnerability only cracks through that by accident unintentionally. When your ego is really working hard to be smart and clever and on par with your heroes musically,

those are real roadblocks to discovery. I just trust the process a lot more than I trust myself to present something honest and vulnerable and real. your unconscious is somehow allowed some part of you to slip through. I sleep underneath a picture that I keep of you next to me. I realize a magnetized. There are a lot of jumbled lyrics, but I assure you they all end up meaning something to me. I'm sustained by a deep pull and connection to my family. to my wife. I realize we're magnetized. I don't know if I can say it any more

plainly than that, even though it sounds silly out of context. I realize a magnetized. I don't think it's necessarily about romantic love. I think it's about something stronger than that, and that's family. My name is Spencer Tweety, son of Jeff Tweety. Spencer, my son, Spencer, did a pass after school one day, of how the drums might come and go or enter and work in the context of the song. It has a lot of Glenn in it because I've listened to Glenn's drumming since I was six years old

and even taking lessons with them when I was a little kid, so probably has a lot of overlap with what Glenn does. We always heard Spencer's part as being kind of tossed off. But yeah, I think that some part of it directed the way that Glenn approached his drums, He kind of emulated some of that, but obviously kind of refined it into a drum part. I'll play guitar on tracks to finish them. And I don't really think I spent much time composing it as much as just doing one track, getting excited, and then not wanting to put the guitar down, and then hearing another track.

And eventually it became this anthemic thing, sort of triumphant sounding. You know, it makes no sense at all for me to be playing guitar at all on a record when you have Nels Klein in your band. Oh, I'm just happy he's in the band and he's happy doing whatever he's doing. A lot of times what Nels is happiest doing is making things work texturally that people maybe don't always notice as a guitar. And I think Nels gets a lot of satisfaction out of being a stealth guitar player in the context of the song. Nells isn't a guitar player exclusively. I think Nels is an effects player and I think he's a really great one. He's obviously got all of the technique that you need to make a guitar work with just his hands.

But he has also spent so much time becoming an expert at how pedals affect that sound. I don't know many people that know that world better than him. He's always moving between pedals in such a fluid state. It's like a virtuoso performance on pedals. I always hear certain songs as having closing credits going over them. You know, like, and this one definitely felt like it was a closing credit moment musically. When you get to the end of the process like this and it works the way you trust that it will work, then, yeah, you sit back and go, how did I do that?

And you have made yourself feel something somehow. Like, I need you, and I couldn't even fight it if I wanted to. You didn't start with the feeling. You discovered a feeling. Now, here's magnetized by Wilco in its entirety. Visit songexploder.net for more information about Wilco and this song. My thanks to Spencer Tweety for his help making this episode happen. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations, about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer

Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishi-kash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks.

Next time on Song Exploder, composer Dustin O'Hallor breaks down his Emmy-winning theme to the Amazon original series Transparent. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. You can find all of the past episodes of this podcast and subscribe to future episodes at iTunes.com slash songexplor. Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, you can find Song Exploder there too. On the Song Exploder Instagram, I just posted a picture of my interview with Jeff Tweedy in Chicago at Wilco's recording studio, so check that out. My name's Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.

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