Jeff Tweedy will release his third book, “World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music” on Nov. 7 via Dutton. It follows two previous bestsellers, “Letʼs Go (So We Can Get Back)” and “How to Write One Song” and details more than 50 songs that shaped Tweedy’s life. Among them: records by the Replacements, Mavis Staples, Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton and Billie Eilish.
Said the Wilco frontman in announcing the project: “I want to talk about songs that gave me permission to be creative…to be myself. To say something that was hard to say. I’ll be telling stories from my life, focusing on a true-to-memory style of how it really felt to me, how I experienced things emotionally. And then I want to talk about music in the same way. I want to talk about music in a way that it rarely gets talked about. I want to talk about the world within the song.”
Speaking to PvNew in 2019, Tweedy described “being immersed in writing prose” for the first time in his life. “I was trying to teach myself how to tell a story in clear language without being distracted by the kind of details I’d historically put into a song,” he said. “Those details don’t tend to move the narrative forward but paint a more vivid picture. You don’t need as much of that when you’re writing prose, because sometimes it’s at the expense of the overall story coming across clearly.”
