Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

I'm really excited to be sitting right here in the studio with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and other projects and Wilco have quite an

excellent new album coming out called Ode to Joy and we'll be talking about

that and hopefully a bunch of other stuff. How are you Jeff? I'm good.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here.

It's an honor.

So I was interested in something that you were saying

about this record and your thoughts on rock,

which is that I'll paraphrase you, but that rockist music was complicit in this moment in some way and that you felt weird about it and which I guess affects the kind of musical moves you're doing and the way you're thinking about music.

I thought that was provocative. I wonder if you could

unpack that a little bit for us. Well I think that one of the things I feel like I've observed

in the town I grew up in and in this general political environment is a lot of people

very resistant to change and a lot more focused in a fear-based way on retaining something that they feel like they earned and they have from the past

as opposed to very, you know, there's not a whole lot of discussion about how we could make a better future

or let's problem solve or let's do you know there's not a lot of forward thinking in my opinion at this critical moment in our history and it reminded me of my experience my feeling listening to a lot of

records that you would call rock or rock-based records in the last 10-15 years or

so I tend to get the feeling a lot of times and maybe even listening to some of my own records that there's a fear of losing an audience, there's a fear that is antithetical to what I believe is the most important aspect of rock and

role to me growing up was the self actualization or the self-liberation that it

promoted and the idea that you should be pushing forward you should be

challenging the status quo you should be challenging your own perception of

yourself I should be able to invent yourself and I don't hear that on a lot of music yourself.

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