Jeff Tweedy - How to Write One Song

Song Exploder

Hrishikesh Hirway

Music

4.8 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In June 2024, I got to go to the Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, which is organized by the band Wilco. I performed some of my new songs, and I got to interview Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of Wilco, on stage as part of the festival. Jeff, in addition to being in Wilco and the band Tweedy, and putting out his solo albums, has also written three books. And this conversation was focused on his second book, which is called How to Write One Song. And even though it’s called How to Write One Song, I think it actually contains a lot of insight about creativity in general, and life in general. I’ve recommended it to friends of mine who aren’t songwriters. And, as you’ll hear, the conversation gets pretty personal for me, because I got so much out of the book personally. It helped me with some of the blocks that I’d been facing in my own songwriting, at a pretty profound level. And when I was listening back to this recording, I’d kind of forgotten about how much I put out there in front of Jeff and the thousands of people who were there watching. But I’m glad the conversation was recorded, partly just so I could revisit it, but also so that I could share it here on Song Exploder. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.

You can buy How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy here (via Bookshop.org) or here (via Amazon) or on Wilco's website.

You can listen to the Wilco episode of Song Exploder here. I also interviewed Jeff along with his son Spencer, who is also his bandmate in Tweedy, about their relationship and musical partnership, for an episode of my podcast Partners. You can listen to that here.

Thanks to Sonos for their support of the podcast. Check out sonos.com.

For more, visit songexploder.net/jeff-tweedy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
0:07.0	I'm Rishi Keishish Heirway.
0:10.0	This episode contains explicit language.
0:13.0	Last summer, I got to go to the Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, which is organized by the band Wilco. I performed some of my new songs, and I got to interview Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of Wilco,
0:26.6	on stage as part of the festival.
0:28.6	Jeff, in addition to being in Wilco and the band Tweedy and putting out his solo albums, has also written three books.
0:35.6	And this conversation was focused on his second book,
0:39.0	which is called How to Write One Song. And even though it's called How to Write One Song,
0:43.8	I think it actually contains a lot of insight about creativity in general and life in general.
0:49.1	I've recommended it to friends of mine who aren't songwriters. And as you'll hear, the conversation gets pretty
0:56.0	personal for me because I got so much out of the book personally. It helped me with some of the
1:01.5	blocks that I'd been facing in my own songwriting at a pretty profound level. And when I was
1:06.7	listening back to this recording, I kind of forgot about how much I put out there in front of Jeff and the thousands of people who were there watching.
1:16.6	But I'm glad the conversation was recorded, partly just so I could revisit it, but also so that I could share it here on Song Exploder.
1:23.6	I hope you'll enjoy it too. Here it is.
1:35.1	Thank you so much for being here. So I make a podcast called Song Exploder. This is going to be a little bit different from what that show is. That's a show about how a song gets made.
1:39.5	But for this, I wanted to talk to Jeff instead of about how a song got made, about how his book,
1:45.6	How to Write One Song, got made.
1:48.0	Part of the reason why I wanted to talk to Jeff about this is not just because it's really
1:52.9	well crafted and has a lot of wisdom in it, but because, yeah, it had a profound effect on me.
1:58.7	I started making podcasts 10 years ago, which not coincidentally
2:03.4	is also the time when I stopped making music. I'd been making music for about 12 years
	...

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