I think she was suspicious of people in a lot of ways. My mother was very suspicious of religion, clergy in particular. Martin: Did you grow up in a religious family? And I've experienced things that are euphoric. I think that I've experienced hellish things. And you strike me as someone who does not believe those things. Martin: Frank Proffitt strikes me as the kind of guy who really did believe in heaven and hell and Satan and good and evil. It felt very similar to the way punk rock would act as a safety valve or release of anger and fear. They're fear based, but there's a catharsis to them that I could relate to. Hearing these old folk songs and how they had lasted and survived for long periods of time. The original sounds like a very old man that has earned the fear, you know, and that's one of the things I think I responded to. Tweedy: When I hear myself singing that version, I can hear myself trying to reach for the gravitas of the original. But your band before Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, you guys covered this. Originally this was sung by a guy named Frank Proffitt. Martin: There is a song in the book called 'Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down,' which is just a haunting, beautiful thing. You know, when somebody comes up with a riff like that we should give it a scientific name and an atomic weight.

It's like stumbling across some new element that gets added to the table of elements or something. And I feel like that song functioned that way for a lot of people that became musicians. It's empowering, you know, and that's the first inkling I had that this is something that I could actually do. I don't think I would have even known anything about it other than when I picked up a guitar and I tried to imagine how somebody plays it, I put my hand on the neck and I went bump, bump bump - I played the riff. Tweedy: At the time that I'm talking about in the book, I didn't know the name of that song.

Rachel Martin: You write in the book that the song that made the first 'dent in your musical mind' is 'Smoke on the Water' by Deep Purple. I think it's just the nature of having been immersed in records for my whole life, I guess. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The highest form of music is that kind that makes people feel less alone. And even though you will hear us disagree about the storytelling integrity of a Dolly Parton classic, we agree on something very fundamental. This book is his tribute to the songs and songwriters that inspired him to start making music in the first place - and then to keep doing it for a long time. And he's a lovely guy who bears no responsibility for my personal insecurities. The lead singer of Wilco thought he was coming on for an NPR interview about his new book World Within A Song, and he got my emotional baggage about musical preferences.īut, I promise, we talked about so much more. Not maliciously per se, just laying out the critiques as a matter of fact and then one-upping each other with obscure musical references. The guys (and they were mostly guys) who spent hours - nay, days on end - debating the quality of Led Zeppelin albums and judging other people's musical taste.

The point of me telling you all this is because I just got to interview a guy who, from my outside vantage point, seemed pretty similar to the cool kids down the hall in my college dorm. No one was ever like, 'Hey Rachel, your music taste is super basic and that means you are super basic.' At least not to my face. Then everyone got all excited about some band out of Seattle called Pearl Jam. Depeche Mode.īut the cool kids down the hall - and seemingly everywhere else on campus - were smoking pot and listening to Dylan and handing around Grateful Dead bootleg tapes. When I showed up for my freshman year I had my CD collection in tow, which was heavy on the top 40 pop hits of the time. I went to college in Tacoma, Wash., in the 1990s. Because the way the notes all happened to line up makes me feel more alive than I was before the music came on. And maybe all that feels not specific enough to be interesting, but I don't care. Maybe they're about the most universal of experiences: love and heartbreak and loneliness. And it's gonna be so great when we get there because that's the emotional center of the song and there will probably be some power chords that I can belt out and maybe the lyrics are dark and countercultural - but maybe they're not. I like a traditional song structure where we move through a couple of verses but all the while we're building towards the bridge. I've lived with a lot of musical insecurity in my life.

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