Talks & Entertainment

Jeff Tweedy, songwriter and founding member and front man of the GRAMMY Award-winning rock band Wilco, reflects on why we listen to music, why we love songs, and how music can connect us to each other and to ourselves in World Within a Song: Music that Changed My Life and Life that Changed My Music.  

World Within a Song features fifty songs that have enhanced Tweedy’s own craft and impacted the way he remembers his past. Song choices—including Mavis Staples, The Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton, and Billie Eilish—cross decades, genres, and emotions. With each one, Tweedy opens up about why the song made an impact and how the style or lyrics altered his perspective or changed the way he thought about music, exploring essential questions like: What makes us fall in love with a song? Do songs help us live better lives? And do the lives we live help us write better songs?  

Interspersed throughout the song-specific chapters, Tweedy includes “Rememories”—dream-like passages recounting specific events in his life—something subscribers of Tweedy’s Substack, “Starship Casual,” will be familiar with. Tweedy is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) and How to Write One Song. As part of the program, Tweedy will perform a few acoustic songs. 

Tweedy will be in conversation with Brendan Canty, a musician and filmmaker best known as the drummer in Fugazi, and currently The Messthetics.