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Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.

Book by Jeff Tweedy · 2 quotes · Art, Creativity, Imagination

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Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. Quotes

“As we grow, we learn to evaluate and judge, to navigate the world with some discretion, and then we turn on ourselves – creating can't just be for the sake of creating anymore. It has to be good, or it has to mean something. We get scared out of our wits by the possibility of someone rejecting our creation. It bugs me that we get this way. It bugs me a lot. I think just making stuff is important. It doesn't have to be art. Making something out of your imagination, that wasn't there before you thought it up and plopped it out in your notebook or your tape recorder, puts you squarely on the side of creation. You're closer to god, or at least to the concept of a creator.”

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Book:Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.
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“The Chicago historian Studs Terkel asked Bob Dylan in the sixties about how he went about writing a song and trying to outdo himself, or at least being as good as the last song he wrote, and his response was pretty damn perfect. “I’m content with the same old piece of wood,” he said. “I just want to find another place to pound a nail . . . Music, my writing, is something special, not sacred.” If the songs Bob Dylan wrote aren’t sacred, then nobody’s songs are sacred. Nobody’s. No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, “Thank god I didn’t make that song. Thank god I didn’t make that piece of art. Thank god I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world.” Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been. I’m writing this just weeks after returning from Belleville, where I sat next to my dad’s bed in my childhood house and watched him die. I can guarantee you that in the final moments of his life, he wasn’t kicking himself for all those times when he dared to make a fool of himself by singing too loud.”

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Book:Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.
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