Recording Interlude

+ Both Sides Now (again)

As previously mentioned, the Jeff Tweedy Solo Family Live Tweedy Band (that’s our full legal name, don’t wear it out) is in the studio working on a record.

The days are getting longer. The sky has been gray in the mornings when we start on a new song and clear blue in the afternoons, when the music starts to become something that I can’t believe we made together. How kind of the sky to reflect our triumph.

In the meantime, here’s a chapter from my book World Within a Song about “Both Sides Now” along with a quick version of it that I recorded and posted a while back. Just to tide you over until we return to regularly scheduled programming, and also in honor of Joni’s breathtakingly poignant performance at the recent Grammys.

OxO—Jeffy

Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)

There are some songs so perfect it’s impossible to imagine them ever not existing. Melodies so seamless that it makes no sense to contemplate how they were constructed. Miniature suns and moons. Here long before us, and sure to survive long after we’re gone. Music that arrives not as something new but as something that finally has a name. This song feels like it’s been a part of me for as long as I’ve had a me to feel.

It seems certain that I must have heard this song as an infant. Judy Collins’s version was riding high on the charts shortly after my first birthday, so it’s not unlikely that it would have seeped into my consciousness around the same exact time my developing mind’s language centers were just kicking into gear. If that’s the explanation for this feeling I have that this song is purely a geological fact, then lucky me. What a gift it’s been to have this song on speed dial my entire life. I can’t always remember all of the words, but the melody is always there. It almost feels like it has a specific physical presence. With its own unique feeling. Like a grade school locker-lined hallway. Or maybe it’s more like a loved one’s face. Like how I can close my eyes and see my sister as a young woman getting married, then later, smiling beneath silver-grey bangs. Like how both those images ARE my sister to me, wherever I am in the world.

It’s love that I’m describing, isn’t it? I trust this song so much. Its wisdom, lyrically, is astonishing. And as simple as it may sound, “Something’s lost, but something’s gained / In living every day,” when combined with such an indelible melody, is a pretty remarkable bit of consolation to have coming out of your radio. And, in turn, on a loop in your head for over fifty years. How? Joni Mitchell was barely out of her teens when she wrote this song. So again I ask, how? Pure magic. Pure genius.

If somehow you aren’t familiar with this song, please go listen to it now if you can. Trust me, you need it. And if it doesn’t keep you company for a long time, I hope you have a song that feels, to you, the way I’ve described this one. I’d be lost without it.

So . . . It’s a good thing it can’t be taken away from me. Not even if I never heard it again. It is a part of the world I live in. Like air and water.

This Week in Wilco, Etc.

1993 / February 18: Freedy Johnston opens for Uncle Tupelo at the Cruel Elephant in Vancouver BC, Canada.

2010 / February 19: Before their show at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center, the Mayor of Duluth makes Wilco citizens of Duluth.

2023 / February 23: On Starship Casual, Jeff shares two different versions of “You Are Not Alone.” The first is Jeff’s guide vocal demo and the second has background vocals added.