During the recording of Wilco's fifth album, Jeff Tweedy was pretty sure he was going to die. «Every song we recorded seemed to be the last. Each note seemed the final ». The album would be called A Ghost is Born and would include a song entitled The late greats , in which Tweedy talks about a lost song that nobody ever heard, the best song of all time. This material was stored in memory and now available on the pages of Let's Go (to be able to return) , edited by Sixth Floor with translation of Esther Villardón, the memories of the leader of one of the most intense bands that rock has given in the last years But this work is also a poetic, a treatise to search for that impossible song.

It could be said that when someone confronts their memories, the only thing that is required is that they tell the truth and, as the author says at the beginning of this book, that is impossible. However, the lens with which Tweedy deforms his own past is sincere and assumes failure in his attempt to be objective. Wandering into his memories in a timeline that breaks, rewinding, jumping and stopping from time to time to ask his wife or children how far he should tell, the book acquires a metaliterary tone that questions gender itself. And like We were children , by Patti Smith, or Chronicles I , by Bob Dylan, Tweedy goes further. The book covers its beginnings with The Primatives (which became the opening act for Johny Thunders), the first years of Uncle Tupelo until its stormy dissolution, the birth of Wilco in 1994 giving his first concert under the name of Black Shampoo, his admission to a detoxification clinic, expulsions of gang members, the birth of their children, the death of their parents, the cancer of their wife. Without influencing the bloody, Let's go seems to exalt the normality of a boy addicted to music who fought against depression and migraines and for a while became addicted to opiates. A boy who became a leader of a large and respected band, although his former classmates have not yet heard.

Reading Tweedy talking about the moment in which he met the criticism of London Calling in Rolling Stone magazine, and how for a long time he retained in his imagination an idea of ​​what that record was without having heard it, is literature. "There is so much power in that silence, when you imagine what could happen, but it hasn't happened yet." From his efforts to communicate, from the impossibility of explaining his songs , that poetic of magic and mysteries in pop music is born, seeking the balance between the understandable and that which is not so much. Thus Tweedy writes some of the best pages in this book, saying the unspeakable of the creative process, pointing out all the smoke that surrounds the songs.

«What really drove me to continue writing songs is the same that forces me to continue writing them today. I listen to music (new albums, my favorite classics, radio, anything), until I feel that I can't take it anymore, that I have to create something or I'll go crazy . It's as simple as that. Even when I think I can never do anything remotely as perfect or beautiful as what I hear, I am unable to sit and let the challenge go unanswered. Thus, a disc with indecipherable radio broadcasts broadcast by spies during the Cold War resulted in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot , another of the milestones in the Tweedy career, whose recording process was immortalized in Sam Jones' documentary, I am Trying to Break Your Heart The album, paradoxically, could not see the light at that time due to the conflicts that the band had with the record company, which refused to publish it, and only later, when the band decides to hang it on streaming , could it be accessed.

Leaving a blank space for the listener to fill in with his imagination is one of the premises when making a song in the Tweedy universe, and for him the top is You are my sunshine , by Jimmie Davis. This is how this book works too, important pieces are missing, such as the gestation of the Mermaid Avenue trilogy, in which together with Billy Bragg he rescued Woody Guthrie's lost letters. He happily recreates himself, however, in the immense magnitude of his melomania , which began as a child when he heard a compilation of steam locomotive sounds at home. That extravagant album summarizes the fascination with which he talks about both PiL or Minutemen, as well as Mavis Staples and Johnny Cash.

" I would love to say that I had a master plan from the beginning , but it would not be true." Jeff Tweedy failed as many times as he was right and his memoirs realize it in 200 simple and honest pages that coincide with the publication of Ode to Joy , his new album with Wilco. An artifact full of jewels in which you have to dive to find them.

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