"Your Mama's Kitchen" transcript: Episode 15

"Your Mama's Kitchen" transcript: Episode 15 | Audible.com

Your Mama's Kitchen Episode 15: Jeffy Tweedy

Audible Originals presents Your Mama's Kitchen, hosted by Michele Norris.

Michele Norris This episode of Your Mama's Kitchen includes conversations about addiction. Please listen with care.

Cold Open:

Jeff Tweedy I think if we're just talking about a kitchen, then our kitchen growing up was the only place people congregated. But it would be more over card games, be more over beers, it would be more over my mother and I, especially alone late at night, especially when I reached adolescence—all of the heart-to-heart conversations would be sitting across from each other at a yellow Formica kitchen table.

INTRO: Michele Norris Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how we're shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids. I'm Michele Norris. Today, I'm talking with singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer and frontman of the beloved band Wilco. I'm talking about Jeff Tweedy.

For more than 30 years, Jeff's heartfelt, delicate and beautiful old country and rock music has won him fans the world over. Beginning with his early band called Uncle Tupelo. In the early 2000s, with the release of Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and its catchy yet gentle hits like Jesus, Etc. and War on War, Jeff jumped into a new echelon of rock stardom. Sold-out stadiums, a huge and devoted fan base, and a Grammy for Best Alternative album for a Ghost Is Born.

Jeff has a way with words as a songwriter and as an author. His recent memoir, World Within a Song, had me laughing and crying and thinking deeply about his ability to find grace in even the most difficult moments with the people we truly love.

Today, Jeff is the devoted father of two boys, and he's proud of a long and loving marriage to his wife, Susie. That kind of family stability is not the kind of thing many rock stars can claim. And the reward is even sweeter for Jeff because of the personal challenges he's faced first. Growing up in an Illinois factory town where the jobs and then the optimism slowly dried up while his parents wrestled with their own disappointments and dashed dreams. And then, as he got older and entered the music business, he confronted his own challenges with anxiety and addiction, illnesses that had plagued his family for generations. Jeff channeled the pain of some of those hardships into soulful music, and, as you will hear, a commitment to speaking honestly about those peaks and valleys with wisdom and humor to light a path for others.

Now, even if you've never heard of his band Wilco, the contours of his life will be familiar to many. Coming up, Jeff talks about the beautiful relationship with his mom, who worked hard and smart but never got the recognition she deserved. And the special dish that's at the center of his family life today. That's actually the name and simply called The Dish. I really loved this honest and vulnerable conversation with Jeff Tweedy. And I think you will, too.

Jeff Tweedy Well, the what I was referring to in terms of what I didn't get a lot of, if hardly any of growing up, was eating together. My parents had given up on that possibly by the time I came around. Or maybe it was never really a part of our family culture, which I think is tragic at this point in my life. I feel like that was just an extremely tragic missing of an opportunity to know each other better on a day-to-day basis that we did not we did not have, which I did not learn the importance of until I met my wife and we had kids. And early on it was not natural to me, but it was pretty easy to see pretty quickly how important it was, because once they were able to talk, once our kids were able to talk, there were things that you would get out of them at a dinner table that, you know you would have never, ever heard about. You would have never heard what happened to them that day without that moment for things to slow down enough for it to occur to them, to share it, or, you know, like it just would like would get bulldozed out of the way by life if you weren't consciously taking yourself out of the speed of life and eating slowly together. So we tried to do that as much as possible. And as a person that was on the road a lot as a traveling musician, obviously I didn't get to participate in as many of those meals as I would have liked. But my wife was very adamant about eating together, and to this day, I still think it's even with the band, I think it's really important for us to share meals together from time to time on the road, to just sit face to face across from somebody. And I just don't think there's any other place where certain things will come up in conversation than at a dinner table with the comfort of being fed. Added into the mix, you know, like I feel like it sets you up in a place where you're maybe secure enough to confront some things that you may be wishing to think about it. I've told people before, we didn't really eat together when I was a kid. And I've had people react like, Oh, Jeff, you know, it is a lot of most people I've met. It's a sad revelation to hear that that wasn't a part of growing up.

Jeff Tweedy No. I mean, I've written a lot of songs about both my parents. There's one song that I wrote called “Please Tell My Brothers,” and it's from sung from the road. Please tell my brothers I miss them still / over the mountains on their phone bill / Please tell my sister I miss her too / with my nieces and nephews in their swimming pool / Please tell my father I love him still / forget the railroad / Forget those bills / And then please tell my mother I miss her the most / and as I travel from coast to coast / I feel her love and I feel her ghost / Please tell my mother I miss her the most. And I wrote that before she died because I think one of the biggest—I think definitely my greatest fear in my life, like a lot of people that grow up with these kind of relationships with their parents that are, I don't know, I think everybody's worst fear is their mom dying, that's probably not that unique, it’s extremely difficult for me to picture me continuing without my mother because of this added element of not really knowing where the boundaries were when I was younger, you know? So that song existed before my mom died. When my mom died, my dad insisted that I play that at her wake and I couldn't do it. I was like the most I've ever not been able to perform in my life. And I really wish I had said no. But it was very difficult to say no to my father at the time. Since then, most of the songs have been both about their memory and about how much of them I still am. I, in fact, a lot of the lyrics are like I am my mother. There's a song on a record from last year I like I am my mother, and it's kind of about both of them. So all of those things still swim around in me. And, and when you write songs, it's an act of discovery. I don't set out to write about anything. It's just they're in there. And so they come out in different ways on different songs. And I'm glad they do because it's a... It's a nice way to be reminded of them. Not just writing the song, but being asked to sing the song years later and realizing that that's a part of it.