Jeff Tweedy Talks About Loving ABBA, the Replacements and Rosalía (and Hating ‘Happy Birthday’) in New Book, ‘World Within a Song’

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic You won’t even have to already love Wilco to find joy in the experience of reading Jeff Tweedy’s new book, “World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music” — although nothing about coming in as a fan will exactly hurt.

His tales about how dozens of pieces of (mostly) pop and rock music have hit him in a personal way over the decades is full of anecdotal pleasures that get at more universal truths about how we’re shaped by art… or, alternately, just illustrate a funny story Tweedy neglected to include in his previous books, the music memoir “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)” and the instructional “How to Write One Song.” The book includes his thoughts on youthful favorites he remains unabashed about into his adulthood, like “Smoke on the Water,” “Takin’ Care of Business” and “My Sharona,” adult fare that rewarded more mature readings, like Randy Newman’s “In Germany Before the War,” and songs as disparate as the Replacements’ “God Damn Job,” Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre,” Rosalia’s “Bizcochito” and “You Are My Sunshine.” Variety caught up with Tweedy on the road between stops on Wilco’s fall tour supporting the band’s recent “Cousin” album, following a solo tour in the summer of 2023. In the introduction to this new book, you say that if you went back and were going to choose which order to write your three books in, you’d do this one first.

Why is it that you’d want to do this book about songs before diving into a memoir, or a book about creative writing, if you did it over again? I think it’s the topic I care the most about.