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.
INTERVIEW:
Michele Norris Jeff Tweedy, thanks for joining us.
Jeff Tweedy Thank you for having me.
Michele Norris Where are you right now?
Jeff Tweedy I am in Chicago in an isolation booth at the studio that I go to every day. The Loft Studio. Wilco headquarters.
Michele Norris Okay. Wilco headquarters. I like the sound of that. You sound great. I'm so glad. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while.
Jeff Tweedy Me, too. Thank you.
Michele Norris So I know a little bit about where you grew up. You come from Bellville, Illinois. So I want you to do me a favor. If I were to come visit your childhood home and I made my way to Bellville, made my way to your front door and walked in and walked in the kitchen. What would that journey look like?
Jeff Tweedy Well, rolling into Bellville. You're rolling near Saint Louis, near the Mississippi River. It's this typical Mississippi River valley terrain, a little bit sloped, not particularly hilly or anything. Bellville was when I was growing up, I was always told that it had the world's longest main street. But I don't know if that's verifiable or not, but I think it was like seven or eight miles long. I grew up on 40th Street, right off of Main Street, but if you were to come in to our house, my mom would have been very proud of her decorating. She designed kitchens and bathrooms, and there was a lot of mauve in our entire house. Seemed to be her favorite color. She was bold in her choices. We had a green living room and a mauve kitchen and a really bright red bathroom.
Michele Norris Did that reflect her personality, those bold choices?
Jeff Tweedy And in a way, I think it represented who my mother would have liked to have been, I think. I think she was probably much bolder in her design choices and her colors. You know, she wasn't boisterous. She was a little bit shy, but very a very good listener, very good friend. But she wasn't the life of the party. She was the overseeing conscience of my dad being the life of the party, you know? You know, the person sitting him in the corner going, Oh, no, you know.
Michele Norris Tell me a little bit more about your parents. Your dad's name was Bob. Mom's name is Joanne. Where'd you people come from?
Jeff Tweedy Well, my mom and dad met in high school. My mother got pregnant. They dropped out of high school, which is what had happened to my grandmother. My grandmother got pregnant in high school and had my mom. So that was like tradition almost seemed like. But they both dropped out of high school. My dad got a job on the Alton Southern Railway.
Michele Norris Remind me, what did he do on the railroad?
Jeff Tweedy Well, initially he worked in the switching yards, which is primarily where he worked his whole life. 46 years. And he started out underneath the trains in the transition from steam to diesel. And at some point, someone recognized that my father was pretty bright and recommended him for a program where they would send him to Arizona to learn early computer programing with punch cards. And so he did that. And then he graduated from underneath the trains to in the tower, overseeing the switch yards and programing computers. And eventually he became a superintendent of the switching yards, which is pretty much, I think, where he was when I came around. I'm much later than my other siblings, ten years younger than my youngest brother, 15 years younger than my sister, and I have another brother in between. So he was pretty established by the time I came around. My mother. I have a very different childhood from my siblings because by the time I came around, my mother had decided that she wanted to work. I think for most of their childhoods, she maybe did side things like Tupperware parties and whatever else she could do. But she taught herself drafting and learned how to design kitchens and bathrooms and got a job at a local...
Michele Norris Kitchen design center?
Jeff Tweedy Thank you. [Laughter.] It was, but yeah, kitchens, bathrooms, you know, home interior, basically. She was really good at it. She became you know, she was a sales woman and she was the only one. And I was really proud of my mom because she was the only one of these snobby men who would go to poor people's houses and not just assume that they didn't have the money. And a lot of times it didn't end up being particularly fruitful. But she ended up doing as well as they all did because she was a harder worker I think. They all would pay her for her drawings eventually, too, because her drawings were so much better than any of theirs. So she would not only draw her kitchens to display to people, but she would draw everyone else's drawings. So I always thought that was pretty remarkable that they both managed to be really accomplished, but without much of an education at all.
Michele Norris You know, I'm interested in your mom's work drawing these kitchens because you're almost—it's a blueprint for people's dreams in some ways. You were deciding to invest in your family.
Jeff Tweedy Right.
Michele Norris And the world you wanted to create, right? It was more than just getting that big Amana stove. It was, I'm thinking about the kind of Christmases I want to have and the kind of dinners I want to serve. She was sort of serving up people's dreams in some ways.
Jeff Tweedy She really was. And it was really beautiful because she was really focused on being able to present to them a beautiful realization of their dreams. Her drawings are really exquisite. We still have a whole a lot of them. So she's really, really good at it. She was great at what she did.
Michele Norris I'm interested in your mother's kitchen.
Jeff Tweedy Mmhmm.
Michele Norris What did it look like as a kitchen designer? Was your kitchen tricked out at home?
Jeff Tweedy You know, Michele, I think this is one of the things I have a little bit of fear about in having been asked to participate in a discussion like this. Because there's a lot of dissonance in my mother's relationship to people's kitchens, her own skill set, and my actual experience of my mother's kitchen.
Michele Norris Mmhmm.
Jeff Tweedy Because it was pretty tricked out. It was pretty state of the art. Pretty early on, we had one of the first microwaves that were commercially available. So it was beautiful. It was nice as a small kitchen. It wasn't a dream kitchen by her standards for other people, certainly not on the richer end of the spectrum of the people that she facilitated. But because my mother worked, I always joke that my mother's cooking was McDonald's, like a Filet-O'-Fish, and I would get picked up from school and we would go through the drive thru lane at McDonald's, get a Filet-O'-Fish and fries and a Coke and get dropped off at home. And she would go back to work and she would go on her calls or house calls and all that, and she would come home about eight or nine in the evening. And so she did not cook a whole lot. I don't have a whole lot of memories of my mother's cooking. And I think if you asked her at the time I was around, she just she resented cooking. I was so fearful that I'm probably going to be one of the worst people you ever talk to about this, because I didn't have any modeled behavior of things that I think are very, very important now. But I did not have them as a child. We did not eat together.
Michele Norris Let me just say, you shouldn't feel bad about that, because when we ask this question, “tell me about your mama's kitchen,” it’s not with any kind of expectation.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah.
Michele Norris A lot of things happened in the kitchen also that have nothing to do with
food.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah, well, my dad probably cooked more than my mom, but not in the kitchen, in the backyard. He was a barbecuer. And I wouldn't recommend his barbecue to most people because it would be mostly an excuse to stand in the backyard and drink beer all day. So we had a lot of very, very well-done pork steaks.
Michele Norris Oh, no.
Jeff Tweedy Growing up it was pork steaks every weekend. And they were very, very tough because that wasn't the point. I think it was my dad liked to be outside and listen to the ballgame on the radio and cook some pork steaks. 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. We eventually got a little bit nicer one, but she hung on to that yellow Formica table for a lot longer than you would expect for somebody that has her finger on the pulse of design trends at her job. But yeah, that's my memory of an adolescence period of my life when she would pull her drafting utensils to the side, sit down, smoke a cigarette and talk to me.
Michele Norris Yeah.
Jeff Tweedy You know, I think she really liked being looked at as wise and she loved offering her counsel.
Michele Norris As much as Jeff loved sitting with his mom at that kitchen table, he'd eventually come to realize that along with their companionship, watching all those late night movies, there was something roiling beneath the surface for his mother. And the more he began to realize that, the more he also realized that he needed to find an independent path toward boundaries.
Michele Norris You actually wrote about a memory you have that the TV's on and you go and you sit next to her and you're a bit of a night owl, too.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah.
Michele Norris There was a communion between the two of you.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah, I think it was my mom. For her to unwind would be with a glass of Coca-Cola and a cigarette and an old movie. And she was not great at setting boundaries for a young person. But it was... it felt good to me because she trusted me. If I got up and went to school, then she didn't think there was anything wrong with me staying up all night watching movies with her. She thought like if live up to my responsibilities, which I think is, you know, I guess that instilled that habit in me because I do feel a responsibility to live up to my commitments, in, in spite of my level of rest. You know, but early on, yeah, I would just sit on the couch with her and watch Andy Hardy movies. Mickey Rooney, Babes in Arms. She really loved Judy Garland.
Michele Norris Aw, yeah.
Jeff Tweedy She absolutely would be transported by these. I think she might have spent a lot of time in the movie theater when she was really young. Probably not first-run movie theaters, because I don't think that she ever had a whole lot of money growing up. I think that she grew up pretty deprived. But I do think that she wanted to be a singer and she really loved old movies. So I think she saw herself in a lot of the characters Judy Garland would play, you know?
Michele Norris Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Tweedy She never sang, though. I mean, that was that's one of the saddest things I think about when I think about my mom is how often she told me she wanted to be a singer when she was growing up and how I almost never heard her sing.
Michele Norris Really? Not even to the radio? Not humming in the car?
Jeff Tweedy Nope. Every once in a while she would sing a little bit of a nursery rhyme or something like that. But I talk to my sister about it too, and she was surprised that Mom had told me that she wanted to be a singer. It's really like I said before, my siblings and I almost feel like we had different parents.
Michele Norris Yeah. Well, I'm the youngest in my family too, by ten years.
Jeff Tweedy Oh, wow.
Michele Norris And so I understand what you're saying. It's a different epoch.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah.
Michele Norris And I think that there's something that goes on where parents maybe are more permissive and less restrictive.
Jeff Tweedy Mmhmm.
Michele Norris My sisters used to joke that they let you juggle knives.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah. [Laughter.]
Michele Norris They let you do anything you wanted to do because they felt like they just had a different set of rules than they did. And, and maybe that's one of the reasons your mom let you stay up late at night.
Jeff Tweedy I think that's part of it. I think she was lonely, also. And that's maybe not a healthy boundary for a child to feel that responsibility for their parents loneliness and, you know, to be a reliable companion. I think her, her and my dad, they got together so young and it was as there's just so fraught, you know, to have the kind of, I think, attention and I don't know, intimacy that she would have liked, I think. I think they loved each other. But I think it was, it was a difficult relationship. And I think that she got a lot of emotional support from a little kid. And I think that's like, I don't want to get too far into it. But I think that that like if Freud was here, they would say that I would be an uncontested Oedipal Victor.
Michele Norris Mmhmm. So did young Jeff Tweedy understand that that was what was going on?
Jeff Tweedy Oh, no. I just love my mom. And I just loved—my dad was the bad guy a lot when I was growing up. I just thought that, you know, he would get up and yell at everybody to turn everything off and go to bed. And she would just tell him to shut up and go back to bed, Bob. You know, I'm not painting a pretty picture, but you know that it was almost a routine. It was almost a bit.
Michele Norris That's probably very familiar to a lot of people.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah. But yeah, what you were saying that your siblings say that your parents let you juggle knives. You know, my siblings were jealous of my Coca-Cola intake. They all claim that they were given a thimble of Coke every Friday and that I basically had it on tap in my in my bedroom.
Michele Norris Yeah, that sounds about right.
Jeff Tweedy There was a problem though. I think at some point, because of my exalted status and my mother's imagination, she at some point had a difficult time hearing the truth of me, in fact, because—this is going to be sort of very, very personal, but—because the amount of alcoholism in her life and in our family, by the time I was drinking, my mother did not think that I was drinking. Even when I would tell her I'm worried about how much I drink. And she would say, I don't think you drink that much. And by her standards, that's probably true, you know, but by the standard of how much is healthy or was good for me, that was not true. So it contributed to maybe some unwise belief that I had somehow sidestepped the genetic trajectory of a potential problem because I wasn't as bad as the people that she had seen. So that wasn't particularly helpful in getting... I don't know, maybe the help I needed at an earlier age. I mean honestly, I don't, I don't think she ever believed it. And I remember calling her from the hospital, from rehab, and telling her that I'm in rehab and that I'm, you know, detoxing. And she said, Why? It's really kind of amazing. And I said, well, because I'm an addict. And she's like, I've never seen it be a problem for you, you know? So like most families, it's complicated. It's really complicated. It's like a beautiful relationship that I cherish. And at the same time, some real damage was done by—not intentionally, but by a lack of an ability to set boundaries, by never having boundaries set for her. You know, she did not have anybody model adult behavior for her in her life. You know, it's very easy to see how these things become generational or become a family affliction. It's never just one person. It's the whole family. And then it becomes the whole lineage of the family, very easily. It's very difficult to break free from those historical paths.
Michele Norris Your dad worked on a freight train. You talk about a freight train. That's a freight train of forward momentum. And it's really hard to break that if you have that family tradition and you tell someone that I think I'm drinking too much for them to validate that, does it mean that they have to examine their own habits?
Jeff Tweedy Well, my mother didn't drink, but she was absolutely a poster child for codependency. I think that, yeah, it would have required her to take some time to self-examine what works for her about a person that drinks being with someone reliably unreliable. My dad was reliable as a breadwinner. You could set a clock by him in terms of his routine, but reliably unreliable in emotional support. You know, reliably unreliable in was he going to do the right thing when it came to going to a school play and supporting me at school or something like that? No, it would have been too uncomfortable for him. And I made peace with that after my mother died and was able to see him as a much, much more complicated figure also than just the batty you know, that I had grown up with, because I think he struggled with all of the same issues I did, but without any, any understanding whatsoever of the psychological components that were compelling him to behave in a certain way. I think he had massive anxiety, socially. I think he... he was doing the best he could. I think that they both were doing the best they could do. Unfortunately, you know, for most of us, our best isn't always the best for everybody.
Michele Norris Mm hmm.
Jeff Tweedy At times, you know, we fall short. And my heart goes out to both of them. I get emotional thinking about it right now because I feel like they both deserve so much more. And I feel so fortunate in that I was able to stop the train of—I was able to get off the train. I don't know if I stopped the train. I think that that in my terms of my family, the train's still going, you know, but I'm not on it.
Michele Norris I really appreciate the way that you have talked about anxiety and addiction and how you have coped with both of those things over time in your music, in your writing and interviews that you've done. I think that takes a lot of courage and a lot of bravery, and there are a lot of people who look up to you who've probably benefited from your openness. So thank you for that.
Jeff Tweedy Oh, thank you. Well—one of the people that was in rehab with me and City Hospital in Chicago—a lot of what you're given as a gift is comes from your other fellow sufferers. You know, the other people that are there sometimes against their will, sometimes court-ordered. But a lot of them have been through it many, many times. And one of the things that sticks out on my mind, that I was told then that I was reminded of just now by your comments. You have to give it away to keep it. There's a belief in recovery that unless you share your experiences, you're likely to repeat your mistakes. Because part of being healthy is being able to keep that in focus—that part of you that isn't ideal, that you don't get to choose, [but that’s] part of you and it's not really going to go away. But you can keep an eye on it. And one of the ways you keep an eye on it is by telling people the truth about yourself. Honestly, it just feels good to not lie to yourself, and you might as well tell everybody else.
Michele Norris As I learned reading Jeff's memoir, he had had a longtime dream, or, as he might call it, a delusion of becoming a famous guitarist and musician long before he even knew how to play the guitar. Due to something that he's not even sure he can put his finger on, Jeff eventually made the dream come true, but there was a lot of fake-it-till-you-make-it bravado until he mastered the art of music and songwriting and his unique way of connecting with an audience. His mother, who had always wanted to be a singer herself, lived long enough to see her son live out his dream.
Michele Norris It's so interesting that you say that your mom always wanted to be a singer, but you never got to hear her sing. But you are a musician and loved the world over. How much of that did she get to experience?
Jeff Tweedy I think... I'm really happy, actually, that she got to experience probably the peak, you know, before she passed away, when she was alive, when we won a Grammy. She was alive to see my face on the cover of some magazines. But she was a believer from way back from day one when Uncle Tupelo was—before we were Uncle Tupelo we would play shows in small towns around Bellville, like Millstadt, Illinois. We would play shows at old halls, like the Liederkranz Hall, and my mother would rent them out. And you could rent one out for, like, $200. And she would collect the money at the door. And so she paid her dues for a long time before she really saw the rewards. And she was definitely very nervous about me not finishing my education and putting all of my eggs into one basket, so to speak. But she did get the relief of knowing that people responded. And she loved going to shows. She loved being in the audience and the attention that she would get, also, she loved from fans that would come up to her and acknowledge her. My dad and her both really loved being celebrities at shows. If you were ever at a show when my dad was there, there's a good chance that my dad bought a pitcher of beer for your table, or poured you a beer out of his pitcher. It was a pretty common thing.
Michele Norris Yeah, walkin’ around, that's my boy up there.
Jeff Tweedy Yep, that's right.
Michele Norris When you did start playing the guitar, was your mother—did you get a sense that she was somewhere in the house? Ear to the bedroom door, listening to you?
Jeff Tweedy Yes and no. I mean, she was very supportive of the loud bands practicing in our house when we had room to do that and things like that. But the thing that that is really my mother was my first audience for any song I would write for a long time, especially when I lived close by. I would sit down at the kitchen table like one of our heart-to-hearts, and I'd say, I just wrote this song and I'd play it for my mom. And she was a very, very forgiving audience, obviously. It was an intense way to learn how to feel someone listening. There's a difference to... being heard and being listened to.
Michele Norris What's the difference?
Jeff Tweedy That's something that any person that performs music in front of an audience has to be able to tune into, to some degree. You can't just be up there playing your music knowing that you're doing it right or correctly. You have to be able to feel the words landing, feel the music being consumed, being, being taken in. There's a give and take of energy of understanding that we're being comprehended. That's such an important thing. And sitting one on one, that's all you ever are really doing with an audience. You can be 10,000 people. It could be 50 people. It could be a million people. Those are numbers that don't mean anything because it's still one person at a time, one consciousness at a time that you're trying to reach and connect with. And I think that was an extraordinarily profound gift to be given the time. Like very real amounts of time. Like, I'm gonna put my everything away for, for 50 minutes and listened to my son talk about his song and play it for me. That's—where would I be without connecting those dots? That actually what it still is. That it's still a heart-to-heart over a kitchen table, in a lot of ways.
Michele Norris No wonder your mom didn't want to give away that kitchen table. Of course she wanted to keep that.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah.
Michele Norris You said something interesting early in our conversation that you you felt like you didn't always get the kinds of things in your childhood kitchen that you know now are important. And you want to make sure that you provide for your own family. What were you referring to and what do you do in your own family now with your wife and your two sons to make sure that you're creating the kind of kitchen that you think serves you and serves your family well?
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.
Michele Norris But it's wonderful that you do it now and it's wonderful that you figured out how to do it as a traveling musician.
Jeff Tweedy Yeah, even when we go somewhere as a family now we almost always eat together. And it's my favorite thing to do, pretty much.
Michele Norris So if we ask your sons, what was the dish that defined all those family meals, what would be their favorite thing?
Jeff Tweedy Well, this is probably a little bit later than their early know their formative experiences as, as tots and pre-teens. But there's actually a dish in our family called The Dish that is just a really simple, healthy vegetarian dish that we started eating a lot in their high school years. And it's basically brown rice, chopped baby tomatoes, chives, diced avocado or sliced-up avocado and sesame chili oil, and that's it. It's so fulfilling somehow. And everybody in our family loves it. It's just a really easy, simple meal to make, and we'd all end up being pretty full. And we started doing it quite a bit. And so, yeah, when you ask my family—if you use the word “dish,” they're immediately going to think of The Dish.
Michele Norris Okay so that's, like when I asked about a dish, I didn't realize I was asking about The Dish.
Jeff Tweedy It is The Dish. And it happened because I went to some vegan restaurant somewhere on the road, I think it was in Minneapolis, and I had that exact dish there. And I came home and I told Susie I was like, I... I had this amazing meal. If you ever go to Minneapolis with me, I, we should go have this. And this is how much I don't know about cooking. And she said, well oh really, what was in it? And I explained it to her and she said, I can make that. We can make that. You can make that. And I'm like, really? And she made it. And it was exactly as good or better than the one I'd had at the restaurant. So it just became our thing.
Michele Norris You worked it into the rotation, and now it's the family staple.
Jeff Tweedy It's a pretty simple thing to get going.
Michele Norris You've written a couple songs about your mother. Did you perform those for her?
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.
Michele Norris I'm glad that those things come out and surface also because we all reap the dividends.
Jeff Tweedy Thank you.
Michele Norris Thank you. Thanks so much. I've loved talking to you.
Jeff Tweedy Well, it's lovely talking to you, Michele, I agree. I could talk to you for a very long time and I'd be very, very happy.
Michele Norris I love this conversation. Let's do it again.
Jeff Tweedy Anytime.
OUTRO: Michele Norris Through food, through card games, through song. No matter what happens in our kitchen, it all simmers inside us throughout our lives. And in Jeff Tweedy's case, those memories, through the lens of time, also turned into music. Music that sings both of the beauty, the difficulties, but most of all, the love that he experienced there in his kitchen.
Michele Norris Thanks so much to Jeff for sharing the memories of his mother's beautifully designed kitchens, that yellow Formica table, and above all, Jeff reminiscing about his mother being his first and possibly his best audience.
Michele Norris Now, if you want to make the dish that Jeff and his family make in his kitchen, that thing that he simply calls The Dish, well, you've basically heard the whole thing in the interview, but I'll post it on my Instagram as well, and we'll have clear instructions. And as a bonus, we will also share the recipe for some special Christmas paintbrush cookies that Jeff made with his mom each holiday. It turns out, she did use that fancy oven every so often.
Michele Norris Thanks so much for joining me today on Your Mama's Kitchen. I'm Michele Norris. Until next time and let's make sure there is a next time, stay bountiful.
CREDITS: This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original, produced by Higher Ground Studios. Senior producer Natalie Rinn, producer Sonia Htoon, and associate producer Angel Carreras. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eappen and Roy Baum. Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camilla Thur de Koos. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and me, Michele Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Nick D'Angelo and Anne Hepperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media. Our talent booker is Angela Peluso and special thanks this week to Threshold Studios. Chief content officer for Audible is Rachel Giazza. And that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Make sure and come back to see what we're serving up next week.
Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Sound Recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.
