Jeff Tweedy: Outwards Expressions of Joy

Jeff Tweedy: I honestly haven't seen the Wilco documentary since I watched it in the theater when it came out. I went to the theater with my wife and I felt like hiding. My ideal audience is a group of people that are better with outward expressions of joy than I am. I only worry about maintaining the personal and intimate connections I have with my family and friends and I prefer to be somewhat removed from the notion of fans. That's more of an abstract thing to me. I'm not anti-modern crowd participation. I'm anti-technological crowd distraction at concerts. And my father always told me I had a face for radio.

I try to remember that being a musician doesn't require you to aspire to success on anyone else's terms. About Wilco constantly being named the American Radiohead, I'd feel better if they were being referred to as the "British Wilco." I play guitar every day and I practice by skronking along to Sonny Sharrock's records and try to figure out Elizabeth Cotten's songs. I have a song that my wife and I call your own, as in "oh honey, they are playing our song." That's "Somethin' Good" by Herman's Hermits. I met my wife Susan in 1989 at the Cubby Bear in Chicago. She already had a boyfriend so I just asked for her phone when I finally got her attention. But even then I could sense she was the one. Sources: stateofsound.com and npr.org

There are undeniable similarities between how the brain responds to substance addiction and how the brain responds to falling in love. Both substances of addiction and individuals we are attracted to cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter, into a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. Dopamine acting in this region helps us learn to associate cues with rewarding feelings. However, dopamine acts on two different types of receptors, called D1-receptors and D2-receptors, in complex ways. Activation of D2-receptors enhances bonding with a partner; it also promotes the reward value of a substance. Activation of D1-receptors maintain that bonding. 

During this time early on in a romantic relationship or early exposure to an addictive substance, dopamine is primarily acting on D2 receptors, heightening our senses and focusing our attention on the cues of our next encounter… developing our craving, our longing, our drive for the next meeting. When we are in the early obsessive stages of love, every encounter (and especially sexual encounters) causes a pleasurable release of not just dopamine, but also natural opioids. These two brain chemicals work together in the brain to continually strengthen the association of the stimulus (the one you are falling in love with) with intense positive feelings. This will cause you to seek more and more of these interactions, craving them intensely in the times in between. These same chemicals act on the same receptors in the same way during the process of forming an addiction to a substance, causing the person to seek more and more of it.

With time, the brain adapts. Repeated encounters no longer cause the same euphoria they once did, but rather, a sense of calm contentment. The dopamine that is released before and during these encounters is now activating more of the D1-receptors, which result in more tranquil passion. In terms of relationships, it is thought that this transition actually helps maintain a pair bond with one individual, because in this stage you are less driven to seek a competing pair bond and you are more likely to aggressively defend the pair bond you have already established. In terms of substance abuse, this phase is called tolerance. 

During this tolerance phase, lack of exposure to the object of your addiction results in a lack of dopamine and opioid release and an increase in stress hormone release. If we are talking about addiction to a substance, we call this withdrawal. If we are talking about a relationship, we call this separation anxiety or even heartbreak. To avoid these horrible feelings, we have to relapse… right back into the arms of our addiction. Love is not listed as a psychological disorder in the DSM-5, nor do we think of it as one. But in a true physiological sense, we may actually be addicted to the ones we love.

“Despite feeling loved being a fundamental human need, there is no consensually agreed upon definition of love and feeling loved,” explained Dr. Eric Sasaki in his postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. “Together with my co-authors, my first goal was to integrate scholarly and lay conceptualizations of love and key relationship theories to identify core components of feeling loved. These core components of feeling loved include feeling cared for, accepted, valued, and understood.”

The recent study “Feeling Loved as a Strong Link in Relationship Interactions: Partners Who Feel Loved May Buffer Destructive Behavior by Actors Who Feel Unloved”, was authored by Eric Sasaki, Nickola C. Overall, Harry T. Reis, Francesca Righetti, Valerie T. Chang, Rachel S.T. Low, Annette M.E. Henderson, Caitlin S. McRae, Emily J. Cross, Shanuki D. Jayamaha, Michael R. Maniaci, and Camille J. Reid. Source: psycnet.apa.org

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: Towering Art Rock

Involving Cold War spy recordings, drug addiction and music industry landmarks, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has been called a fable and a masterpiece. One of Wilco's best albums, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has uncanny connections to 9/11, a landmark Internet-first release; Reprise Records' then-president David Kahne listening to one of the most critically lauded albums of the 2000s and deciding Wilco should start again from scratch; Jay Bennett counting out tons of pills he'd had FedExed to the studio before the rest of the band arrived. Or perhaps it would be best to start further back: Jeff Tweedy perusing CDs in a record store and coming across one titled The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations: encoded spy transmissions made over shortwave radio. "The voices were so eerie,' Jeff Tweedy wrote, explaining the attraction, 'like a long dead ghost trying one more time to make contact.' On one section, against a storm of hiss, a woman's voice pronounced the same letters from the phonetic alphabet: 'Yankee, hotel, foxtrot'. There was no response."

Jay Bennett left the band during its making, and tragically died of an overdose eight years later, and Reprise Records rejected the finished record, only for it to be hailed as a masterpiece. The first element had all the ingredients of a cautionary tale; the second became something of a fable for the record industry as it began the 21st century. The Conet Project recordings made sense in the darkest corners of Jeff Tweedy's psyche. 'These solitudes exist so apart from each other in this sea of white noise and information,' he told Wilco biographer Greg Kot, 'and the beautiful thing is they keep transmitting to each other in the hope that somebody is going to find them.' The description seems to predict the America of today, a country atomised by the internet, but back then, for Jeff Tweedy, The Conet Project recordings described something more personal. 'The way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate in The Conet Project,' he explained, 'it's not all that different to me than my own efforts to communicate.' Those recordings, full of crackling static, might also have pointed Tweedy towards the album's experimental soundscapes. 

The band had been in transition from punk-adjacent alt-country rockers to studio nerd wizards for some time. Jay Bennett, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, joined the band in time for Being There. Glenn Kotche, a drummer and percussionist with an eye for detail, who had been briefly tutored by The Velvet Underground's Maureen Tucker, replaced ex-Uncle Tupelo drummer Ken Coomer. Following the use of the sample from the Conet Project (a voice repeating: ‘yankee, hotel, foxtrot’) on the song ‘Poor Places’, Irdial-Discs successfully sued the band for copyright infringement. In our current age of carefully edited music documentaries, in which every moment of vulnerability feels carefully calculated, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco feels genuine and edgy. It is a fascinating warts-and-all document, but it also appears to have warped the process it observed. Jeff Tweedy never got used to having the cameras around, out-nerding Kurt Cobain. 'Maybe the camera is like a fly on the wall but it's a type of fly that you always know is there and you can't stop thinking about it,' he later reflected. But YHF would eventually reach its reward: Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 225 on its updated "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list in 2020.

What followed was a well-documented comedy of errors and misjudgments. Then-President of Reprise David Kahne and A&R Mio Vukovic listened to the finished album, decided it had no hits and gave the band an ultimatum: start again or be dropped. One wonders how closely they really listened to the record, and how much they were influenced by the opener 'I Am Trying to Break Your Heart'. Despite Jim O'Rourke's new mix, that track probably remained the album's most experimental. Foreshadowing the music industry to come, Wilco streamed the whole thing online ahead of its physical release. Finally landing on record store shelves, somehow miraculously coherent and complete given its tangled production subplots, the album was critically acclaimed. Uncut said it was the Americana equivalent of Radiohead's Kid A, and Pitchfork called it a 'masterpiece' giving it a perfect 10. Given the album was unlikely to return much profit, there appeared little choice for Wilco but to leave Reprise with the masters: 'It was a choice of making a record we didn't like and not making any money,' Tweedy wrote later, 'or making a record that we loved and not making any money'. At the time, the band had a substantial fanbase and were darlings of the music press. Streaming Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fed both, driving sales of tour tickets, creating a buzzworthy story and giving the album considerable underground lustre.

There is an alternative history to the YHF album. Had Reprise Records loved the record, then it would have been put out on its original release date: 11th of September 2001, available in record stores at almost exactly the same time American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Centre's North Tower. The fact the album had duplicated towers on the cover (Chicago's so-called Corn Cob Towers), contained the lyrics 'tall buildings shake' and a song called 'Ashes of American Flags' would have lent the album a creepily prophetic quality. Jeff Tweedy has said the original 9/11 release date would have probably resulted in the album being pulled from shelves. Randomness also played a role in Jay Bennett's story. Eight years after he had departed Wilco, after several solo albums that failed to break through, Jay died of a fentanyl overdose. 'It was hard to be surprised, but that didn't make it any less heartbreaking,' Jeff Tweedy said, adding: 'I wouldn't have been surprised to see him onstage with Jackson Browne for instance. Jay would have made almost any band better if he'd been able to get help'.

According to critic Robert Christgau in The Village Voice: "The way Jeff Tweedy's tunes seep through shifting strata of complication recalls Beck's in Odelay, but Odelay was a lot jollier than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Jeff Tweedy with Wilco makes a virtue of their entanglement in disconnected sound, their depressive inability to control an encroaching environment--a defeatism familiar enough from slacker days, only slackers were more chill or at least ironic about it. Wilco and Jeff Tweedy's integrity comes down to a stubborn determination--distinctly American in its folksy affect and go-it-alone-ism--to tell the world how very ineffective they feel." Sam Jones (December 12, 2000): "I have had many discussions with Tony Margherita, Wilco’s manager, and although he assures me the band is excited about the idea of a documentary, I can’t get Jeff Tweedy to return my phone calls. 

Tony suggested to call directly Jeff's wife and she was lovely with us and encouraging of our project. Of course, Tweedy returned his wife Susan's call even during the rehearsal of 'Reservations', although he seemed distressed." According to the rival Son Volt's fan base, the marriage of Tweedy and Susan Miller might have been on the rocks at that time, but it's difficult to imagine there were serious problems in their relationship after all the eulogies that Tweedy has offered to her wife, being Sukierae (2014), an album explicitly dedicated to her, calling her "his best muse," and remarking "she understands me better than I understand myself. Without her, I wouldn't be here."

Sam Jones (January 13, 2001): "Christy (the producer), Roger (soundman) and I flew to Chicago. We arrived in the evening, and were met by Margherita. As he drove us from the airport to Wilco’s loft, I realized that he was a huge fan of the band, and that he had a very persistent habit of singing along with the stereo. We were let into the loft by none other than Jeff Tweedy himself. The rest of the band was sitting around a card table having Chinese food. I was introduced to Jay, John and Leroy. The mood was strangely silent and somber, and I felt very awkward as Christy and I tried to make conversation. And poor Glenn Kotche (Wilco’s new drummer). The band didn’t even tell him that a documentary was being made. He was about to find out. I just finished watching the Nine Inch Nails documentary, and I realize it is everything I don't want the Wilco film to be. It was full of quick edits in time to the music, with every visual medium ever invented mixed randomly. Although it is probably quite effective for the NIN audience, to me it is like watching moths darting around a porch light. After 30 minutes I decided that it was the antithesis of what I want my film to look like. I would rather a scene from my film be mistaken for “Harold and Maude” than it be mistaken for a music video. I don’t feel like the movie has to look like MTV to feel musical. And I decided right then and there that I do not want a music video editor to cut this film." Sources: stateofsound.com, gloriousnoise.com and medium.com

Sam Raimi: Send Help and Drag Me To Hell

When the System Collapses: What Sam Raimi Is Really Revealing About Power Structures

Sam Raimi’s films are famous for its excesses—vomit, blood, demonic spectacles. But the real horror in Drag Me to Hell and Send Help isn’t mostly supernatural. It’s mostly structural. Both films begin inside institutional-coded spaces—a bank, a corporate succession pipeline. And both stage the same experiment: What happens when the insulation around power disappears? The answer isn’t always empowerment. It’s often exposure. Power isn’t always Strength. Sometimes paradoxically it’s Insulation.

In Drag Me to Hell, Christine competes for promotion against a less competent male colleague who thrives through proximity and schmoozing other colleagues. In Send Help, Linda is passed over in favor of a fraternity-connected executive heir. These institutions don’t simply reward merit. They simply stabilize incumbents. They absorb flaws. They normalize entitlement. They cushion mediocrity. The insiders do not need to prove themselves. The structure protects them from exposure. 

The Closed System: Raimi’s worlds operate as closed systems—procedural, indifferent, fixed. In Drag Me to Hell, Christine enters a supernatural bureaucracy that mirrors corporate logic: someone must pay the debt. She becomes ruthless enough to exhume a corpse and attempt to transfer the curse given previously to her. She follows the rules. And she still dies. Not because she lacked cruelty—but because she never controlled the inner mechanisms. And a simple technical error seals her fate. Compliance offers no authorship. The system does not always reward effort. It just deletes errors.

In Send Help, the plane crash strips away corporate hierarchy entirely. No inheritance. No networking advantage. No institutional buffer. But the pivot happens even earlier. On the plane, after overhearing the men casually confirm her marginalization, Linda deletes the plan draft she is completing. Her gesture is quiet but decisive. She withdraws her labor and ambitions from a system that will never convert them into leverage. The plane crash that follows does not create her break from legitimacy—it reveals she was already prepared to operate without it. 

From Compliance to Authorship: Once stranded on the island, Linda discovers the private beach resort—a hidden infrastructure with plenty of stocked resources, discovering an insulation she can control. From that moment, her survival shifts into authorship. She knows rescue is possible. But she chooses not to signal help. When Zuri and the guide suddenly arrive, she could restore legitimacy and return to the corporate order. Instead, she decides to eliminate them. Not in panic—but in consolidation of her new power. She refuses to reenter the system as a subordinate again, so she remains insulated. 

Baptism and Revelation: Christine seeks restoration and is destroyed by structural indifference. Linda rejects restoration, seizes authority, and converts it into insulation. Closed systems reward either inherited protection or self-authored control. They do not reward compliance by outsiders. Raimi renders this divergence grotesquely literal. Christine is baptized in corpse vomit—engulfed, swallowed by forces she cannot master. Her immersion marks her erosion. She remains subject to rules she did not design. Whereas, Linda is baptized in blood during the boar hunt—drenched, exhilarated, dominant. Her immersion marks her initiation. She stops seeking permission. She generates an inevitability. The difference in these two films is not morality. It is control. And sardonic inevitability.

Blondie’s “One Way or Another” frames Send Help at both beginning and end. At first, signifies how "outside" and not accepted Linda is. By the end, it lands as sardonic thesis. “I’m gonna get ya” is no longer playful. It’s structural. Linda does not only earn legitimacy. She embraces inevitability. One way or another. The humor works because the film knows exactly what it’s showing. Success here is not moral triumph. It is rational adaptation within an uncaring structure. 

The Structural Threat: If insulated hierarchies protect incumbents from exposure, then their authority depends on that insulation. When insulation collapses, what’s revealed is uncomfortable: power did not reflect ability. It reflected insulation. Christine believes compliance will protect her. It doesn’t. Linda recognizes compliance will not protect her. She exits legitimacy, gains authorship, and reenters the system insulated. Strip away the insulation, and power doesn’t disappear. What disappears is the illusion. Raimi’s horror isn’t moral—it’s structural. The system was never neutral, only uncaring. 

Rachel McAdams is wonderful as always—our eternal romantic lead. Here she uses every ounce of that built-in goodwill as a weapon. Her Linda is never a victim in Send Help. Even covered in sand, blood and sweat, she possesses a terrifying, luminous capability. It is a subversive performance that lands perfectly. Opposite her, Dylan O’Brien nails the specific, grating energy of a boss we have all had. He is not a cartoon villain, but an indifferent, casually manipulative dude who mistakes privilege for charm. His descent from predator to pathetic prey is horrifying, hilarious and—crucially—feels earned. Raimi’s genius is in the balance. The torture walks a razor’s edge between cruelty and catharsis, but it never tips into nihilism. You are always cheering for Linda’s ingenuity and cruelty. Source: cultmtl.com

Donnie Darko as Suicidal Ideation Allegory, Twilight Override (Jeff Tweedy from Wilco)

Narratively, cinema tends to oversimplify the onset of a character's mental illness by rooting it tidily in a single trauma. This is called the "presumption of traumatic etiology", a term used by Steven E. Hyler, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, in his Comprehensive Psychiatry article, "DSM-III at the Cinema." In the mythos of the film, Donnie Darko must sacrifice himself to save the universe. In another read, though, he instead comes to the unfortunately common conclusion that his suicide will improve everyone else's lives. He allows the jet engine to crush his bedroom with him inside: he kills himself. Just think of the image at the end of the jet engine falling through the wormhole tunnel. What does that resemble? A bullet traveling through a gun barrel. The jet engine's rounded, cylindrical, shiny-metal shape is completely analogous to that of a bullet. The jet engine missing him the first time might be symbolic of giving up on an early suicide attempt. 

The suicidal young man's idea of himself as a hero who must sacrifice himself to save people is the psychology that is represented in many works (including Catcher in the Rye), and in certain mythology of rock and roll. Jeff Tweedy from Wilco differs from that mythology. Jeff Tweedy (talking over his most recent triple album Twilight Override): “I’m not espousing the dark underbelly of New York's nightlife or decadence or anything like that because I was so disappointed—even as an addict, I was so disappointed with the cliche of it, the hypocrisy of it. The disgusting nature of advocating for things that are really bad for people.  You know, honestly, the way rock and roll was marketed as a culture was just awful. And the part that I knew was there and was disappointed to find wasn’t really the guiding principle was the part that I thought was really beautiful.”

 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you get together with your friends and then the world is a little less painful. You get together with your friends, make some music and you’re all transported. And then all of a sudden, you have a community around it. And then other bands start because they see that there’s this opportunity, there’s this place. There’s a strategy for living. It isn’t what you’ve been sold. And so, you know, I reject it. I fucking reject it in rock and roll. The radical, individuated self-expression of rock and roll and the self-liberation of it — that’s all that matters.” He makes it sound so simple. What if it is?" Source: insidehook.com

At first Donnie/the antihero has an impulse to harm others, and then he turns it inward and imagines an elaborate scenario by which he "saves" people. His destructive, lashing-out impulse has found a personal mythology that makes him feel justified and good. Catcher in the Rye's Holden character has a fantasy of saving children running through a field toward a cliff. Holden Caulfield is the guy who catches them before they fall to their deaths. By the end of that novel, we realize Holden is in therapy and undeniably suicidal. His rejection of "phonies" is very similar to Donnie Darko's hostility toward the moral preachings of those at the high school. By burning down the house of the Patrick Swayze's pedophile character, Donnie Darko basically "catches" the Sparkle Motion girls (and his little sister) by preventing the local creep from getting to them.

The fear/love dichotomy is similar. He fears dying, especially the loneliness of dying by his own hand, fears many other things, especially losing his girlfriend Gretchen and his family. He wants to love and be loved. His parents are shown to be very loving people, but not reaching him, not even his doting mother. He really doesn't want to hurt them. He finds a way to think that if he dies, he is somehow doing them a favor. Part of him realizes that the fear/love dichotomy is a cop-out, so by the end he has accepted that if it has to be one concept winning above the other, it should be love. 

The arrow of time, and the blob that goes in front of people before they take action, is like what he sees himself moving toward. But he's schizoprenic and starts to see his decision as inevitable. He goes onto a kind of autopilot toward his oblivion. That is similar to the resignation and elation that many suicidal people have just before they commit the deed. Often it is a sense of peace after the decision has been fully finalized and accepted. In suicidal research literature, this is often the time when people are giving away their personal items, as they don't care any more about possessions. Donnie's parents give him a lot of "new stuff" as a reaction to him getting in trouble at school, and unfortunately it doesn't mean much to him.

One major element of the story is the idea of destruction being a part of creation. "The Destructors" by Graham Greene is about young people destroying a man's wealth and home, and the story is said to mean something about destruction being a positive thing. It is the young reclaiming something from the old, an expression of vitality and renewal. I think the fixation on this story is completely a part of the psychological process Donnie Darko is working out. Interestingly, the term "cellar door" represents a portal to a downward location -- a portal one passes through to death. It's also a term from "a famous linguist," whom the screenplay avoids mentioning was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose claim to fame was the creation of a vast fantasy realm and mythology. Donnie Darko is creating his own personal mythology as he moves toward the "cellar door" of his demise. The two words are cast as "the most beautiful in the English language": death recast as a high form of beauty. Suicidal ideation.

Basically, Donnie considers himself a liability to his community. He falls in love with the new girl at school, but he imagines he might end up losing her, and fantasizes finally with saving her life. His therapist isn't making any real progress with him and recurs to use placebo medicine. The echo-voiced bunnyman he imagines doesn't seem to be alive -- it is a half-dead bunny face, like a skull. A bunny is a symbol of innocence but in the form Donnie hallucinates, it becomes a symbol of innocence turning to death, of something that has become rotten in its springtime. That's how he feels on the inside: Like he's not youthful or vital or hopeful like he thinks he ought to be, but already dead inside.

On October 2, 1988, Donnie Darko — a euphemistic “troubled teen” — receives a dreamlike message from a satanic bunny named Frank, that the world will be ending on October 30. Donnie accepts this news fairly stoically, but it’s just the beginning of a month of nightmares about destruction that Donnie then re-creates in real life. Or does he? Is anything that happens between the warning to Donnie of impending apocalypse and the date of its predicted arrival real? Is it all a drug-induced hallucination? Or a psychosis-induced fantasy, a detachment from reality? Donnie Darko is what Ferris Bueller’s Day Off might have been if David Lynch had ever gotten his hands on it, a daring, disturbing, visionary debut from writer/director Richard Kelly. 

It's at times a bleak and pessimistic vision, but it reflects some of the feelings of Xers that they’ve been ignored and unappreciated. Donnie knows where his parents hide their gun. The inevitable chest-blob-arrow leads him right to it, as though it's not even his own decision anymore. He imagines a scenario where he'll end up using the gun on somebody else, out of revenge or some angry impulse. He doesn't want to do that. Up close, the gun's barrel is a wormhole of time. The bullet's aim is the arrow of time. The bullet is the jet engine. The Philosophy of Time Travel becomes the ability to make time stop, for him and him only. Source: popmatters.com