World Within a Song

I love how a song can crack open time.

I’ll be driving along and the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is next up on the playlist—and, suddenly, I’m eighteen, it’s summer, I’m in a car with a bunch of friends in the parking lot of a church where there’s a dance going on.

The car windows are rolled up, we’re smoking cigarettes madly (we don’t actually smoke), dancing in our seats, screaming the lyrics, working up a sweat so we will look and smell like we’ve already been inside. Shortly, we’ll send a paying representative in to get the “mark.” Then we’ll copy it and, one by one, go to the entrance as if we’re returning.

We have a box of markers, as well as library other kinds of stamps that might be used for this purpose.

“Start Me Up” takes me to winter mornings, sleeping soundly until this song blasts me awake. It means, get up, get ready, it’s time to ski! I stumble out of bed, make sure the kids are awake (how could they not be). My husband, the guilty party, who hates to get up to go to work, is up and pulling on his long johns.

I grumble but, really, who can resist the Rolling Stones?

The thing is, though, the way a song cracks open time, the way it makes you, for an instant, the person you once were can be disconcerting.

What is time, anyway?

Jeff Tweedy’s World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life that Changed My Music explores the power of music to time-travel us backwards and also to set us on a path toward a future we hadn’t quite imagined.

Wilco fans will love reading these short pieces about about fifty of the songs that set him on the path toward, well, Wilco.

But anybody shaped by music of any kind when they were young will know what Tweedy is talking about here and conjure up some song memories of their own. And, maybe, as I did, pull up some unfamiliar songs on Spotify, adding some of them to their playlists.

But the best thing about World Within a Song—from my point of view— is that the book was a gift from my friend, Dan. We go way back—as in, he was my student in a creative writing class when he was in high school, 1984!

The considerably younger sibling of two sisters and a brother who were teenagers when he was a child, he’s been in love with rock n’ roll all his life.

He’s also one of the few people I know who still writes letters. I love any day one lands in my mailbox.

Here’s what he wrote wrote on the cover page of World Within a Song.

Dear Barb—

Some books are so good you have to give them to someone. BUT will they really READ it? Sure, they always mean to, but there’s a lot of books floating around. Hard to get to sometimes.

So this is your special annotated (Dan-otated) version of a book I like so much I could just live there a while. And you’ll HAVE to read it ‘cause it’s like a letter to you.

Dan

Definitely one of the best gifts, ever.

I would have lovedWorld Within a Song anyway, but really, really loved hearing Dan’s voice as I read—his astute observations, his endearing excitement about music and ideas.

I am now in the process of rereading, annotating some of the Dan-otations and adding a few of my own.

Expect a package in the mail, Dan!

Tweedy is a wonderful writer. These “song-sized” pieces are the perfect medium for making his passion for music (and life) real on the page.

I mean, this:

“I have very few strongly held beliefs. Among them is the conviction that loving one thing deeply and with ardor is the best way to open yourself up to the world. It’s a bit counterintuitive but I’ve seen it with my own eyes and felt it with my own heart. My obsession with music from a very early age had the potential to isolate and alienate me from the world at large. But I believe that by indulging that passion and focus, I found the only way into knowing what people live for.”

It’s books for me.

As Tweedy says, “Loving one thing completely becomes a love for all things, somehow.”