I finished reading Jeff Tweedy’s How To Write One Song last night (I did manage to learn how to write one song). Jeff, as always, writes eloquently and deeply about the creative spirit and act. I’m continually fascinated by the time in his life when he wrote the songs that became A Ghost Is Born, and I’m hoping to write a long essay on it over Christmas. But this insight from the middle of How To Write One Song on the power of point of view absolutely crushed me.
“Reading to them [his boys] was something I was still able to do with some reliability, and it occurred to me that children’s books were almost all written from the point of view of animals or things, like caterpillars or trains, So I started writing songs to them from the point of view of animals, or at least with some element of an animal-like perspective. Which led to a semi-coherent Noah’s ark concept that shaped the rest of the album. The song that may contain the most evident residue of the entire approach is “Company in My Back,” written from the viewpoint of an insect at a picnic. That’s the point of view that was in my mind, at least, but what it ended up being is far from impersonal. In fact, I find it to be heartbreakingly revealing when I read it or sing it today.
I attack with love, pure bug beauty I curl my lips and crawl up to you
And your afternoon And I’ve been puking
I think it’s revealing because without the emotional cover of not being myself as the narrator of the song, I don’t think I would have been secure enough to identify myself as something beautiful yet unwelcome. Like a bug at a picnic. An interloper. Facing danger bigger than anything i could ever imagine, and yet feeling gentle and deeply surrendered to the largeness of the world and is mysteries. Writing from a bug’s place in the world allowed me to be honest, in other words. About things that were too painful to contemplate fully at the time.”
Here is Jeff singing “Company in my Back” over a decade later with those two grown boys.
Gleam & Resonate 