You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs,
and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Wilco formed in 1994, and 21 years later, they released their ninth album, Star Wars.
In this episode, Jeff Tweedy,
the band's singer and principal songwriter, breaks down the song Magnetized.
In addition to collaborating with his five bandmates,
Jon Stewart, Pat Sansone, Mike Jorgensen, Nels Klein,
and Glenn Kochi,
it turns out Jeff Tweedy makes an active effort to remove his own ego from the process of songwriting.
Coming up, you'll hear why.
Most days I don't come into the studio with an idea for a song.
Most days I come to the studio with this.
interest in discovery or idea that I can't wait to hear what's going to happen today and I just start making sound and try and follow where it leads without trying to lead it too much my ultimate goal is to get out of the way as much as possible the joy of it is the discovery Periodically,
I'll just have the guys that don't live here in town come in to just play around in the studio.
This was one of the sessions where Mike had come into town.
We were just kind of playing around with different ideas.
And he was using that synth sound, and I started to hear something melodically in what was there,
like a monotonous kind of chant or something, you know, like that's the idea.
I'll do a vocal melody based on just sounds or we call them mumble tracks and I will sit and listen to the first line over and over and over and sketch things on my notepad and try and figure out things that have the same syllables or the same meter until I get something that's satisfying and then I'll sing it.