The latest Wilco album, Sky Blue Sky, has been on and off my i-pod for the past few weeks - to be honest, to no great shakes. But the opening track, Either Way, has just crept up on me the way good pop music sometimes does. And it now replaces If I Can’t Change Your Mind by Sugar as the opening music to my imaginary first feature film.
These are the lyrics …
“Maybe the sun will shine today
The clouds will blow away
Maybe I won’t feel so afraid
I will try to understand
Either way
Maybe you still love me
Maybe you don’t
Either you will or you won’t
Maybe you just need some time alone
I will try to understand
Everything has its plan
Either way
I’m gonna stay
Right for you
Maybe the sun will shine today
The clouds will roll away
Maybe I won’t be so afraid
I will understand everything has its plan
Either way”
It’s an astonishingly simple song, especially in the wake of the experimental leanings of the previous two albums, but I think it works brilliantly given the context that Jeff Tweedy is a man who has often written lyrics which appear to be wracked with the comings and goings of relationships and love, has talked openly about his depressions and can get an audience singing along to “maybe all I need is a shot in the arm. Something in my veins, bloodier than blood.”
It’s very much a song about acceptance of the state of things as they are. What I love about it is that the first line seems to demand a “maybe it won’t” as the second line. But it never happens. It’s a wonderful bit of writing that manages to get across an almost Buddhist take on the world, without reverting to slacker cliches. Jeff isn’t saying he doesn’t *care* whether the suns shine today or not. Just that, maybe it will. “I will try to understand everything has its plan. Either way.” It’s the opposite of a “meh, whatever!” view of the world. It’s about finding peace and tranquility in that acceptance of “either way” - not in blocking himself off from the emotion he’ll feel “either way”, but just accepting it will happen.
[It also has a lovely touch of admitting this attitude might not work - "I will TRY to understand" - but something in the tone of his voice and the serenity of the actual song makes you think he WILL understand. Still. Always the possibility it could go wrong, and it's that sense of possibility that everything could go tits up, and he could find himself back being "an American aquarium drinker", or realising "the ashtray says you've been up all night" that makes Jeff Tweedy such a human songwriter. It even comes across in the way his voice breaks.]
It’s good to hear Jeff in that place. [Although of course I'm not going to fall into a trap of biographical fallacy and assume he's writing about himself, though just to be able to write that song he must be to at least some extent understand someone who DOES feel like that.] It’s A Good Thing to hear talented people making great art out of feeling together, content and happy for a change, instead of the constant fetishising of misery that pervades a lot of rock.
The point being that when people say that it’s somehow admirable for Amy Winehouse to appear to be on the brink of killing herself [I'm not sure how much Mark Ravenhill really means this, or how much is for effect, but still. {And isn't it depressing reading the responses just how many Guardian readers appear not to know who Ravenhill is??!!}] then I’m reminded of Lester Bangs writing about Astral Weeks …
As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, “S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can’t accept that we’ll never know.” Makes you want to jump out a fifth floor window rather than even read about it, but it’s hardly the end of the world; it’s not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken to casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boiled down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you’ve got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes’ problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. how much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the numbest mannekin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to destroy everything they touch - but then again, to tilt Madame George’s hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the realization that you must share the world with him is ultimately unbearable is to only go the first mile. The realization of living is just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. Please come back and leave me alone. But when we’re along together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss: it doesn’t make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. At such a moment, another breath is treason. that’s why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. You got their hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. Viler than the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of cigarettes. because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed.
… and I wonder whether this chimes more with Either Way or with Ravenhill’s admiration of self-destructing totems. I suspect it’s more in the Either Way camp, because one thing Jeff Tweedy is NOT doing is turning away, in some kind of slacker shoegazery way. He’s well aware of “the hurts that go on everywhere everyday”, but this is one song that says just now, just in the case of today’s weather/our relationship, I’m going to be accepting. Open to emotion, but accepting of it whatever it is. And I think that’s a very brave bit of songwriting.
This snippet of interview, however, seems to suggest that, at least on Pitchfork, some journalists don’t quite get it …
Pitchfork: The lyrics to Sky Blue Sky– especially in the first and last tracks– kind of talk about relationships that have gone on maybe too long.
Jeff Tweedy: No, I think the songs are more about relationships that are endless. I wouldn’t deny you your interpretation. I think both those songs are just kind of trying to express some acceptance of the idea that we don’t really know what’s going to happen and I’m going to try to do my part, my thing, as honestly and as with as much spirit as I can even in the face of that. The whole record to me is really, lyrically, geared towards being more accepting of ambiguity.
If you think the lyrics to Either Way suggest a relationship that has “gone on too long” then you just don’t get what he’s singing about. Which just goes to prove. Jeff Tweedy=genius. Nameless internet hacks=generally not genius.
