Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Jeff Tweedy

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Singer and songwriter Jeff Tweedy discusses cherished memories from his childhood kitchen in Illinois,and the invaluable time he spent at his kitchen table with his mother, and he explains how his favoritehome-cooked dish today–known simply as The Dish–became a Tweedy family hit. Jeff Tweedy is an American songwriter, musician, and record producer best known as the singer andguitarist of the band Wilco. Born and raised in Belleville, Illinois, Tweedy started his music career in highschool with Jay Farrar and their band The Plebes (which later became Uncle Tupelo). After UncleTupelo's fourth studio album, the band broke up in 1994, prompting Tweedy to form Wilco. Wilco foundcritical and commercial success on their albums Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born; the latterwent on to receive a Grammy for Best Alternative Album in 2005. Across Tweedy's career, he hasreleased fifteen studio albums: four with Uncle Tupelo, ten with Wilco, and one with his son Spencer,along with numerous collaborations with other musicians. He is the author of several books, including hismemoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) and most recently, World Within a Song.Tweedy lives with his wife, Sue Miller, in Chicago. They have two sons, Spencer and Sammy.Find the episode transcript here: https://www.audible.com/ymk/episode15 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Your Momma's Kitchen includes conversations about addiction. Please listen with care. I think if we're just talking about a kitchen, then our kitchen growing up was the only place people congregated. But it would be more over card games, be more over beers, it would be more over my mother and I, especially alone late at night, especially when I reached adolescence. All of the heart-to-heart conversations would be sitting across from each other at a yellow Formica kitchen table.

Welcome to Your M Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how we're shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids. I'm Michele Norris. Today I'm talking with singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer, and frontman of the beloved band Wilcoe. I'm talking about Jeff Tweety.

For more than 30 years, Jeff's heartfelt, delicate, and beautiful alt countrycountry in rock music has won him fans the world over, beginning with his early band called Uncle Tupelo. In the early 2000s with the release of Wilcoe's album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it's catchy at gentle hits like Jesus, et cetera, and War on War, Jeff jumped into a new echelon of rock stardom,

sold out stadiums, a huge and devoted fan base, and a Grammy for best alternative album for a ghost disborn. Jeff has a way with words as a songwriter and as an author. His recent memoir, World Within a Song, had me laughing and crying and thinking deeply about his ability to find grace in even the most difficult moments with the people we truly love. Today Jeff is the devoted father of two boys and he's proud of a long and loving marriage to his wife Susie.

That kind of family stability is not the kind of thing many rock stars can claim. Now the reward is even sweeter for Jeff because of the personal challenges he's faced. First, growing up in an Illinois factory town where the jobs and then the optimism slowly dried up while his parents wrestled with their own disappointments and dashed dreams. And then as he got older and entered the music business, he confronted his own challenges with anxiety and addiction, illnesses that had plagued his family for generations. Jeff channeled the pain of some of those hardships into soulful music, and as you will hear a commitment to speaking honestly about those peaks and valleys

with wisdom and humor to light a path for others. Now, even if you've never heard of his ban Wilco, the contours of his life will be familiar to many. Coming up, Jeff talks about the beautiful relationship with his mom who worked hard and smart, but never got the recognition she deserved, and the special dish that's at the center of his family life today, that's actually the name.

It's simply called the dish. I really love this honest and vulnerable conversation with Jeff Tweety, and I think you will too. Jeff Tweety, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Where are you right now? I am in Chicago in a isolation booth at the studio. I go to every day. The loft studio. I go to every day, the loft studio, Wilco headquarters. Okay, Wilco headquarters, I like the sound of that.

You sound great, I'm so glad I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Me too, thank you. So I know a little bit about where you grew up, you come from Belleville, Illinois, so I want you to do me a favor. If I were to come visit your childhood home and I made my way to Belleville, made my way to your front door and walked in and walked in the kitchen.

What would that journey look like? Well, rolling into Belleville, you're rolling near St. Louis, near the Mississippi River. It's a typical Mississippi River Valley terrain a little bit sloped, not particularly hilly or anything. Belville was when I was growing up, I was always told that it had the world's longest main street, but I don't know if that's verifiable or not. But I think it was like seven or eight miles long. I grew up on 40th Street, right off of Main Street, but if you would have come in to our house, my mom would have been very proud of her decorating.

She designed kitchens and bathrooms and there was a lot of moth in our entire house seemed to be her favorite color. She was bold in her choices. We had a green living room and a mall kitchen and a really bright red bathroom. Did that reflect her personality, those bold choices? In a way, I think it represented who my mother would have liked

to have been. I think she was probably much bolder in her design choices and her colors. She wasn't boystress, she was a little bit shy, but very a very good listener, very good friend. But she wasn't the life of the party. She was the overseeing conscience of my dad being the life of the party. The person sitting in the corner going, oh no. Tell me a little bit more about your parents. Your dad's name was Bob. Mom's name is Joanne. Where did you people come from? Well, my mom and dad met in high school. My mother got pregnant. They dropped out of high school, which is what it happened to my grandmother.

My grandmother got pregnant in high school and had my mom. So that was like tradition almost, it seemed like, but they both dropped out of high school. My dad got a job on the Altman Southern Railway. Who remind me, what did he do on the railroad? Well initially he worked in the switching yards, which is primarily where he worked his whole life, 46 years, the switching yards, which is primarily where he worked his whole life, 46 years, and he started out underneath the trains and the transition from steam to diesel. And at some point, someone recognized that my father was pretty bright and recommended him for a program where they would send him to Arizona to learn early computer programming with punch cards.

And so he did that and then he graduated from underneath the trains to in the tower overseeing the switch yards and programming computers. And eventually he became a superintendent of the switching yards, which is pretty much, I think, where he was when I came around. I'm much later than my other siblings, 10 years younger than my youngest brother, 15 years younger than my sister, and I have another brother in between. So he was pretty established by the time I came

around. My mother, I have a very different childhood from my siblings because by the time I came around, my mother had decided that she wanted to work. I think for most of their childhoods, she maybe did side things like Tupperware parties and whatever else she could do, but she taught herself drafting and learned how to design kitchens and bathrooms and got a job at a

local, for a local kitchen design center. Thank you. It was, yeah, kitchens, bathrooms, you know, home interior, basically. She was really good at it. She was a saleswoman and she was the only one. And I was really proud of my mom because she was the only one of these snobby men who would go to poor people's houses and not just assume that they didn't have the money. And a lot of times, it didn't end up being particularly fruitful, but she ended up doing as well as they all did because she was a harder worker, I think. They all would pay her for her drawings eventually, too, because her drawings were so much better than any of theirs.

So she would not only draw her kitchens to display to people, but she would draw everyone else's drawings. So I always thought that was pretty remarkable that they both managed to be really accomplished, but without much of an education at all. You know, I'm interested in your mom's work drawing these kitchens because you're almost... It's a blueprint for people's dreams in some ways.

You were deciding to invest in your family. Right. And the world you wanted to create, right? It was more than just getting that big a manistove. It was like, I'm thinking about the kind of Christmas as I want to have. And the kind of dinners I want to serve, she was sort of serving up people's dreams in some ways. She really was, and it was really beautiful because she was really focused on being able to present to them a beautiful realization of their dreams. Her drawings are really exquisite. I always still have a whole lot of them.

So she's really, really good at it. She was great at what she did. I'm interested in your mother's kitchen. What did it look like as a kitchen designer? Was your kitchen tricked out at home? You know, Michelle, I think this is one of the things I have a little bit of fear about and having been asked to participate in a discussion like this.

Because there's a lot of dissonance in my mother's relationship to people's kitchens, her own skill set, and my actual experience of my mother's kitchen, because it was pretty tricked out. It was pretty state of the art, pretty early on. We had one of the first microwaves that were commercially available. So it was beautiful. It was nice as a small kitchen. It wasn't a dream kitchen by her standards for other people,

certainly not on the richer end of the spectrum of the people that she facilitated. But because my mother worked, I always joke that my mother's cooking was McDonald's, was like a flay of fish. And I would get picked up from school and we would go through the drive-through lane at McDonald's, get a flay of fish and fries and a Coke and get dropped off at home and she would go back to work and she would go on her calls or house calls and all that and she would come home about eight or nine in the evening and so she did not cook a whole lot. I don't have a whole lot of memories of my mother's cooking.

And I think if you asked her at the time I was around, she just, she resented cooking. I was so fearful that I'm probably going to be one of the worst people you ever talked to about this because I didn't have any model behavior of things that I think are very, very important now, but I did not have them as a child. We did not eat together. Let me just say you shouldn't feel bad about that because when we ask this question, tell me about your mom's kitchen, it's not with any kind of expectation.

Yeah. A lot of things happen in the kitchen also that have nothing to do with food. Yeah. Well, my dad probably cooked more than my mom, but not in the kitchen in the backyard. He was a barbecueer and I wouldn't recommend his barbecue to most people because it would be mostly an excuse to stand in the backyard and drink beer all day. So we had a lot of very, very well done pork steaks. Oh, no. Growing up, it was pork steaks every weekend. And they were very, very tough because that wasn't the point. I think it was my dad liked to be outside and listen to the ball game on the radio and cook some pork steaks. I think if we're just talking about a kitchen, then our kitchen growing up was the only place people

congregated. But it would be more over card games, be more over beers, it would be more over my mother and I, especially alone late at night, especially when I reached adolescence, all of the heart to heart conversations would be sitting across from each other at a yellow formica kitchen table. We eventually got a little bit nicer one, but she hung onto that yellow formica table for a lot longer than you would expect for somebody that has her finger on the pulse of design trends at her job. But yeah, that's my memory of an adolescence period of my life

when she would pull her drafting utensils to the side, sit down, smoke a cigarette, and talk to me. Yeah. You know, I think she really liked being looked at as wise, and she loved offering her counsel. As much as Jeff loved sitting with his mom at that kitchen table, he'd eventually come to realize that along with their companionship watching all those late night movies, there was something roiling beneath the surface for his mother.

And the more he began to realize that the more he also realized that he needed to find an independent path toward boundaries. You actually wrote about a memory you have that the TV's on and you go and you sit next to her and you're a bit of a night out too. Yeah. There was a communion between the two of you.

Yeah, I think it was my mom, for her to unwind, would be with a glass of Coca-Cola and a cigarette and an old movie and she was not great at setting boundaries for a young person. But it felt good to me because she trusted me. If I got up and went to school then she didn't think there was anything wrong with me staying up all night watching movies with her. She said if I was like I live up to my to school, then she didn't think there was anything wrong with me staying up all night watching movies with her. She's like, I live up to my responsibilities, which I think is, you know, I guess that instilled that habit in me because I do feel a responsibility to live up to my commitments

and in spite of my level of rest. But early on, yeah, I would just sit on the couch with her and watch Andy Hardy movies, Mickey Rooney, Babes and Arms. She really loved Judy Garland. Yeah. She absolutely would be transported by these. I think she might have spent a lot of time in the movie theater when she was really young, probably not first-run movie theaters, because I don't think that she ever had a whole lot of money growing up. I think that she grew up pretty deprived, but I do think that she wanted to be a singer and she really loved old movies.

So I think she saw herself in a lot of the characters Judy Garland would play, you know. Yeah, yeah. She never sang, though. I mean, that was one of the saddest things I think about when I think about my mom is how often she told me she wanted to be a singer when she was growing up and how I almost never heard her sing. Really, not even to the radio, not Humming in the car? Nope.

Nope. Every once in a while, she would sing a little bit of a nursery rhyme or something like that. But I talked to my sister about it too. And she was surprised that mom had told me that she wanted to be a singer. It's really, like I said before, my siblings and I almost feel like we had different parents.

Yeah. Well, I'm the youngest in my family, too, by 10 years. Oh, wow. And so I understand what you're saying. It's a different epoch. Yeah. And I think that there's something that goes on where parents maybe are more permissive and less restrictive.

My sister's a hues to joke that they let you juggle knives. Yeah. They let you do anything you wanted to do because they felt like they just had a different set of rules than they did. And maybe that's one of the reasons your mom let you stay up late at night. I think that's part of it. I think she was lonely also.

And that's maybe not a healthy boundary for a child to feel that responsibility for their parents' loneliness and to be a reliable companion. I think her and my dad, they got together so young and it was just so fraught to have the kind of, I think, attention and, I don't know, intimacy that she would have liked.

I think they loved each other, but I think it was a difficult relationship. And I think that she got a lot of emotional support from a little kid. I think that's like, I don't want to get too far into it, but I think that that, like, if Freud was here, they would say that I would be an uncontested, eatable victor. So did young Jeff Tweedy understand that that was what was going on? Oh, no, no. I just love my mom and I just love. My dad was the bad guy a lot when I was growing up. I just thought that he would get up and yell at everybody,

to turn everything off and go to bed. And she would just tell him to shut up and go back to bed, Bob. I'm painting a pretty picture, but it was almost a routine. It was almost a bit. That's probably very familiar to a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, what you were saying that your siblings say that your parents let you juggle knives. You know, my siblings were jealous of my Coca-Cola intake.

They, they, uh, they all claim that they were given a thimble of coke every Friday and that I basically had it on tap in my bedroom. Yeah, that sounds about right. There was a problem though, I think at some point, because of my exalted status and my mother's imagination, she at point, had a difficult time hearing the truth of me. In fact, because this is going to be very, very personal, but because the amount

of alcoholism in her life and in our family, by the time I was drinking, my mother did not think that I was drinking. Even when I would tell her, I'd worried about how much I'd drink. And she would say, I don't think you'd drink that much. And by her standards, that's probably true. But by the standard of how much is healthy or was good for me, that was not true. So it contributed to maybe some unwise belief that I had somehow

sidestepped the genetic trajectory of a potential problem because I wasn't as bad as the people that she had seen. So that wasn't particularly helpful in getting, I don't know, maybe the help I needed in an earlier age. I may honestly, I don honestly, I don't think she ever believed it. And I remember calling her from the hospital, from rehab and telling her that I'm in rehab and that I'm detoxing. And she said, why? It's really kind of amazing. And I said, well, because I'm an addict.

And she's like, I've never seen it be a problem for you. So like most families, it's complicated. It's really complicated. It's like a beautiful relationship that I cherish. And at the same time, some real damage was done by not intentionally, but by a lack of an ability to set boundaries, but never having boundaries set for her. She did not have anybody model adult behavior for her in her life.

It's very easy to see how these things become generational, are being become a family affliction. It's never just one person. It's never just it's the whole family and then it becomes the whole lineage of the family very Easily it's very difficult to break free from those those historical paths. Well, there's a lot of you know Your dad worked out of freight train you talk about a freight train. That's a freight train of Forward momentum and it's really hard to break that if you have that family tradition and you tell someone that I think Dad worked on a freight train. You talk about a freight train. That's a freight train of forward momentum. And it's really hard to break that. If you have that family tradition and you tell someone that I think I'm drinking too much

for them to validate that. Does it mean that they have to examine their own habits? Well, my mother didn't drink, but she was absolutely a poster child for a codependency. I think that yeah, it would have required her to take some time to self-examine what works for her about a person that drinks, being with someone reliably unreliable.

My dad was reliable as a breadwinner. You could set a clock by him as a terms of his routine, but reliably unreliable and in emotional support. You know, reliably unreliable in, was he gonna do the right thing when it came to going to a school play and supporting me at school or something like that? No, it would have been too uncomfortable for him.

And I made peace with that after my mother died and was able to see him as a much, much more complicated figure also than just the baddie that I had grown up with because I think he struggled with all the same issues I did, but without any, any understanding whatsoever of the psychological components that were compelling him to behave in a certain way. I think he had massive anxiety socially. I think he was doing the best he could. I think that they both were doing the best they could do. Unfortunately, you know, for most of us, our best isn't always the best for everybody at times. You know, we fall short. And my heart goes out to both of them.

I get emotional thinking about it right now because I feel like they both deserve so much more. And I feel so fortunate in that I was able to stop the train of, I was able to get off the train. I don't know if I stopped the train. I think that in my terms of my family, that train's still going, you know, that I'm not on it.

I really appreciate the way that you have talked about anxiety and addiction and how you have coped with both of those things over time in your music, in your writing, and how you have coped with both of those things over time in your music, in your writing, and interviews that you've done, I think that takes a lot of courage and a lot of bravery, and there are a lot of people who look up to you

who've probably benefited from your openness. So thank you for that. Oh, thank you. Well, one of the people that was in rehab with me and city hospital in Chicago, a lot of what you're given as a gift is comes from your other fellow sufferers, you know, the other people that are there, sometimes against their will, sometimes court ordered,

but a lot of them have been through it many, many times. And one of the things that sticks out in my mind that I was told then, that I was reminded of just now by your comments, you have to give it away to keep it. There's a belief in recovery that unless you share your experiences, you're likely to repeat your mistakes because part of being healthy is being able to keep that in focus. That part of you that isn't ideal, that you don't get to choose that part of you. And

it's not really going to go away, but you can keep an eye on it. And one of the ways you keep an eye on it is by telling people the truth about yourself. Honestly, it just feels good to not lie to yourself, and you might as well tell everybody else. More coming up with Jeff Tweedy on Food and Family Life after the break. You're listening to the audible original original at your mom's kitchen. Like what you're hearing, the next episode is available now, exclusively from Audible. You can listen to new episodes on Audible two weeks before you can hear them anywhere else. As I learned reading Jeff's memoir, he had had a long time dream, or as he might call

it a delusion of becoming a famous guitarist and musician long before he even knew how to play the guitar. Due to something that he's not even sure he can put his finger on, Jeff eventually made the dream come true, but there was a lot of fake it tell you make it bravado, and tell him mastered the art of music and songwriting and his unique way of connecting with an audience. His mother, who would always wanted to be a singer herself, lived long enough to see her son live out his dream. It's so interesting that you say that your mom always wanted to be a singer, but you never got to hear sing, but you are a musician and loved the world over how much of that.

Did she get to experience. I think I'm really happy actually that she got to experience probably the peak, you know, and before she passed away, I mean, she was alive when we won a Grammy. She was alive to see my face on the cover of some magazines. But she was a believer from way back, from day one, when Uncle Tupelo was before we were Uncle Tupelo, we would play shows in small towns around Belleville, like Mill Stoddell and Oye. We would play shows at old halls, like the leader crons hall. And my mother would rent them out. And you could rent one out for like $200.

And she would collect the money at the door. And so she paid her dues for a long time before she really saw the rewards. And she was definitely very nervous about me not finishing my education and putting all of my eggs into one basket, so to speak. But she did get the relief of knowing that people responded. And she loved going to shows. She loved being in the audience and the attention that she would get also.

She loved from fans that would come up to her and acknowledge her. My dad and her both really loved being celebrities that shows. If you're ever at a show when my dad was there, there's a good chance that my dad bought a picture of beer for your table or poured you a beer out of his picture. It was a good chance that my dad bought a picture of beer for your table or poured you a beer out of his picture. It was a pretty common thing.

Yeah, walk around. That's my boy up there. Yep, that's right. When you did start playing the guitar, was your mother, did you get a sense that she was somewhere in the house, you're to the bedroom door listening to you? Yes, I know. I mean, she was very supportive of the loud bands practicing in our house when we had room to do that and things like that. But the thing that is really, my mother was my first audience for any song I would write for a long time, especially when I lived close by. I would sit down at the kitchen table like one of our heart to heart and I'd say, I just wrote this song and I play it from my mom.

And she was a very, very forgiving audience, obviously. It was an intense way to learn how to feel someone listening. There's a difference to being heard and being listened to. What's the difference? That's something that any person that performs on music in front of an audience has to be able to tune into to some degree. You can't just be up there playing your music

knowing that you're doing it right or correctly. You have to be able to feel the words landing, feel the music being consumed, being taken in. There's a given take of energy, of understanding that we're being comprehended. That's such an important thing. And sitting one on one, that's all you ever are really doing with an audience. You can be 10,000 people, it could be 50 people, it could be a million people. Those are numbers that don't mean anything because it's still one person at a time, one consciousness at a time that you're trying to reach and connect with.

And I think that was an extraordinarily profound gift to be given the time, like very real amounts of time, like I'm gonna put my everything away for 50 minutes and listen to my son talk about his song and play it for me. That's where would I be without connecting those dots that that's actually what it still is, that it's still a heart to heart over a kitchen table in a lot of ways. No wonder your mom didn't want to give away that kitchen table.

Of course she wanted to keep that. Yep. You said something interesting early in our conversation that you felt like you didn't always get the kinds of things in your childhood kitchen that you know now are important and you want to make sure that you provide for your own family. What were you referring to and what do you do in your own family now with your wife and your two sons to make sure that you're creating the kind of kitchen that you think serves you and serves your family well. Well, what I was referring to in terms of what I didn't get a lot of, if hardly any of growing up was eating together. My parents had given up on that possibly by the time I came around, or maybe it was never really a part of our family

culture, which I think is tragic. At this point in my life, I feel like that was just an extremely tragic missing of an opportunity to know each other better on a day-to-day basis that we did not have, which I did not learn the importance of until I met my wife and we had kids. early on, it was not natural to me, but it was pretty easy to see pretty quickly how important it was. Because once they were able to talk, once our kids were able to talk, there were things that you would get out of them at a dinner table that you know you would have never ever heard about.

You would have never heard what happened to them that day without that moment for things to slow down enough for it to occur to them to to share it or you know like it's just like would get bulldozed out of the way by life if you weren't consciously taking yourself out of the speed of life and eating slowly together. So we tried to do that as much as possible and as a person who was on the road a lot as a traveling musician. Obviously I didn't get to participate

in as many of those meals as I would have liked but my wife was very adamant about eating together. And to this day, I still think it's even with the band. I think it's really important for us to share meals together from time to time on the road to just face to face across from somebody. And I just don't think there's any other place where certain things will come up

in conversation then at a dinner table with the comfort of being fed. Add it into the mix. You know, like I feel like it sets you up in a place where you're maybe secure enough to confront some things that you aren't maybe wishing to think about. I've told people before, I didn't really eat together when I was a kid and I've had people react like, oh, chef. It is, so a lot of most people I've met. It's a sad, it's a sad revelation to hear that that wasn't a part of growing up. But it's wonderful that you do it now and it's wonderful that you figured out how to do it as a traveling musician.

Yeah, even when we go somewhere as a family now that's always eat together. And I don't know, it's my favorite, my favorite thing to do pretty much. So if we ask your sons, what was the dish that defined all those family meals? What would be their favorite thing? Well, this is probably a little bit later than their early,

their formative experiences as tots and preteens. But there's actually a dish in our family called the dish that is just a really, really simple, healthy, vegetarian dish that we started eating a lot in their high school years. And it's basically brown rice, chopped baby tomatoes, chives, diced avocado, or sliced up avocado, and sesame chili oil. That's it.

It's so fulfilling somehow. And everybody in our family loves it. You know, just a really easy, simple meal to make. And we'd all end up being pretty full. And we started doing it quite a bit. And so, yeah, when you ask my family, if you use the word dish, they're immediately going to think of the dish. Okay, so that's like when I asked about a dish,

I didn't realize I was asking about the dish. think of the dish. Okay, so that's like when I asked about a dish, I didn't realize I was asking about the dish. It is the dish. And it happened because I went to some vegan restaurant somewhere on the road. I think it was in Minneapolis and I had that exact dish there and I came home and I told Susie,

I was like, I had this amazing meal. If you ever go to Minneapolis with me, I would, she'd go have this. And this is how much I don't know about cooking. And she said, well, only what was in it. And I explained it to her and she said, I can make that. We can make that.

You can make that. And I'm like, really? And she made it and it was exactly as good or better than the one I'd had at the restaurant. So it just became our thing. You worked it into the rotation and now it's the family, the family staple. It's a pretty simple thing to get going. You've written a couple songs about your mother.

Did you perform those for her? No. I mean, I've written a lot of songs about both my parents. There's one song that I wrote called, Please Tell My Brothers. And it's like it's from the song from the road. Please tell my brothers, I miss them still over the mountains on their phone bill. Please tell my sister, I miss her too, with my nieces and nephews and their swimming pool. Please tell my sister, I miss her too, with my nieces and nephews and their swimming pool. Please tell my father, I love them still. Forget the railroad, forget those bills. And then please tell my mother, I miss her the most.

And as I travel from coast to coast, I feel her love and I feel her ghost. Please tell my mother, I miss her the most. And I wrote that before she died, because I think one of the biggest, I think definitely my greatest fear in my life, like a lot of people that grow up with these kind of really relationships with their parents that are, I don't know, I think everybody's big,

worst fear is their mom dying, probably, it's probably not that unique. It's extremely difficult for me to picture me continuing without my mother because of this added element of not really knowing where the boundaries were when I was younger. So that song existed before my mom died. When my mom died, my dad insisted that I play that

at her wake. And I couldn't do it. I was like the most I've ever not been able to perform in my life and I really wish I had said no, but it was very difficult to say no to my father at the time. Since then, most of the songs have been both about their memory and about how much of them I still am. In fact, a lot of the lyrics are like, I am my mother. There's a song on a record from last year, like I am my mother. And it's kind of about both of them.

So all of those things still swim around in me. And when you write songs, it's an act of discovery. I don't set out to write about anything. It's just they're in there. And so they come out in different ways on different songs. And I'm glad they do because it's a nice way to be reminded of them, not just writing the song, but being asked to sing the song years later and realizing that that's a part of it. I'm glad that those things come out and serve us also because we all reap the dividends. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks so much. I've loved talking to you. Well, it's lovely talking to you, Michelle. I really, you know, I agree. I could talk to you for a long time and I'd be very, very happy. I love this conversation.

Let's do it again. Anytime. The sun, dear mother, I miss you the most. And as I travel from coast to coast I feel your love and I feel your ghost Listen dear mother, I miss you the most Listen dear mother,, miss you the most. Through food, through card games, through song, no matter what happens in our kitchen,

it all simmers inside us throughout our lives. And in Jeff Tweedie's case, those memories, through the lens of time, also turned into music. Music that sings both of the beauty, the difficulties, but most of all the love that he experienced there in his kitchen. Thanks so much to Jeff for sharing the memories of his mother's beautifully designed kitchens, that yellow for myka table, and above all, Jeff reminiscing about his mother being his first and possibly his best audience. Now, if you want to make the dish that Jeff and

his family make in his kitchen, that thing that he simply calls the dish, well, you've basically heard the whole thing in the interview, but I'll post it on my Instagram as well, and we'll have clear instructions. And as a bonus, we will also share the recipe for some special Christmas paintbrush cookies that Jeff made with this mom each holiday. It turns out she did use that fancy oven every so often. Thanks so much for joining me today on your mom's kitchen. I'm Michele Norris until next time and let's make sure there is a next time. Stay Boundiful.

This has been a higher ground and audible original produced by a higher ground studios. Senior producer Natalie Rin, producer Sonia Tan, and associate producer Angel Carreras. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Epen and Roy Baum. Higher ground audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camilla Thertacouse. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mook Demohan, Dan Fierman, and me,

Michele Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Nick DiAngelo and Ann Hepperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. A tutorial in web support from

Melissa Bear and say what media, our talent booker is Angela Paluso. And special thanks this week to Threshold Studios. Chief Content Officer for Audible is Rachel Giazza, and that's it. Goodbye, everybody.

Make sure and come back to see what we're serving up next week. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. you