Wilco’s longevity has turned the band into a sort of self-sustaining universe, with enough ardent, longtime fans to continue doing pretty much only what they want to do. (Lindsey Jordan, the 19-year-old singer and guitarist who records as Snail Mail and put out one of 2018’s most acclaimed albums, tweeted recently: “my perfect day starts at a cracker barrel and ends at a wilco concert :(”) The band, whose lineup now hasn’t changed in a little over a decade, has its own record label and puts on its own music festival every summer in North Adams, Massachusetts. On the side, Tweedy has produced or written a trio of albums for the legendary Mavis Staples. And at the end of the month, he’ll release his first full-fledged solo album, WARM, a collection of quiet, bracing songs about family and mortality.

Given that Tweedy doesn’t even “like music memoirs very much”—he wouldn’t read Keith Richards’s because “I have this really, maybe unhealthy, identification with things I’m reading sometimes. I used to have it when I was a kid a lot more, when I would read a book about Picasso and I’d wear a beret for a fucking week, you know?”—the choice to write one right now may seem curious.

“But if you associate a memoir more with stories to tell” rather than the end of a career, Tweedy later told me, “and, in my case, maybe some particularly common struggles that are treated often as if they’re uncommon, I felt like I had an opportunity to be open about something that I sincerely believe people should be open about.”

All those conflicts and struggles that make for great memoir material also make for great music mythologizing. The albums that launched Wilco into a new stratum of critical adoration in the late 90s and early 00s were written during Tweedy’s unhealthiest years, and in some cases at the height of his creative clash with his bandmate Jay Bennett. (Bennett died of a fentanyl overdose in 2009, and one of the revelations of Let’s Go is that Tweedy writes that he fired Bennett from Wilco to preserve his own health.) In 2005, Wilco won its only Grammy for A Ghost Is Born, an album that Tweedy describes in the book as molded by a “looming sense of imminent demise.” In 2004, after finishing recording that album, he finally entered a dual-diagnosis clinic to treat his addiction and anxiety. “I wanted [that] record to be an elemental tool for Spencer and Sammy to reconstruct my worldview,” he writes. “To have some deeper connection to the dad they’d lost.”

In short, Tweedy told me, he felt that he needed to write the memoir as “an argument against the notion of ‘suffering equals art.’”

What Tweedy really wanted at The Strand was a book about an Arctic expedition.

“I read a lot of nonfiction,” he said. About “stuff like Stalingrad. It’s good for you if you have a panic disorder, to read about tales of survival in horrific circumstances. Like Arctic expeditions? I've read every book about Arctic expeditions.”

If explorers can get through that, his thought was, “then I can get through my heart racing because I have to do an interview.” I told him I hoped this was less scary than an Arctic expedition. “It’s similar,” he responded. “Am I a hero? Probably.”

In *Let’s Go,” Tweedy explains how he wrote one of his simplest, most oblique, and most evocative lyrics. Any Wilco fan will have puzzled over “I assassin down the avenue” from the song “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” and it’s tempting to simply attribute to Tweedy an uncanny ability to marry the inscrutable with the affecting. It turns out it “doesn’t really mean anything. It comes from a writing exercise . . . but it’s amazing how hard it is to put words next to each other without some meaning being generated.”