“As a parent sometimes you feel like you’re supposed to always be a fount of wisdom, and doing something meaningful and enriching with your children,” Tweedy said. “My mom, she never slept for very long. She took naps at like different hours of the day. I never had bedtimes, so I spent a lot of time watching old movies with my mom on the couch while she fell asleep with a lit cigarette. Is that good parenting? I don’t know, but it’s meaningful to me. It’s a scene in my life that evokes warm feeling toward my mom. In spite of it being this thing where you’d go, ‘Well, that’s terrible. You know, the little boy should have been in bed and not around cigarette smoke and not in danger of being burned alive.’”

I was torn about including the fact that Tweedy’s son is the drummer for this project in the title of this link. That shouldn’t be why it gets attention or praise. But, as a long-time fan of Wilco, and a father in the making, I find the story of the little boy drumming on his Dad’s lap at the end of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart now making music on stage with him just crushingly sweet and beautiful.

Luckily, the album’s pretty good too.

Joe Stracci