Jeff Tweedy of Wilco was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night to promote a new album ("Love is the King") and a book, "How To Write One Song". He explained that he doesn't write songs in the plural; rather, he writes one song, and then he writes another song. This idea of working not with genre but with each individual work also comes up in Stephanie Burt's "Don't Read Poetry": she argues that one should not talk about reading poetry but about reading poems, with each poem understood on its own terms. I'm only a poet when I'm writing a poem, only a songwriter when writing a song. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 October)
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