World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life, and Life That Changed My Music

Tweedy (Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)), cofounder of the rock band Wilco and alt-country group Uncle Tupelo, delivers a spirited memoir centered on his relationships to such songs as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” and Judy Collins’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” In short sections organized by song, Tweedy holds forth on the ways these tunes­—which he often loves, sometimes hates, and occasionally feels indifference toward—have shaped his life and relationships, delving into his own creative process along the way (“When you hear the occasional whistled refrain in my own songs,” he writes, “it’s only there because Otis [Redding] let me sit down on the dock beside him” in “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”). “Shotgun” by Junior Walker and the All-Stars stirs up memories of marrying his wife, Susie (a tongue-in-cheek selection, as she was pregnant at the time); “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five convinced him, at 15, that hip-hop was “a vitally important new form of musical expression” rather than “some pop music anomaly.” Tweedy’s snappy prose (“I reflexively reject everything Bon Jovi does”) and dry wit elevate the proceedings. This entertaining and enlightening survey hits the right note. Agent: Josh Grier, Ember Lab. (Nov.)