Watch Jeff Tweedy Talk About Why Wilco Named Their Album Star Wars & Play “Let’s Go Rain” On Colbert

Watch Jeff Tweedy Talk About Why Wilco Named Their Album Star Wars & Play “Let’s Go Rain” On Colbert

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy has been showing up on Stephen Colbert’s television show since way back in the Colbert Report days, and I get the sense that the two really are friends, or at least mutual admirers. So it was cool to see Tweedy show up on Colbert’s Late Show last night and sit down, for the first time, for an interview on his couch. Tweedy’s got a busy month, with his memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) coming out today and his solo album WARM on the way in a few weeks. And on last night’s show, he promoted both.

Talking to Colbert, Tweedy gave a couple of fun anecdotes. One of them, which also appears in the book, is about how Tweedy tried to convince his third-grade friends that he’d written Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run — the entire album — playing all the instruments himself. They didn’t bite. He also explained the rationale behind Wilco naming their 2015 album Star Wars. To hear him tell it, the band wanted to get sued and to change the album’s name to Cease And Desist, but nobody sued them over it.

Tweedy also performed, knocking out a not-yet-released song from WARM. He and his band played “Let’s Go Rain,” a warm amble that Tweedy called “a joyous plea for the sweet relief of death.” I’m not good enough at recognizing Tweedy kids to say which ones were in the band, but I think there’s at least one in there. Watch the interview and performance below.

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir Of Recording And Discording With Wilco, Etc. is out now via Penguin. WARM is out 11/30 on dBpm Records

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