Little rooms

10 things worth sharing this week

“Low Overhead,” marker + newspaper, 2014

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. “Great things start in little rooms.” That’s André 3000 of Outkast in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech, referencing Jack White of The White Stripes, who told young artists in his acceptance speech to “get your hands dirty and drop the screens and get out in your garage or your little room and get obsessed.” In my opinion, White’s “Little Room” is the greatest song ever written about success. Here it is in its entirety:
   
   “Well, you’re in your little room
   and you’re working on something good
   but if it’s really good
   you’re gonna need a bigger room
   and when you’re in the bigger room
   you might not know what to do
   you might have to think of
   how you got started
   sitting in your little room!”
   
   

2. “I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.”
   —Kenneth Clark, Civilisation
   
   

3. We saw Jeff Tweedy at the Paramount here in Austin, TX playing songs off his new triple record Twilight Override — aka “Sad-inista” — with a band of musicians he’s known since they were little kids: Macie Stewart on violin, siblings Liam Kazar and Sima Cunningham on guitar and bass, and Tweedy’s own sons, Sammy and Spencer, on keyboard and drums. This family-based lineup was particularly special to me because Jeff has the last quote in Don’t Call It Art, my forthcoming book about what I learned from playing with my two sons:

   

   I was 18 years old when I plucked that quote out of a 2002 interview in Newsweek and pinned it on my bulletin board. I found it 17 years later while going through my stuff at my mom’s house, realizing my own boys were about the same age as the Tweedy boys were at the time of the interview! (“Plant yourself like a seed / take your time...”)

   

   
   

4. Congratulations to Hrishikesh Hirway on the 300th episode of Song Exploder! It’s been a favorite podcast of mine for over a decade. Don’t miss the recent episode about the evolution of A-Ha’s “Take on Me.” One of the things that makes the show great is that Hrisihi is a musician himself and a real student of the craft of songwriting. (Bonus link: Last year he interviewed Jeff Tweedy about his book How To Write One Song.)
   
   

5. Matt Berninger’s cure for writer’s block: Writing on baseballs.
   
   

6. With the kids: We saw cartoonist Nathan Hale’s well-honed draw-and-talk about Lewis and Clark at the Texas Book Festival last weekend and it was hilarious and great. My boys love his Hazardous Tales books. We’ve had a couple of really good pizza nights together, too: We liked the horror-movie-for-the-whole-family Sketch (2024) and the better-than-it-needed-to-be Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022), both of which mixed animation with live action to really good effect. (Earlier this year we loved Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit.)
   
   

7. Austin, TX: If you’re doing the Austin Studio Tour this weekend, I loved the show of turn of the 20th century photographs of Austin in the restored carriage house and peeking inside the most-definitely-haunted house at the Flower Hill Center.
   
   

8. “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!” How guest Hans Christian Andersen destroyed his friendship with Charles Dickens.
   
   

9. “First he became aware how much he needed the winter to rest and mend; then he suspected the winter wasn’t long enough to mend him.” I re-read Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams in anticipation of the film adaptation coming to Netflix later this month. It’s as sad and beautiful as I remembered, but also funnier. I recommend listening to this 2003 event when Johnson read from the story and discussed his writing with writer Chris Offutt. Johnson’s writing advice: “Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.”
   
   

10. “To me poems / feel like rooms / you enter / again and again.” My latest typewriter interview is with poet Matthew Zapruder.

    

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xoxo,

Austin

photo by @tannvvisingh