Cut Worms on Recording With Jeff Tweedy, Songwriting, and the World at Large

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Here's the latest from me: I've been a fan of Max Clarke's work as Cut Worms pretty much since the beginning and his latest Transmitter is another very solid collection of songs from someone who seems to be a conduit for making music in general. (We're talking about someone who released a double album and pretty much nailed it!) Something of note: Wilco's very own Jeff Tweedy produced the latest, and when I hopped on a call with Max a few weeks ago his time in the 'stu with the don dadda himself was just one of a few topics we touched on. Check it out:

Talk to me a little bit about how this one came together.
I'd been writing songs for a bit since the last record, and then we got to go on tour with Wilco in 2024. That eventually led to the opportunity to work on the record at the Loft with Jeff. It all came together pretty smoothly after that.

Walk me through getting hooked up with Jeff, since opening for Wilco kicked things off in that regard.
I'd been aware that they knew who I was back in 2020. Jeff and Spencer covered one of my songs on their little podcast thing they were doing, which was a surprise to me at the time. A few years later, I got an email from Glenn Kotche, who wanted me to come out and play a private show at his wife's surprise birthday party in Chicago, which was really nice. Shortly after that, we got an offer to go on tour with Wilco, which was really exciting.

The tour was great. It was about two weeks long. I didn't really get to talk to Jeff at all during that time. He seems like he keeps to himself on the road. But I got to meet him kind of at the end of the tour, and I mentioned that I was gonna be working on a new record, and he offered to let me record at the Loft. Later on, when I reached out to him about it, I offhandedly said, "If you'd want to be involved in the recording somehow, let me know." I forget what he said, but it was somehow communicated that he was interested in producing the record.

Before all this happened, what was your level of familiarity with the Wilco catalog?
I've been a fan of his for for a long time, probably since I was in high school. It never even would've occurred to me that ever working with him or Wilco would be an option. I never even entertained that idea. They've been at the top level in the music business for quite a long time now. You never expect to meet these people, much less get to work with them. So it was a surprise, and a good one. Probably the first record [of theirs] I really got into was Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and then Sky Blue Sky right after that.

They're one of those bands where they have such an impressive catalog that you can't go wrong with any of their records.
Yeah, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot being my favorite one is kind of basic.

I mean, it's a big one!
With any artist, really, I'm most interested in the hits. I love greatest hits records. That was how I got into a lot of music. I'd get the greatest hits CDs, go through them, and from there I'd dig into the more obscure stuff.

I hear a bit of a new sound for you on this record. Talk about how you perceive your own sound as having changed.
I don't know. I didn't consciously try to change much, as far as the songs themselves. I was listening to some different things over the past couple of years and getting into some stuff from the '80s and '90s. Maybe that plays into it a little bit. As far the production, I left that to to Jeff and Tom, the engineer at the Loft. I had a say in it, obviously, but I kind of just let it happen as it did. There wasn't much being done to it. We'd track the drums, vocal, and guitar live, and just overdub bass, guitars, and some piano, which makes the songs more easily translated to playing them live.

You self-produced the last record. Talk to me about what you took away that was newly applicable to working on this one.
On the last one, I did the basic tracking in three different studios over the course of a year. It was more spread out, and there was a lot more time to fiddle with things and be a perfectionist. But it's pretty easy to get lost in the weeds when you're doing that. You can go through a hundred ideas, and any number of them probably would work when you sit there for hours and re-do something a hundred times. Eventually, you learn that you're not really making it better—you're just making it different.

I came into this one knowing that, any time you're in a studio, you have a much more finite amount of time with those resources. You have to be wise with how you spend your time, so that was something that I kept in mind—being a little more spontaneous and, if I liked something, just going with that and not trying to overthink it.

I hear a little bit of country in this record, but I hear a little more of an '80s heartland rock sound—like Tom Petty—as well.
I don't know, I guess there's some of that stuff in there. I actually felt like this was the farthest from country that I've done, but that goes to show what different perceptions you could have of something. I listened to all kinds of stuff, so when I'm listening back, I could hear any number of different things in there—but I can't really say that any of it was a conscious decision. It just kind of came out that way.

Tell me about what you're putting into your songwriting when it comes to personal touches. Some songwriters prefer being explicitly personal, some prefer more subtlety.
Anyone who makes anything—whether it's a film, a painting, a song—it's you that's making it, so at least half of it is about you. Even if you're writing a biography of a Civil War general, there's probably going to be a fair amount that's just about you in that, because of what you choose to focus on and what strikes you as being relevant. Knowing that will ultimately be such a big part of it, I don't make a big point of putting super specific personal details about my life in [my music]. It feels reductive or limiting to do that. But sometimes there are really specific things that happen, or a phrase I heard, and I'll just put it in word-for-word.

Otherwise, I think of songs being a little more expansive than that—almost like a collage of a moment in time. In my experience, that's closer to what it feels like to actually be alive. I'm never just thinking or feeling one thing—it's a hundred things at once, and there's so many tiny little things constantly happening, more than you could ever express. Songs have a unique way that, if you do it right, you can express that feeling a little bit.

Are there any songwriters that you particularly look up to?
I mean, there's all the greatest ones—Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, Paul McCartney. I always loved Brill Building pop like Carole King. Someone like Paul Westerberg, in recent years his songwriting has struck me in a way that I have a more profound respect for how good of a writer he was or still is.

Let's talk about the financial realities of being an artist.
I'm extremely fortunate and have gotten very lucky to be able to get to, where I'm somewhat able to live off of making music, barely. I still have a ton of debt and everything like that. So in some ways, there's the instinct that you don't want to complain when there's so many people who never get to that point.

But, on a broader level, it's not even about being a musician—it's about being a person that lives now. No matter what you're doing, it's become so insane, the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. It's absurd and criminal that 10 people have all the wealth—this infinite amount that no human could ever spend—and everyone else has to suffer. There's a sickness to this country, this obsession with being the most rich, and there's a whole cultural side of things that fetishizes that. Even people that don't have money fetishize it. It's pretty hard to take most of the time, especially when there's such glaring criminality happening with the people that have the money and and the power. There seems to be very little that anyone can really do about it.

I don't know. I'm gonna go on tour to make my meager living and try to make ends meet, and hopefully try to keep making music. The current administration, not only are they hoarding all of the money for the very richest people, but they're also cutting funding to all the arts and environmental protections—basically anything that any sane person would believe is important and meaningful in terms of being alive and okay in the world. But I don't know. That's my rant on that, I guess.