Someone Else's Song

To me this song is Tweedy's recreation of Dylan's "Song to Woody." Tweedy is speaking to someone (Woody) and he admits to sounding like someone from "a long time ago." The story does not need to be told again because Dylan's already told it, but the chords are the same. Tweedy cant help paying his respects to Woody Guthrie, even if he ends up sounding like "whats his name."

here is what i think happened: jeff tweedy began working on this song, and played some chords for his girlfriend. she told him it sounded like "norweigan wood" by the beatles, because it does. then he turned that comment into a bitter love song.

This song is about a guy who is with a girl and the girl can't stop comparing her current boyfriend to an ex-boyfriend. The current boyfriend is going out of his way to show this girl he loves her, but she's heard it all before from her ex-boyfriend and just thinks it's the same old thing this time around. I love this song because it's just so soothing and sweet and sad.

When I first got into Wilco, I thought Jeff Tweedy's voice sounded a little like Jerry Garcia. I'm curious if anyone else thinks that? When I got this album I definately thought the line "I sound like whats-his-name" was in refence to that. ? Not that their music is very Dead-like. The lyrics seem to fit the simple chord changes/melody. It seems like a campfire song.

i browsed here in the hope that someone would have said which song this sounds like. definitely not 'norwegian wood' - it's quite a different progression. it's a pretty standard country blues that you hear in lots of songs. i just can't think of any of them atm..... but yeah, meaning-wise, the whole song is just an excuse to record a version of this basic progression. & the kind of depressing feeling you get when you feel like expressing something but what comes out sounds so unoriginal.

this album was a departure for the band. They did things different sonically and with instrumentation but it is still the same great song writing. I think this song is about the bands view of thier own music and how it can be hard to grow internally as a song writer. "you already know I love you, and I sound like whats-his name" is saying "I know youve heard this before, but not from me". And "but you cant stop me, I want you to know", is the determination to be myself and you should understand how special that is.

I think it has to do with Jay Farrar dissing Tweedy's songwriting in the UT days. I am pretty certain that Farrar considered Tweedy to be a lousy songwriter. Tweedy really didnt' hit his stride til he wrote "Gun" which I think threatened Farrar a little bit. I could see Farrar telling Tweedy that his songs simply are not good enough to be on the records and more specifically that alot of them sound like songs that someone alse wrote years ago, like Dylan, Neil Young, Stones, Prine maybe had already done.

Musically this song has always reminded me of a Johnny Cash song.