Misunderstood — Wilco

#365Songs: July 27th

Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again was one of my favorite novels as an undergrad, one of those “I see myself in this character” books that shook me up. I felt seen, maybe for the first time in my life. George and I were one in the same, residing in a world where belonging happened between places. For us, home is a state of movement rather than a place of stability, a perpetual in-between.

My life has been a series of transitions. From Cleveland to Columbus to Cambridge to Colorado to Chicago to California — apparently “home” isn’t home if it doesn’t begin with a “C” — and then the job changes, the loss of a parent and birth of a son, an endless pattern of beginnings and endings.

For some, stasis is comfort, for others it’s the restless state between moments of change.

Thomas Wolfe wrote: “Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”

Well, you’re back in your old neighborhood
The cigarettes taste so good
But you’re so misunderstood
You’re so misunderstood
There’s something there that you can’t find
Honest when you’re tellin’ a lie

Everyone comes from somewhere, the beginning of beginnings, and mine was in a small-ish blue collar town not far from Cleveland proper. When my family calls, they ask, “When are you coming home?” It’s a question that always gives me pause. What’s home, anyway? A place we’re from, where we’re going, where we’ve been? Is it an idea, a feeling? Is it wherever we are, in the moment, where we’re most ourselves, a constantly evolving target, or a landing place, like a Christian’s concept of Heaven?

That’s not to say I’ve never felt a sense of home. I sure have, but in a long life we accumulate so many versions of the concept that it’s not always clear we’re there even when we’re there.

You’re looking at a picture of me
You’re staring at a picture of me
Take the guitar player for a ride
’Cause he ain’t never been satisfied
He thinks he owes some kind of debt
Be years before he gets over it
There’s a fortune inside your head
All you touch turns to lead
You think you might just crawl back in bed

In a week, I’m going to that first place I called home for only the second time in 8 years. I can go home again, but if home is a place where you’re truly understood, that ain’t it. To be understood, to be seen, requires two ingredients: a group of people willing to see you even if it’s at odds with what they want to see, and an internal desire to be truly seen. For most of my life, neither have been true. Each time I go back, I breathe deep and tell myself this is the moment when it all comes together, when home becomes home. Even if for just a moment.

So misunderstood
So misunderstood
So misunderstood
So misunderstood

Jeff Tweedy gets a lot of things. Though I was late to the cult of Wilco, even during my long music-heavy seven years in his Chicago hometown, I get it now. I don’t gravitate towards the band, don’t listen often, won’t claim to sit atop the fan club hierarchy, but for every feeling there’s a Wilco song. For me, today, it’s Misunderstood off of the 1996 double album, Being There.

Music writer Evan Schlansky wrote for American Songwriter: “It’s a song that identifies with the outsider and the downtrodden. In brief brush strokes, Tweedy paints a picture of a dreamer being choked to death by encroaching age and the dullness of small town life. His youthful ideals have all morphed into memories, except for one; he ‘still loves rock and roll.’ He’s got little to do, a lack of concrete goals, and a fortune inside of his head that won’t come out.”

Growing up in Cleveland, I was the dreamer choked to death by the dullness of its smallness, its traditions, its confortist ways, its absence of culture and counterculture. For a weird, quirky, literary kid like me, I was perpetually out of time and place. My ‘rock and roll’ was literature, stories, faraway places with lifestyles foreign to me. I was always on the move, always searching, a restless soul with no discernible destination in mind. That never vibed there. Still doesn’t, for all I know.

The fortune inside your head
You know you’re just a mama’s boy
Positively unemployed
So misunderstood
So misunderstood
I know you’re gotta God shaped hole
Leanin’ out your pedastal
So misunderstood
So misunderstood
So misunderstood
So misunderstood

Misunderstood is a layered, dreamy yet angry song, and when it builds like a Velvet Underground epic, its rhythms are that of a fast moving train moving us from where we come from to wherever we’re going. The only destination is anywhere other than here.

I was also a Mama’s boy, but one who felt perpetually guilty for wanting nothing more than to leave. To be me was to not be there, but to not be there was to abandon and leave behind those who knew home to be only where family lives.

Sometimes home is just a misunderstanding, a convergence of unmet needs and faulty expectations, a place where we’re reminded of who we once were or never wanted to be. And yet it’s also a place that marks time and progress, where we can compare our present and shadow selves, to see how far we’ve come. There’s beauty in that, after all. Sometimes we must stop, for just a moment, and catch up with ourselves before we can move forward to whoever we’ll become.

~

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