If there’s anyone who can get a crowd teary-eyed at one moment, then belly laughing the next, it’s Chicago’s Jeff Tweedy, frontman of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Wilco.

Tweedy has a new book, World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music, out Tuesday. And he kicked off his national book tour in Chicago on Sunday with a live WBEZ event moderated by Peter Sagal, host of the radio program Wait… Wait, Don’t Tell Me!

The Wilco songwriter and bandleader told a sold-out crowd at the Athenaeum Center that he wanted to share through his book the emotional spaces music can hold. His book spans 50 chapters, each named after a song that he connects to his life and his own creative process — one he has refined over nearly three decades. The songs include music from well-known artists such as Bob Dylan and Billie Eilish as well as lesser-known acts such as Leo Sayer.

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At the event, which included questions from the audience and a short, acoustic set of song requests, Tweedy talked about his early days sorting through his brother’s record crates, how addiction and sobriety affects his songwriting and his greatest influences along his path as a musician. Here are some of the highlights of that conversation, edited and condensed for publication.

How his music memoir came to be

Tweedy: “It didn’t come to me until after [How to Write One Song, his second book] was finished that the thing I actually really like writing about the most is other people’s songs. I don’t think of myself as my own songs. I think of myself more as the songs that made me.

I just started thinking of songs. I thought of songs that I have stories about, that I could relate to some memory that wouldn’t make any sense without the song being a catalyst for. That’s another part of what I wanted to write about in the book, how efficient songs are at containing our memories and enhancing our own experiences.”

On describing himself in his book as an “alienated” child and how songs made him feel less alone

“ ‘Alienation’ maybe is a heavy word to apply to such a young person, but I feel like it’s accurate. I hung out with adults, I hung out with my mom. My socialization — by the time I was around other kids — it wasn’t just awkward. I didn’t like them. First of all, they didn’t love me as much as my mom. Real red flag. (The audience laughs.)

For a little background, I am 10 years younger than my youngest sibling. By the time I really have a lot of memories formed, my brothers and my sister were gone. They had left the house for school. There was this companionship my mother seemed to foster but that still leaves a lot of loneliness. Records were my other friends.”

On the crate of records that set him up for a lifelong appreciation of music

“The story is that my older brother had gone away to college and it didn’t go so well. When he came back, he had a giant crate of records. All of his records were given to me as a promise that I would not continue to fill out a Columbia record club [Editor’s note: This was a mail-order record subscription service that sold stacks of albums, sometimes for as little as a penny.]. I was at the kitchen table filling this out, 13 records for a penny. He saw me checking the box that said ‘Kansas’ and said, ‘Not on my watch.’

There was Kraftwerk. There were jazz records. It was wild college music before there was a name for college rock. There were a lot of German bands, but like Kraftwerk, there was Amon Düül [II], there was Aphrodite’s Child, a Greek psychedelic band.”

On his appetite today for new music

“I think I listen to a lot more new music than old music because I’m always kind of searching for stuff that’s exciting, that feels new, feels fresh. If you told me when I was 12 years old that every Friday, I could hear every single record that was coming out, I would have lost my mind. And I honor that kid. Every Friday, when all the streaming services load in the new records, I spend a lot of time scouring stuff and listening.”

The bands that set him on the path to the stage

“I think that there are many. The ones that come to mind are The Ramones, [but] I think more important [were] The Replacements, seeing them live. The Replacements look like, ‘Oh, I could probably do that.’ I think that’s how scenes get started all over the world, when you have a culture of belief that just grows out of people seeing one group of kids figure this thing out, and then other kids go, ‘That doesn’t look so hard.’

The Minutemen [was] a similar thing, but they also were altruistic. They actually spoke out loud about a belief system that was very much encouraging, like ‘Go start your own band. You can do this.’ I can’t thank them enough. I’ve known Mike Watt for a number of years now and I thank him every time I see him.”

How he thinks about his music through a history of addiction and, now, sobriety

“The first thing that comes to mind is one of the things that happened when I got sober was I worried about things that I had written under the influence, or where I wasn’t as healthy. What I was happy to discover was that that material still felt like me. I made this material in spite of the drugs. That made me feel really good.

It made sense to me because the part of me that wanted to make songs started way before I’d ever drank beer — before anything ever happened.”

How it feels to play the most requested songs again and again

“I don’t feel like I’m that kind of artist that even has the wherewithal to deny people that. I want people to hear ‘Jesus, Etc.’ if they came to hear it. I think it’s an amazing thing to be on this planet and know that there’s something you could do that would make somebody happy. I don’t make that choice not to do it very often.

Art is there to help people see an authentic world, and you can’t just show them the same world over and over and over again. But that being said, I probably lean towards the side of the world that feels like it’s enough to have people be free of care for 3 ½ minutes in a theater, and that probably is way more important.”

Mendy Kong is a digital producer at WBEZ. Follow them @ngogejat.