Jeff Tweedy is making the rounds promoting his latest book, World Within A Song: Music That Changed My Life And Life That Changed My Music. In doing so, he has repeatedly pointed out how much his perspective on ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” has changed over the years. An excerpt from the book published in the New York Times last week is headlined, “I Thought I Hated Pop Music. ‘Dancing Queen’ Changed My Mind.”

The NYT essay delves into ideas about how identity and tribalism walled him off from the pleasures of ABBA as a teenager, such as this passage:

The divisions we created were embarrassing. I have sometimes even wondered if these youthful skirmishes over musical taste weren’t a childhood version of the current situation our country now finds itself in. Were people of my generation so good at dividing ourselves into factions based on stupid, insignificant differences that we simply never stopped doing it? Someone smarter than me has probably mapped the parallels between Journey fans and X fans and the current binary of political right and left. Or if no one has, someone should.

I also enjoyed this paragraph:

Let’s talk about that first wave of disgust a bit. Initially, hating this song and Abba in general didn’t really feel like a choice. Gagging at the mere mention of this sweet little quartet was just being, you know, normal. And at the time that “Dancing Queen” came out, it wasn’t hard to hate a disco song, anyway; disco was despised by practically everyone I knew (with the exception of the kids who liked to roller skate).

Tuesday, on the book’s release date, Tweedy did his latest sit-down interview with Seth Meyers on Late Night. The ABBA thing came up again. So did the internal battle between “Belleville Jeff” (the humble and self-deprecating Midwesterner at his core) and “beret Jeff” (the pretentious artist also at his core). He also doesn’t remember doing the music for Meyers’ podcast. Watch the conversation below.