A few weeks ago, while promoting his new book World Within A Song on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy referred to a section of the book where he expresses his distaste for Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” This caused a minor kerfuffle, as some took Tweedy’s comments out of context, writing that Tweedy hates Dolly Parton and so forth. Today, Tweedy has addressed that situation.

On his Substack outpost Starship Casual, Tweedy posted a cover of “I Will Always Love You.” That’s behind a paywall, though you can hear it by signing up for a one-week free trial. There is some audio available to the public: In a spoken message at the top of the post, Tweedy clarifies his comments and expresses his annoyance about the whole imbroglio. Here’s what he says:

There was some erroneous reporting I woke up to after surgery last week. I saw headlines on the internet that said I hate Dolly Parton. And when I wrote my book and picked a song to talk about that I don’t like, the whole point was that it’s OK to not like something. There’s not much point in trying to convince a billion people that they’re wrong about a song. Yet somehow doing an interview on Colbert and things being taken out of context made it look like that’s exactly what I was doing, trying to tell everybody that a song they like is bad. And absurdly trying to convey the idea that I think Dolly Parton’s bad or that she should have stopped writing songs. In other words, a lot of people can’t take a joke, and apparently reading comprehension is not what it used to be. But it made me want to learn the song and sing it. Because the whole bit isn’t really that I hate the song, it’s that a certain part of a song annoys me. And again, when I was writing my book I was looking for monolithic, huge — someone huge. A star that anything negative I might have to say about their songs would be taken as, you know, a joke, in the spirit that it was intended. So, without further ado, here’s my attempt to make this song fit into my mouth.

Are you willing to provide your credit card information in order to hear Tweedy’s Dolly Parton cover? If so, you can do so here. Let us know how it measures up to the Phil Elverum/Julie Doiron version. If you don’t, hey, there’s always the Whitney Houston masterclass.