The 43-year-old songwriter and guitarist told Staples that the title was lingering in his head. "I said, 'Well, then write it, Tweedy. Write it!,' " Staples says, in a conversation from her home on Chicago's South Side. She lets out a hearty laugh. "Because just that title . . . It sounded good to me."
Tweedy did write it, and it became the title cut of the new You Are Not Alone (Anti-), the latest late-career winner for Staples, in a streak that began with her 2007 album, We'll Never Turn Back.
That album of freedom songs, produced by Ry Cooder, revisited many of the anthems Staples - who refers to herself as "like a walking history book" - would sing with her family band while accompanying the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. throughout the South at the height of the civil rights movement. And that streak continued with 2008's Live: Hope at the Hideout, a fiery set recorded in a small Chicago club before a select crowd, including Tweedy.
After the Wilco leader paid his respects to Staples, the two got to know each other in a Chicago restaurant. "We talked for about 2½ hours," Staples says. "He really opened up to me about himself and his family. I felt grateful . . . He had worked in a record shop as a kid, and he grew up listening to the Staple Singers. He told me how much he liked our music, especially my father. I said, 'Especially Pops? You didn't like me?' "
Tweedy was prepared to be intimidated by working with Staples, who was coaxed into the studio in the late 1980s by Prince and who turned down a marriage proposal from Bob Dylan in the 1960s - especially since it was his first time producing a non-Wilco project.
But Staples was "welcoming and warm," Tweedy says, by phone from his home on Chicago's North Side. "You're on her side for life within 10 seconds of meeting her."
