Songfacts®:

• Wilco's Jeff Tweedy engages in some serious lyrical ambiguity with "She's A Jar." The song appears to be about a women reluctant to commit to being with Tweedy, but at the same time, she is unable to end the relationship. It is likely Tweedy is referring to his wife, who was hesitant to continue their relationship because of Wilco's extensive touring: "She's a jar. With a heavy lid. My pop quiz kid. A sleepy kisser. With feelings hid. She begs me not to miss her."
• Some of the more abstract lyrics from "She's A Jar", such as "Please beware, the quiet front yard," stem from the surrealist writing technique, cadavre exquis, which Wilco tried out while on tour. A typewriter was set up in the band's tour bus, so that members could take turns typing lyrics, the catch being the current writer could only see the previously typed line.
• Tweedy's wife, Sue Miller, was reluctant to endorse this track, particularly due to the line: "She begs me not to hit her." Miller elaborated to Greg Kot in his book, Wilco: Learning How To Die: "Obviously Jeff has never hit me. And I know I have to give Jeff his creative license. And I have no way of knowing whether he could have written as cool and brilliant an album without having to go through everything he went through that year. I think that's one of our most common myths, that artists have to me miserable to be creative. I don't think that's true. I hope it's not true. I don't wish that kind of misery on anyone."
• This song is one of many darkly-themed tracks on Summerteeth, an album which is marked by Jeff Tweedy's "bold, depressing lyrics." Tweedy's sadness is said to have been a result of not being able to see his family due to Wilco's excessive touring at the time.
• The song's controversial ending was intended to illustrate Tweedy's depression caused by his long separations from Sue Miller.
  
  A pretty war
  With feelings hid
  You know she begs me not to hit her
  
  Tweedy told Mojo magazine: "I wasn't a grown up or an equal partner as a parent and I felt shame and guilt about a lot of that. It was a tormented time for a young couple who were both flawed and not particularly prepared for a relationship with kids where being gone was required, for a touring musician and as a woman owning a rock club (Sue Miller run the Chicago venue, Lounge Ax).
  
  Tweedy added that he was deluded enough to think he'd succeeded in masking his depression. "The end of 'She's A Jar' - 'she begs me not to hit her' - is probably the one lyric that gets the most scrutiny of anything I've ever written. And honest to God, it never occurred to me it would be taken that the narrator of the song was the person doing the hitting. All of the dark times that period represents, violence was not a part of it. Any of the struggles that my wife and I have ever had, it's never been related to any kind of physical violence. I was feeling things very very strongly and I lacked the vocabulary."