Jokermen Live with Jeff Tweedy — Dylan, Music, and the Art of the Long Career
Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy joins Jokermen Live at the Chicago Humanities Festival for a conversation about Bob Dylan, songwriting, and what it means to sustain a creative life over decades.
Why we picked this
Tweedy has spent thirty years writing songs that survive the test of repeated listening, which gives him standing to talk about Dylan's longevity that most critics don't have — this conversation is for people who care about what sustaining a creative practice actually requires.
Jeff Tweedy has spent three decades leading Wilco through more reinventions than most bands attempt in a lifetime, from alt-country to the glorious commercial disaster of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to an ongoing career that continues to produce work worth taking seriously. He has also written candidly about creativity, addiction, and the relationship between personal difficulty and artistic output in his memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back).
At Jokermen Live, the Chicago Humanities Festival’s music-focused conversation series, Tweedy brings his particular perspective to Bob Dylan — a figure who has been refracted through so many interpretive lenses that it’s refreshing to hear from someone who relates to Dylan primarily as a fellow songwriter trying to figure out how to keep making things. The conversation touches on the craft of lyric writing, the mythology that accumulates around long careers, and what it costs to stay in it.
The Chicago Humanities Festival has a consistent talent for creating evenings that feel like overhearing a conversation rather than attending a lecture — Jokermen Live is one of the better formats for that.