by Jeff Tweedy has worked with some of the greatest artists from across the generations.
The Wilco frontman has shared the stage with Bob Dylan, Japanese Breakfast and Fleet Foxes, produced albums for Mavis Staples and Richard Thompson, recorded with Norah Jones, Nick Lowe and Billy Bragg and, as well as all that, gets to walk out to an adoring audience night after night alongside one of the coolest, most brilliant and most underrated guitarists of all time, Nels Cline.
Over the last 30 years, Tweedy has established himself as one of the greatest, most cutting and insightful, playful and thoughtful, expressive and experimental songwriters of his generation. His band, Wilco, have cemented itself at the pinnacle of the alt-country/alt-rock pyramid and has more than earned its right to play with whoever it wants to.
Though for most, the chance to sing with Dylan or Mavis Staples might just be a pipe-dream, something we all wish would happen to us but of course never does, but such is the strength of Tweedy’s own body of work and own reputation, he was invited to work with both of these living legends.
Dylan and Staples, of course, go back a long way, but so too, it seems, do Dylan and Tweedy. Having first encountered each other backstage at Bonnaroo in 2003, Dylan invited his acolyte onto the stage ten years later with some regularity during his 2013 AmericanaramA tour. Over the course of the shows, Dylan and Tweedy, as well as My Morning Jacket frontman (or, as they are affectionately referred to amongst the members of Wilco, “My Boring Racket”) Jim James, joined forces to sing old spirituals and standards like ‘Twelve Gates to the City’ (where Dylan also led the audience in a sing-along verse or two), ‘Let The Light of the Lighthouse (Shine on Me)’ and The Band’s classic ‘The Weight’.
Not long after, Tweedy was recruited by soul and social justice legend Mavis Staples to write and produce her powerful 2017 album If All I Was Was Black. The pair have regularly performed songs from the album together and have continued to collaborate, most recently on Staples’ upcoming album Sad And Beautiful World.
Perhaps it was his work with Wilco and Billy Bragg on their joint 1998 album Mermaid Avenue, an album made up of lost Woody Guthrie songs and unfinished lyrics that the collaborators finished and recorded, which caught the attentions of Dylan, Staples et al in the first place, or perhaps it was his own seminal album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the incendiary live shows he put on with his band over the years. And it was on the live circuit where Tweedy crossed paths with another living legend, as well, in the shape of Patti Smith.
They were each booked to play at the 2007 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, and had both been involved in a tribute to the legendary German playwright Bertolt Brecht at London’s South Bank Centre two years previously. Somewhere along the way, at one of the festivals they were both booked to play, Tweedy got wind of a rumour that Smith wanted to work with him.
Having sought out the punk-rock icon, he introduced himself and said, “Hi Patti, I was told that you might want me to help you out?” To which she handed him her guitar and said, “Tune this”.
Maybe she should have asked Johnny Depp instead.
