Creatives Like Jeff Tweedy Tell How Ever Successful Partnership Is Like A Love Story

The isolation we all face during our COVID-19 quarantines can tear us apart if we aren’t supporting each other and lifting each other up. When it seems like all the forces of the world are against us, it reminds us that we really need each other.

In a way, that’s the theme of The Partners podcast that just finished its first eight-episode season. Each episode of the show tells the story of different sets of partners who have made something together across a variety of fields like tv writing and music-making and the difficulties they experienced along the way. It features notables in a variety of creative fields like Jeff Tweedy and his son Spencer Tweedy who play music together in Wilco, and Tegan and Sara, the pair of twin sisters who are in a band of the same name together. Additionally, it also features a partnership from the world of business and technology with Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram.

I was thinking about the theme of partners and togetherness last weekend when watching Barack Obama’s speech from the #graduatetogether event.

In a speech filled with humor and honesty, he said, “our society and our democracy only work when we think not just about ourselves, but each other. It was ostensibly directed at the high school class of 2020, which for many of whom it should have been their graduation night instead of being quarantined at home with their family watching Tiger King.

“Build a community,” he said. “No one does big things by themselves.” That’s what the Partners podcast is all about in each 15 to 20-minute episode.

The creator of Black Mirror recently announced that there would be no new episodes because people couldn’t take any more bad news, and people that take that to heart will be pleased to know that Partners doesn’t focus on the natural drama that can arise from the pairing of two different minds towards a common goal.

Hrishikesh Hirway, the creator of Partners who also makes the podcast Song Exploder about musicians telling stories about their songs, says the opening scene in When Harry Met Sally, where the elderly couples tell the stories of how they met and fell in love, was one of the original inspirations for Partners. The scene features the same non-narrative interview format that he used in Song Exploder where you don’t hear the interviewer and it just feels like the characters are talking directly to you.

That scene got him thinking of the similarities between creative partnerships and marriages and how much luck and chemistry are involved in both. When he thought about it some more, he realized those same elements exist in every kind of partnership and you could tell a fascinating story with any two people who have done something together for a long time.

“In essence,” he says, “they’re love stories. That was the guiding creative force. My test was – Does this story feel like a love story when translated into this other context.” Interestingly enough, he didn’t tell any of his groups of partners this idea, he just told them that he wanted to interview them about the story of their partnership.

“I don’t know what the story is going to be before I do the interview,” Hrishikesh says, “I just looked for partners who I thought would make an interesting story.”

His first interview with P.J. Vogt and Alex Goldman, the hosts of the hit podcast Reply All, kinda fell into his lap since he was already going to be at their office for a workshop and they said he could interview them while he was there. Reply All is a show with a lot of interviews and Hrishikesh says that made it easy to tell their story because they know “how to get you a great response because they’re always looking for it themselves.”

No two partnerships are ever truly equal because there’s never an exactly equal amount of things that need doing, and so what often happens, and you can see this play out in the Reply All episode, is that the roles can change and one partner may have to sublimate their traditional role to benefit or lessen the burden on their partner. And just like a marriage, one partner can end up resenting the other partner for it.

Alex Goldman describes the early stages of their partnership by saying that they used to do nearly the same thing, but gradually P.J. became the leader of the show and Alex became the host and that produced some friction that Alex describes as a “painful process.”

But as I mentioned, there are no bad endings on Partners, and by the end of the show Alex and P.J. relate how they began to understand how each other work individually and what they needed to make their partnership work.

Their stories, like most of the others, are 15 to 20 minutes full of charm, laughter, and whimsy and to achieve that effect Hrishikesh ended up talking to most of the partners for two hours or more. For many of the partners, hearing their story condensed down into a finished product like that was transformational.

Aline Brosh McKenna, co-creator of the tv show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend along with her partner Rachel Bloom, said she cried when listening to her episode, and Daveed Diggs said that he learned things about his partnership with Rafael Casal from listening to the episode.

They saw story arcs in their own lives they hadn’t noticed before, and in the course of the eight episodes many of those arcs take on a similar trajectory. Notably, to survive it takes cooperation towards a common goal or shared vision. It takes people who want to put the other person ahead of them and recognize that their weakness might be their partner’s strength. And that’s what it means to be Partners.