Success Quote by Jeff Tweedy

Tweedy’s line is a quiet rebuke to the scoreboard culture that shadows musicians long after they’ve left the garage. “Somehow you need to get to a certain point” makes it sound less like a motivational poster and more like hard-won weather: you don’t arrive at this mindset by reading the right book, you arrive by living through enough bad shows, wrong turns, and mornings-after to realize the word “failure” doesn’t actually describe the work.

The phrase “the notion of failure is absurd” flips the usual artist anxiety. He’s not claiming you can’t bomb; he’s arguing that treating a creative life like a pass/fail exam is a category mistake. Songs aren’t products with an objective defect rate. They’re attempts, and attempts are the medium. Calling one a failure often means it didn’t sell, didn’t trend, didn’t please the right gatekeepers, didn’t fit the current algorithmic mood. Tweedy’s subtext: those are social judgments, not artistic verdicts.

In Tweedy’s world - and Wilco’s history is basically a case study - “failure” is often just misalignment with an industry moment. When a label can’t hear what you’re making, or an audience hasn’t caught up yet, the easy story is that you lost. The deeper story is that you kept the only metric that matters: the willingness to keep making things. His intent isn’t bravado; it’s permission. Past a certain age, the ego stops needing to be protected by success, and the work gets to be the point again.