Steve Tannen and Deb Talan couldn’t see the future when they almost accidentally formed the folk-pop duo the Weepies in the early 2000s. Since then, the road has been a rewarding and at times rough one. The singer-songwriters married and became parents. Talan battled cancer and is now in remission. Through it all, they’ve maintained a grassroots fan base that hangs on every word of the couple’s delicately wrought songs.

“After a lot of years, success, even modest success like ours, is really comforting,” said Tannen, calling during a holiday break in Florida with his family. “It’s so good. You just want to swim in that ocean.”

The couple are based in Iowa City, where they put down stakes and bought a house five years ago. They settled in the college town after being vagabonds on the road and living in multiple cities over the years.

“We live right up the street from where Kurt Vonnegut used to live,” Tannen said. “Yo-Yo Ma is opening the season at the local auditorium. The town has great beer, great culture and great people. We feel there are kindred spirits there as well.”

When Tannen and Talan go on tour, they usually have their three sons — ages 9, 6 and 4 — in tow. The family loads into a minivan and hits the road.

“It’s the Partridge Family all the way,” he said. “We take the kids everywhere. They’re part of our life. We just did 21 shows, and we took them to every one. We’re the luckiest people in history. I’m not being facetious when I say we feel grateful because we get to do all of this, and no one bothers us.”

The couple are known for their trenchant lyrics, lovely melodies and intuitive harmonies. Tannen and Talan also have plenty of tales to tell.

“It’ll be a bit more of a talkier show than we’ve done because we’re older now and have more stories,” Tannen said about their Chicago show. “We’re doing it all acoustic. The feedback loop (with the audience) is so much stronger and more interesting because you’re literally one on one.”

The duo is taking time off from touring to focus on Talan’s upcoming solo project Lucky Girl, an album planned for release in 2017 on the Canadian label Nettwerk Records. In the spring, Talan will embark on a solo tour of her new material.

The solo album’s title is a nod to Talan’s bout with breast cancer. She was diagnosed in 2013 and underwent chemotherapy and surgery.

Tannen remembers it as a harrowing time filled with uncertainty.

“It was a cancer year,” he said. “When Deb got the news, we had a sit-down with the kids that night. Our youngest son was 17 months old, so we were necessarily concerned. The kids came through it really well, but it definitely affected everybody. My heart goes out to anyone going through it.”

Talan announced her diagnosis on Twitter and Facebook. The couple were astonished by the outpouring of concern from their fans.

“You either hide it or you don’t, and Deb decided she was going to tell everybody,” he said. “I set up a P.O. Box in case anyone wanted to write. For the next three months we got thousands of letters and presents. It was heartfelt, personal and wonderful. It was so overwhelming I’m about to cry right now.”

Today, Talan is in full remission. “It was very clarifying,” Tannen said about the experience. “We took solace in the music, the kids and the people around us.”

The two were solo performers when they met in 2001 at the legendary folk venue Club Passim in Cambridge, Mass. Talan lived in Boston. Tannen lived in New York. Each was a fan of the other’s work. They traveled to see each other play and began co-writing material.

“We started a mutual admiration society-slash-very tense possible romantic thing,” Tannen recalled with a laugh. “Nothing happened. I was interested, but she was dating someone else. Eventually the songwriting collaboration turned into touring together, which turned into working on each other’s records. Then it became romantic.”

The Weepies were formed one night when the two were asked to perform together for a gig at Club Passim. They had only a few hours to come up with a name for their ad hoc duo.

“ ‘The Weepies’ was a name we had for a person you could go with to a movie theater, see Pinocchio, cry and not worry about it,” Tannen said. “We laughed about that and thought it would be a name for just one show.”

Fate had other plans. The show sold out immediately. They followed up with a second, and that, too, sold out. The one-off duo performance suddenly became a full-time gig. The couple released their first album, Happiness, in 2003 and sold 10,000 copies out of the back of their car. That debut was followed by a string of well-received albums. The duo’s most recent release is 2015’s Sirens.

Looking back at their beginnings as a duo, Tannen said both were ready for the stabilizing influence of a dedicated partnership. “Deb was really almost done with being alone on the road,” he recalled. “It is brutal without great success. She had been doing it for years, and so had I. I was able to put together a ragtag band, and even that was hard. But she was doing it all alone. For her, there was a great relief that she had someone to do it with.”

Over the years the two have licensed material for various projects. Their songs have appeared in the movies Sex and the City and Morning Glory and in a long list of television shows including Grey’s Anatomy and How I Met Your Mother.

The couple have always emphasized songcraft. “We’re writers,” Tannen said. “The fact that we have a career where we play live music is happenstance.”

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