Deep Talk About the Songwriting Process. That's It.

"I have no rituals when it comes to writing. I don't want to think something can go wrong if things aren't set up the right way," says James McGovern of The Murder Capital. (photo by Pierre Le Bastard)

“My biggest hurdle as a writer is trying to hack my brain to become less critical,” Christian Lee Hutson says. In other words, Hutson wants to get the hell out of his own way when he writes.

Eli Hewson of Inhaler likes to stay up and writes all night. Come morning, he heads to bed and will sometimes pass his father Bono (yes, that Bono), who is just beginning his day and starting to write. Hewson's bandmate Josh Jenkinson wants no part of those late night writing sessions. "I just go to bed," he says. Jenkinson is a daytime writer; like Hewson, he's most productive during the day when no one else is around.

Hamilton Leithauser keeps regular hours. And those hours can be early: on the day we talked, he had started writing at 5am. It’s a problem if he doesn’t write every day, he says. "I keep regular hours, and if I don’t write every day, I feel anxious or like I’ve done something wrong.

If you see Cecilia Castleman browsing the paint aisle at Home Depot, she’s probably not looking for paint. She’s looking for song ideas. Castleman finds inspiration everywhere, but paint names, she says, are particularly rich sources for song ideas and lyrics. Her debut self-titled album is good. Really, really good.

Rebecca and Megan Lovell, the GRAMMY-winning sisters who compose Larkin Poe, are “serial idea keepers.” This means they don’t write every day. Instead, “we pull back on ideas until we are ready to write,” they say. This seasonal writing, as they and other songwriters like to call it, requires discipline: you have to resist the urge to write every day and only write during certain times. The advantage of this is that the words flow freely when it’s time to write.