Episodes

Patrick Hetherington of Parcels says that the urge to write usually strikes when he's had some kind of new input, but then he needs distance from that input to be able to process it and write about it. And a good sunset is ma...

It's the return of Molly Tuttle ! (The first time I interviewed Tuttle was in 2021, when I interviewed her and Katie Pruitt.) Tuttle won the GRAMMY for Best Bluegrass Album in both 2023 and 2024. And you don't become great wi...

I cannot imagine a world where Scott McCaughey is not writing. But first, some background. He was an auxiliary member of R.E.M. from 1994 to 2011, working with them in the studio and playing with them live. He founded The Bas...

Dev Hynes had me at the bookshelves. All those bookshelves behind him our Zoom interview, rising to the ceiling and stuffed with books. Small wonder, then, that Hynes works best in daily consumption mode rather than creation ...

There's a difference between wanting to write and needing to write. For Will Taylor of Flyte , it's usually a need. Taylor says that he doesn't write every day, but instead writes after an accumulation of experiences. "I know...

"I write the most when I'm supposed to be doing something else because it tricks me into thinking that songwriting is rebellious," Meg Duffy (aka Hand Habits ) told me. "It feels like I get to choose to do it." I love this qu...

The theme of today's podcast is nourishment. It dawned on me a few minutes into my conversation with Hannah Cohen that when she said proper nourishment was critical to her writing process, she was being literal. It was no me...

Ed Note: Lzzy Hale has collaborated with Mark Morton (Lamb of God) in the past. I co-authored Mark's new book Desolation: A Heavy Metal Memoir , hence the occasional reference to Mark and our book in this episode. Many songwr...

You think you're busy? You're not busy. Sophie Payten (known professionally as Gordi ) is busy. She's a songwriter AND a physician. On this episode, we discuss how she finds time to do anything. We also explore how she so bea...

"I see no point in being bored. I just don't understand the concept. So I'm always looking for things to occupy my time and get me excited," Peter Berkman of Anamanaguchi told me. Berkman actually told me this in 2011, when ...

Cody Jinks had me at "I could talk about books forever." He estimates that he reads 80-100 books a year. All that reading leads to a lot of writing: songs, poetry, a journal, and an almost completed memoir. Oh and he paints. ...

"Songwriting is about being awake to something you've never thought of or a way of thinking about something you've never experienced before," Mary Chapin Carpenter says on the pod. The five-time GRAMMY winner has a poet's way of thinking about songwriting. And on those rare occasions when she's stu…

I'm a huge Indigo De Souza fan, so I had a great time on this episode! We went deep into her songwriting process and discussed, among other things, how moving from western North Carolina to Los Angeles changed her songwriting...

"I'm realizing how neurotic my process is as I'm talking to you," Jade Bird said, laughing, during our conversation. Indeed, Bird is pretty particular about her writing ritual, which can be intense: she usually takes a walk a...

At some point I told Megan James and Corin Roddick, who compose Purity Ring , that this was the bizarro episode: I'd mention something that a lot of songwriters do, and they told me that they actually did the opposite. But th...

Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová of The Swell Season feel no need to write every day. They both wait patiently for a spark. "I have no worries if I don't write anything. I'm available 24/7," Hansard says. "I never noodle, nev...

"I'm always chasing that ADHD thing: whatever it tells me to do, I just do it," John Gourley of Portugal. The Man told me. This episode hit hard. I used to be a middle school special education teacher. I taught kids with severe learning disabilities, and most also had severe ADHD. A big misconcepti…

Laura Stevenson returns to the pod! This was an easy decision to have her on again ( the first time was 2011 ) because I love her music and she's one of the funniest songwriters I've ever interviewed. I don't know how Stevens...

Cautious Clay and I spent the first ten minutes of this episode talking about the role that painting plays in his creative process. Then a few minutes later, the topic turned to the through line between basketball and songwri...

This episode with Shura marks a first: we managed to draw a through line between Marcella Hazan's bolognese sauce and the songwriting process. We also talk about why peeing brings great ideas. (To be sure, Shura is not the fi...

"The more I do this, the less I want to understand where it comes from," Orla Gartland says on the pod. Like most songwriters, Gartland likes to walk as a part of her songwriting process. She'll usually listen to music on the...

It's the return of Nick Kivlen and Julia Cumming of Sunflower Bean ! We had so much fun in 2022 that we had to do it again. Kivlen says, "One of things I'm realizing as Julia I talk is that our processes are totally different...

"Without the labor, channeling can't happen," Matt Gervais of The Head and the Heart told me. He has stacks upon stacks of Mead notebooks to prove it, all the way back to when he was a kid. Gervais finds art galleries to be p...

When a band has seven GRAMMY wins and thirty-one GRAMMY nominations among them, they're a supergroup. So let's be clear: I'm With Her is a supergroup. The trio of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O'Donovan, and Sara Watkins are close frie...