Episodes

Send us a text Rebecca and Megan Lovell, the GRAMMY-winning sisters who compose Larkin Poe , call themselves “serial idea keepers.” This means they don’t write every day. Instead, “we pull back on ideas until we are ready to ...

Send us a text Flipturn's Tristan Duncan (guitar), Devon VonBalson (drums), and Dillon Basse (vocals) join the pod and go deep into their creative processes. We talk about, among other things, why certain times of day are bet...

Send us a text Is Vera , the debut album by Phil and Tim Hanesroth ( The Hanesroth Twins ), really a debut? After all, they've won three GRAMMYs and have been nominated seven more times for their songwriting collaboration wit...

Send us a text The last time I interviewed Josh Carter of Phantogram was in 2010, before this site was even a podcast. It was one of the first interviews I ever did, and Carter mentioned the author Breece D'J Pancake . The na...

Send us a text Whenever Sophie Allison (aka Soccer Mommy ) puts something out, I know I'll like it. Her new album Evergreen is no exception. We take a deep dive into her songwriting process on this episode.

Send us a text Ed note: Here's my 2022 podcast episode with Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten. Unfortunately, I stopped recording before Conor Deegan (Deego) and I started reading poetry to each other. But that should give ...

Send us a text Hello Mary on the pod today! Stella Wave, Helena Straight, and Mikaela Oppenheimer released their debut album in 2020, when Wave was 19 and Oppenheimer and Straight were 16. The band talks about their collectiv...

Send us a text "Bravery is underrated when it comes to art," Mike Einziger, guitarist and songwriter for Incbus , told me. In other words, don't be afraid to write the bad stuff. (I'd listen to a guy whose band has sold 23 mi...

Send us a text Here's a sampling of the authors and artists that Jake Duzsik of HEALTH mentioned in our conversation: Pascal, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Pynchon, Camus...

Does writer's block really exist? Or is it just a reluctance to write the bad stuff? The writer Anthony Doerr once told me that writer's block is just "a failure of courage." Pete Yorn tends to agree. On this episode of the p...

Wunderhorse is why you should always get to the show early to see the support act. I was introduced to Jacob Slater's band when I saw them open for Fontaines D.C. ( here's my podcast with Grian Chatten of Fontaines) at a smal...

It’s always fun to interview two songwriters who have a history together! Before his solo career, Kishi Bashi was a member of Kevin Barnes’ band of Montreal . Kishi Bashi’s new album Kantos is out now on Joyful Noise Recordin...

Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Lewin of Magdalena Bay love hybrid cars. While I’m sure they appreciate the environmental benefits, it’s the humming sound the cars make when they first start moving that the duo finds inspiring. In fa...

"I'm always writing and always creating. I relate to the world by writing," Eva Hendricks of Charly Bliss told me on the podcast. Besides songwriting, she's written a YA novel and is a big journaler. Heck, Hendricks even gets...

Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura has a superpower: she's able to write entire songs in her head before putting them to paper. If Campbell gets an idea and can't write it down immediately, she'll repeat the words over and ...

Matthew Koma of Winnetka Bowling League stops by the podcast to talk about how writing a song is like solving a crossword puzzle, why he doesn't like to dig through discarded melodic and lyrical ideas for new songs, and how h...

Ashton Irwin , drummer for 5 Seconds of Summer , often writes songs out of necessity. While he likes to journal, Irwin finds songwriting a much more effective vehicle for maintaining his mental health. And there's a routine t...

ED NOTE: This is from 2021, before this was a podcast and I was posting the video interviews to YouTube. I've taken the audio from that interview and turned it into podcast form. As you can tell at the beginning, we did this ...

The circle is complete. I’ve had recent interviews with Anais Mitchell (together with Charlotte Cornfield) and with Eric D. Johnson , but now that we’ve added Josh Kaufman, this is a full-on Bonny Light Horseman episode. I en...

All four members of DIIV (Zachary Cole Smith, Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman) joined me to talk about their individual songwriting processes. This is one of those interviews that could've gone on forever because...

Does the mind of Eric Earley from Blitzen Trapper ever rest? I think not. After all, he told me that he liked to solve math problems in college while he was making breakfast. Earley is a voracious reader who just finished hi...

Deerlady is Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego , and their debut album Greatest Hits is my favorite album of the year, and this is also one of my favorite interviews because we had so much fun. I first heard Deerlady while l...

Aaron Lee Tasjan has a pretty simple writing process: he gets up around 8am, has a glass of water, and pets his cat. Then he writes. But not every day. "I only write when my body tells me to, when I can go off yesterday's fum...

Jane Penny, co-founder of TOPS , makes her solo debut with her fantastic EP Surfacing , out now on Luminelle Recordings . Penny stops by the podcast to talk about how Barry White has influenced her songwriting; why she has ...