Episodes

"I like to have structure in my songwriting process in order to let chaos rule." Jonathan Russell of The Head and the Heart loves structure. It helps him in his domestic life: he often finds missing bridges in his songs when he’s cleaning the house, for example. “I love order,” Russell told me. “Clean kitchen, happy brain.” And he loves using lists to make his day easier. When I asked Russell what kind of writing he does outside of songwriting, his immediate response was simple: “I’m a listmake...

"With the stuff I've been through, I would just go outside and immediately start to feel better." S. Carey's (Sean Carey) new solo album Break Me Open was written during a time of tremendous domestic change: the dissolution of his marriage, the death of his father, and the growth of his children. Any three of these events, much less all three, would be time for introspection. On the deeply personal lyrics of Break Me Open, Carey channels this introspection. And these periods of reflection were...

Tim Kasher's latest solo album is called MIDDLING AGE. The Cursive frontman explains why he's a "militant reader" and why he doesn't subscribe to the Hemingway credo of "write first, read later." But does he believe that you should always write when you're hungry? Listen for the answer to that, and hear why he thinks songwriters always sing about "walkin' down the street."

“I’m better at writing songs after I’ve processed an emotion. I have to let myself feel an emotion before I can write about it.”—Katie Pruitt. "I write the best when I’m not putting pressure on myself to write about what’s happening around me.”—Molly Tuttle. For Pruitt and Tuttle, dreams are an especially fruitful time for song ideas: both women have been awoken in the middle of the night by incredible melodies running through their head. (And as you’ll also hear, one of those daytime melodies...

"The more evolved periods of my life are when I’m journaling. My journal is a backbone to my life, a conversation with my subconscious. It makes for a healthy mind and spirit.” For Grammy winner Paula Cole, the songwriting process is deeply contemplative and kinesthetic. But journaling is just one part of Cole’s very kinesthetic writing process. “I feel it in my body,” she told me. “It’s like feeling creatively pregnant.” Cole uses movement to bear those songs. They come from walking, swimming,...

Eric Pulido of Midlake takes a deep dive into his songwriting process on today's episode. Pulido is an avid runner, and we talk a lot about how that four mile loop in the local park is a great way to both get out of a rut and conjure up new ideas. Midlake's latest album is called For the Sake of Bethel Woods (ATO Records).

(This interview is from February 2021.) Listen to old friends Sarah Jarosz and Margaret Glaspy talk about their songwriting process! Four-time GRAMMY winner Jarosz and Glaspy have known each other since they were teenagers, so this was a fun conversation. But we did this in the middle of the first COVID winter, so it's a stark reminder that songwriters are only now beginning to emerge from a long spell of unemployment. You'll hear phrases like "when you lose your job, it's stressful" and "the r...

This interview is from January 2021. You think you're prolific? Stu Mackenzie and his bandmates put out five albums in one year, and sixteen over the course of ten years. Not surprisingly, Mackenzie is always creating and gets anxious when he's not. He gets song ideas from everywhere: one song even came from the time signature of the alarm his car makes when he leaves the lights on.

“My receptors are always on because I don’t want to miss anything I see or hear. I try to collect everything," says Steve Gunn. The songwriting process is 24/7 for Gunn. Even when he’s not putting pencil to paper, he’s creating. This interview is from August of 2021.

"If I have anything to give the world as a songwriter, I'm trying to explore the middle ground. That's not the most effective for songwriters because the most provocative things are clear statements of good and evil," says Anand Wilder, formerly of Yeasayer. In this podcast, you'll come for the process and stay for the impressions! Sure we take a deep dive into Wilder's songwriting process, but where else can you find impressions of John, Paul, and George (no Ringo). And Paul Simon? Impression...

“There are days when the songs won’t stop coming. It’s like I’m holding a bucket in the rain and just trying to catch all the ideas.” Bartees Strange has a lot of song ideas. So how does he get them all down when all he does is think about creating?

Did you know that "The Ballad of Jayne" by LA Guns was one of the first songs Brian Fallon learned on guitar? Or that Tracii Guns is a huge Brian Fallon fan? This interview is from the early stages of the pandemic, September 2020. It's interesting to hear people talk about making and playing music in what seemed like a different time. I got these two together after noticing that they always commented on each other's social media posts. Little did I know this was the first time they met! This is...

Erin Rae needs three things for her songwriting process: a hardwood floor, a phone on airplane mode, and glowiness. Rae typically gets compared to 70s singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. It seems like every review has the obligatory "Laurel Canyon" reference. But heck: these are just good songs, period. No comparison needed. Erin Rae's latest album Lighten Up is out now on Thirty Tigers Records.

“It's important to me as a writer to push myself out of my comfort zone in order to grow. That's what excites me now.” With her terrific memoir All I Ever Wanted, bassist Kathy Valentine of the Go-Go’s loves exploring new genres outside of songwriting. As one of the songwriters for The Go-Go’s, Valentine wrote two of their most popular hits in “Vacation” and “Head Over Heels” as well as several other songs. So we’ve been able to check "killer songwriter” off the list for a while. Now we can ad...

For Tomberlin, songwriting is emotional and heavy work. It’s not always pleasant. There’s a lot of emotional prodding and digging. The word “processing” came up a lot in my interview with Sarah Beth Tomberlin (aka Tomberlin) when she discussed how she writes songs. She uses songwriting as a way to process the events in her life, much more so than most songwriters have shared with me. But it’s difficult to write songs when things are “pleasant” in her life. “There’s no urgency to the process in...

Bank pens and vacuum cleaners: the keys to Emily Scott Robinson's songwriting process. Robinson and I both agree that having a writing ritual is important. Rituals give us confidence and comfort. But they also help us achieve a flow state where the writing just happens: you don't have to think about the words because they issue forth. It's when you're on a roll. Achieving this flow state is hard, so that's where the bank pens and vacuum cleaners come in. Robinson is a pen-and-paper person for ...

“You’ve got to be open, you’ve got to fire the judge, you’ve just got to receive it all.” If you want to be a writer of any genre, says songwriter (and, yes, actor) Jeff Daniels, you also have to keep your radar on 24/7 for what you see and hear. And be prepared to steal it. Sure, you know Jeff Daniels from his many films, but he's also been writing songs and playing guitar since 1976. This is a conversation about the artistic process writ large, so if you're a songwriter, a playwright, an ac...

"The good songs happen like someone is playing a record in space, and I have an antennae to pick it up. I actually hear it, and write it down as quickly as I can.”—Patterson Hood. "You don’t just get to have the muse all the time. It’s mysterious. But you have to experience stuff and have time to process those experiences to be able to write about them."—Lilly Hiatt. There are two different points during my interview with Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers and Lilly Hiatt when each reaches to...

When singer/songwriter Martin Sexton gets in a rut, he turns to chaos. Some songwriters take a break, some take a walk, others plow through until they get a breakthrough. But Sexton needs disruption. He uses two radios at once, one on each side of his computer. Each radio plays a different genre. It could be talk radio and rock, classical and country. The sounds don't matter because the goal is to drive his editor crazy. Sexton says that his ruts happen when he gets in his own way: too much ed...

For George Clarke and Kerry McCoy of Deafheaven, it’s not the ritual of the process itself that’s important as much as the preparation before the process. Both use a meditative and repetitive activity to prepare their mind: for McCoy it’s surfing, and for Clarke it’s often running or driving. Clarke writes the lyrics for Deafheaven, while McCoy writes much of the music. For both men, it’s all about putting themselves in the best possible headspace to make something. Surfing is a big part of McC...

Walter Martin’s most efficient writing process involves not sitting down with the intent to create. Also: being hungover helps. Like most songwriters tell me—Britt Daniel of Spoon was the last one—Martin does not sit down to write a song. “When that happens, it comes out the wrong way. I start to sound too smart or like poet,” he says. Instead, he’s writing all the time by constantly observing his surroundings. Song ideas come to Martin throughout the day, like when he’s mowing the lawn, and th...

Morgan Wade gets more done by 8am than you do. "The more active I am, the more energetic I feel. And that's when I get my best ideas," she told me. If you want to schedule a meeting with Wade, do it early. I mean really early. She's usually up and ready to go by 5am. "I get emails from people who want to schedule meetings at 10am, and that is way too late for me. I'm thinking 8am is a much better time," she told me. In fact, on those rare occasions when she’s slept in until 8am, her day is ruin...

For the uninitiated: Debbie Gibson is still the youngest female to write, produce, and perform a #1 single, with "Foolish Beat" at age 17. I think I was just learning how to make toast at that age. She wrote all the songs on her debut album Out of the Blue—at age 16. The album had four singles in the US top five and sold more than five million albums. Gibson's second album Electric Youth was the #1 album in the US for five weeks. It contains three singles in the top 20, including the #1 song "L...

Some artists create because they like the process and the product. They like what they do and they’re good at it, whether they’re amateurs or professionals. But other artists create because they need to create. They have to write songs. It’s a self-actualizing and at times even a survival instinct, a primal drive. Because of this, external forces like love or relationships or world upheaval aren’t always drivers. These artists create because they must create. And at times, it may not even be en...