Songwriters on Process

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 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 time...

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 better for writing, how exercise improves songwriting, and the places they find the most inspiring. Flipturn's latest album Burnout Days is out January 24 on Dualtone Records .

Is Vera , the debut album by Phil and Tim Hanseroth ( The Hanseroth Twins ), really a debut? After all, they've won three GRAMMYs and have been nominated seven more times for their songwriting collaboration with Brandi Carlile. (They're the twins who flank her in concert live.) The twins' songs have been covered by Adele, Dolly Parton, and the Avett Brothers. So while this may be th...

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 name stood out, of course, but it took a while for me to read about Pancake's tragic backstory . Then more songwriters started mentioning him in interviews, so I finally read his boo...

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.

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 you a sense of how deep I went into the creative process with the Fontaines D.C. bassist. This is less a discussion about the particulars of the songwriting process than it is about th...

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 collective and individual writing processes, and we also discussed our shared love for the novelist Jennifer Egan. Hello Mary's latest album  Emita Ox is out now on Frenchkiss Records . 

"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 million records.)   As you'll hear on this episode, Einziger's intellectual curiosity runs deep, expanding far beyond music into the world of physics; the overlap...

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, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy. And somewhere along the lines, we discussed postmodern prose. To be clear, Duzsik was not name checking. It reflects how deeply his creative m...

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 podcast, Yorn and I talk about the myth of writer's block, why you should always say yes to a creative project with your kids, and why he still keeps h...

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 small club in Pittsburgh in 2022. I had never heard of Wunderhorse, but they won everyone, including me, over in the first thirty seconds with their volume and their ene...

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 Recordings , and of Montreal’s Lady on the Cusp is out on Polyvinyl Records. Kishi Bashi’s “ Omoiyari: A Song Film ” has been nominated for an Emmy with the winners announced in Sept...

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 that the duo finds inspiring. In fact, they find inspiration in everything around them, visually and sonically—even the act of Swiffering, as you’ll hear on the podcast. Small surprise that Tenenbaum had 2002 voice memos of ideas on her ph...

"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 inspired while she's hanging laundry! And when those songs are close to fruition, they need to be perfect: Hendricks estimates that she wrote 50 diff...

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 over to herself until she can grab a pen and pencil. This superpower comes in handy when driving is an especially rich source of inspiration, as it is for Campb...

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 he gets inspired by being among the stores. Winnetka Bowling League's debut album Sha La La is out now. I'm a big fan. 

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 to the songwriting process: from 11a-3p when the caffeine is at its peak, with a Moleskin journal and a black ink pen. Irwin likes to write lyrics during the day; the song...

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 in the middle of the pandemic, hence our discussion about the creative process during COVID. Mike Doughty believes that discipline is a necessary part of the songwriting...

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 enjoyed this conversation immensely because we dove into their collective process, not just their individual processes. And listening to them talk for even a few seconds makes o...

All four members of DIIV (Zachary Cole Smith, Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman) joined me to talk about their individual songwriting processes. This interview could've gone on forever because they are so passionate about creativity. What's interesting is that their individual songwriting processes don't have too much in common, but perhaps how those differences play off ea...

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 his self-proclaimed "Time of the Tomes," in which he read nothing but, well, tomes. (The longer, the better. Infinite Jest ? Please. Kid's stuff). Earley has a fa...

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 listening to my old college radio station, WTHS at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. They played " Bounty ," and it was one of those moments when you hear a song...

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 fumes," he told me. And in one of the best rituals I've ever heard, Tasjan always writes with a pencil--but never uses the eraser. "I hate erasers,"...

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 to write her lyrics in cursive; and why when you see her in the audience at a show and she's looking at her phone, she's actually deeply engaged in the creative pro...

On this episode of the podcast, Grace Cummings talks about why her phone has been such a drain on her creativity and why she's making a conscious effort to stay away from it. But sometimes that phone can be pretty useful. For one, it allows Cummings to create her alter ego Cheryl. (You'll understand once you listen.) And it also allows her to create a fantastic filing system for her song...