Songwriters on Process

"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 misconception is that people with ADHD can't focus on anything, when in fact the opposite i...

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 Stevenson has time to make music. We might imagine artists creating their art free of life's responsibilities, but Stevenson has responsibilities and then some: s...

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 songwriting. And later he mentioned that planks and stretching are a part of his writing ritual.  He also plays seven (at least) instruments: drums, bass, guitar, piano, sax, flute,...

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 first songwriter to tell me that.) Lest you think her inspiration is confined to those indoor pastimes, Shura told me that few things beat a hike in the mountains. This was...

"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 these walks, and she walks to the tempo of the music she's listening to. So if you see her on the streets of London walking briskly one day and slowly the nex...

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." And as you'll hear, differences can actually streamline the process. Sunflower Bean's latest album  Mortal Primetime is out now on Lucky Numbe...

"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 particularly inspiring; they were a rich source when he worked in the Seattle Art Museum The latest album by The Head and the Heart is Aperture , out now.

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 friends who say that great songs can come from a good trip to the grocery store. I've had all three on the pod before, but never together. The latest albu...

"I need to have those times of being fully in bloom, then fully hibernating. That's how I get my best, most genuine work," Samantha Crain says. She's a seasonal songwriter who actively takes time not to write, and those times are the hibernation stages. Some of Crain's songs hibernate too: the title track off her new album took twenty years to write. Crain's writing p...

ED NOTE : here's my episode with Hood's bandmate Ashton Irwin. It's about time a songwriter referenced the movie Lost in Translation, as 5 Seconds of Summer bassist Calum Hood did in our conversation. It's part of Hood's process: he finds inspiration everywhere. And he likes to create every day, but that doesn't always happen. "I'm an anxious person anyway,...

Suzanne Vega usually heads straight to the compost heap for song ideas. "I have a compost heap of at least 50 notebooks dating back many years, and I pull from those notebooks when writing a new album," Vega says. She starts the process with a theme in mind then heads straight to that pile of notebooks to look for ideas to fit the theme. Some of her songs take years to emerge: "Luci...

"I assign too much personal value to my creative output. Too much of my self-worth is wrapped up in that process in a way that is unhealthy," Stefan Babcock of PUP told me.  It's natural for an artist to attach self-worth to what they create, but Babcock says he's working on loosening that attachment. "Trying to write and not have every song be everything has been a big we...

It's not easy being a songwriter. It's also not easy being a PhD student. I don't know how Uwade is able to do both simultaneously. Uwade is in the first year of her PhD program in Classics at Stanford University, and in this episode we explore how these two lives intersect. We also go deep into her songwriting process, which must involve a .38mm Muji black ink pen. It has to be bla...

Ed note: my new permanent intro and outro music is, in fact, the Tennis song "Need Your Love." Alaina Moore and Pat Riley of Tennis are good friends of mine, which means this episode is more of a conversation than an interview as we go deep into the creative process. The band's website features Alaina surrounded by books, and this is hardly a surprise: they are voracious, and I do m...

“Scribbling into oblivion” is how Lili Trifilio of Beach Bunny describes her editing process. (It's also an amazing song title.) She used this phrase in response to a question I like to ask songwriters: when you’re editing something you don’t like, do you cross it out with a single line or scratch it out? Trifilio wants that word or phrase to disappear forever.  Beach Bunny’s latest album is...

ED NOTE: Here's my recent episode with Benmont Tench, keyboardist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.   Mike Campbell doesn't have songwriting rules. He doesn't need any because he's always creating. "I'm probably writing as I'm talking to you," Campbell told me. In fact, Campbell's problem is that he can't stop coming up with ideas and sometimes...

I always love having my buddy Derek Miller of Sleigh Bells on the pod! This is Miller's third time as a guest. I don't know how he ever has time to do interviews because the man is either writing music, about to write music, or thinking about why he's not writing music. Miller is inspired by everything, and I mean everything. Even LSU football. (Go Dawgs, sorry Derek!) We also talk...

I'm a much better songwriter when I'm reading," Annie DiRusso says. Truer words have never been spoken; a clear through line connects quality songwriting and reading. And the fact that DiRusso loves poetry makes me even more of a fan.  DiRusso does most of her songwriting in her "giant mess" of a bed. "It's covered in guitars, notebooks, pens, a laptop, mics. The...

Running and poetry are all Denison Witmer needs as a songwriter. "When I'm being physically active, my brain opens up," he says. Running is a big part of Witmer's life and plays a big role in his creative process. The other major source of Witmer's inspiration is poetry, and we talk about its impact on his songwriting. We also make a collective case for why the poet Li-You...

Note: here's my recent interview with Mike Campell, guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Benmont Tench is the keyboardist and a founding member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. That’s reason enough to listen to this podcast. I’ve interviewed other icons—Duff McKagan, Johnny Marr, and Jerry Harrison, to name a few—and they all have one common thread: a voracious appetite for art i...

"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 . Indeed, that's the downside of a ritual: a fixed routine can limit your productivity when that routine isn't available. But McGovern does have one tiny "ritual" that I wholeheartedly end...

“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. I've heard this before from other songwriters: Matt Nathanson has a name for that annoyingly critical voice in his head that he's always trying to silence: "the assassin." Hutson and I talk...

Eli Hewson of Inhaler usually stays 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. (All of the band members live with their parents.) Hewson's admittedly "terrible sleeping habits" are nothing new; when he was five years old, his mother often found him watching tv i...

Ed Note: Here’s my 2013 interview with Leithauser and my 2022 interview with his bandmate Walter Martin from The Walkmen . 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. "If I don’t write every day, I feel anxious or like I’ve done something wrong." I don&ap...

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. And as you’ll hear, baking cakes and looking at old houses are great sources too.  It took me about ten seconds—the first notes of the open...