Songwriters on Process

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...

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...