Songwriters on Process

“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 the...

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 i...

“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 a...

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 dif...

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...

“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...

"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...

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...

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 abou...

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 h...

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...

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...

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...

No matter if she's writing great music or great books, Michelle Zauner goes by one credo: first thought, best thought. It's always garbage before the good stuff. "Raw source material is supposed to be crap,” Zauner says. “You have to allow yourself to be terrible," she told me. Zauner is the singer, songwriter, and founder of the band Japanese Breakfast. But she's also the...

Spoon's Britt Daniel finds that success as a songwriter comes when he's not trying to write songs. The less organization, the better.  "When I try to write with intention, I come up empty," Daniel says. But if I'm not trying to do anything, I've been more successful. Trying to be organized can be a dead end." He told me that he likes to start writing without any...

Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches has an impressively organized songwriting process that involves spreadsheets, Pinterest boards, and a jar full of paper. For Mayberry, that organization involves writing every day. She has the jar to show for it, a jar full of cut out words and phrases that she collects for inspiration or future lyrical Ideas. She also keeps notebooks. "Writing is very therapeutic...

For Mia Berrin of Pom Pom Squad, how a song looks is as important as how it sounds. And her latest album Death of a Cheerleader  looks and sounds red.   Pom Pom Squad’s video for  “ Head Cheerleader ” is fantastic. (The song itself is amazing and one of my favorites of 2021.) It’s rife with colors, images, and symbols.  But what Berrin did with the video is not surprising if you know her backgroun...

For Yola , songwriting is all about the colliculus. And sometimes a good vacuum. There’s a common motion many songwriters make when telling me where their songs come from: they start grasping in the air, mere conduits pulling songs out of the ether. But if you ask Yola , she’d probably tap her head. “I have an obsessive neurological approach to songwriting,” she told me.  The most important part o...

Artists are always searching for the ideal creative state, that perfect time when the songs effortlessly flow. With both Anaïs Mitchell and Charlotte Cornfield , that involves, well, not really being aware of when they’re in that ideal state.  For Mitchell, it involves accessing the subconscious in dreams. If she’s lucky, a fellow songwriter might appear in those dreams to give her counsel, like D...

“As a songwriter, my job is to figure out how to draw some optimism out of any situation.” Five-time GRAMMY winner Keb’ Mo’ draws that optimism from the “big bubbling river” of creativity.   We can all use a little Keb’ Mo’ in our lives. As the world burns, Kevin Moore (aka Keb’ Mo’) sees cause for optimism everywhere—even in his own home, where he gets joy from mundane household chores that I cer...

Allison Russell & Aoife O'Donovan talk about the songwriting process as full-time moms. Hint: there's not a process. “We’re working moms, so the best undisturbed time is between midnight and 4am.”— Allison Russell “I’m not the ‘lounge around’ type of person. There’s not one wasted hour in my day.” — Aoife O’Donovan Russell and O’Donovan are full-time songwriters of course, but they’r...

Ben talks to Ben: Songwriters on Process interviews Ben Bridwell from Band of Horses. Fun fact: this is not the first time I've interviewed Bridwell. The first was in 2015, when the amazing Sera Cahoone hooked us up with each other. Like most songwriters, Ben Bridwell from Band of Horses has found the past two years to be a bane to his creative process.  With few exceptions, songwriters have...

An introduction to the Songwriters on Process podcast