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 editing, too much thinking about what he's writing when the goal is to just get stuff down. "Two radios at once allows the other stuff to come in. It distracts my brain so I can just write," he says. With different songs coming from each side, he can't focus on either. "The chaos confuses the editor and hopefully drives it away." It's a great way to jumpstart his writing.
When he's not in a rut, Sexton prefers silence. His favorite place to write is the family cabin deep in the Adirondack Mountains, where he lives in the summer and visits in the winter. "It's a magical place. I'm surrounded by clean air and clean water and nature. I'll sit at the table and write for hours," Sexton told me. "I love the dead quiet. There's no one around. Just me and the coyotes."
There's another place where Sexton gets inspired, and it's common to many songwriters I interview: behind the wheel. "After a few hours, the sound of the tires hitting the pavement puts me in this elevated state of consciousness," Sexton says. And yet "behind the wheel" doesn't have to be the car. He thought of the chorus for his song "Hold On" while on a bike ride with his son. He didn't have anything to record the chorus with, so he sang it to himself over and over until he got home--and sang it to the neighbor too just to make sure he didn't forget it.