Songwriters on Process

(This interview is from February 2021.) Listen to old friends Sarah Jarosz and Margaret Glaspy talk about their songwriting process! Four-time GRAMMY winner Jarosz and Glaspy have known each other since they were teenagers, so this was a fun conversation. But we did this in the middle of the first COVID winter, so it's a stark reminder that songwriters are only now beginning to emerge from a long spell of unemployment. You'll hear phrases like "when you lose your job, it's stressful" and "the reality of losing my job really got me down."

This interview is from January 2021.You think you're prolific? Stu Mackenzie and his bandmates put out five albums in one year, and sixteen over the course of ten years. Not surprisingly, Mackenzie is always creating and gets anxious when he's not. He gets song ideas from everywhere: one song even came from the time signature of the alarm his car makes when he leaves the lights on.   

“My receptors are always on because I don’t want to miss anything I see or hear. I try to collect everything," says Steve Gunn. The songwriting process is 24/7 for Gunn. Even when he’s not putting pencil to paper, he’s creating.  This interview is from August of 2021.

"If I have anything to give the world as a songwriter, I'm trying to explore the middle ground. That's not the most effective for songwriters because the most provocative things are clear statements of good and evil," says Anand Wilder, formerly of Yeasayer. In this podcast, you'll come for the process and stay for the impressions! Sure we take a deep dive into Wilder's songwriting process, but where else can you find impressions of John, Paul, and George (no Ringo). And Paul Simon?Impressions aside, Wilder is a fantastic interview and a great storyteller. But back to the process: it's about weed and windsprints. Listen to find out how he incorporates these elements into his songwriting process!Wilder's first solo album is called I Don't Know My Words.

“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 they always commented on each other's social media posts. Little did I know this was the first time they met! This is the third time I've interviewed Fallon, and I've been a Tracii Guns fan since, well, forever. 

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 is out now on Thirty Tigers Records.

“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 as several other songs. So we’ve been able to check "killer songwriter” off the list for a while. Now we can add “fantastic prose writer”:  All I Ever Wanted is a great book. Our interview was a discussion about Valentine’s process as a songwriter and a prose writer, with a focus on the latter. 

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 difficult to write songs when things are “pleasant” in her life. “There’s no urgency to the process in that case,” she says. It’s the difficult events that she writes about, and these events require distance before she’s able to process them. 

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 flow state is hard, so that's where the bank pens and vacuum cleaners come in. Robinson is a pen-and-paper person for her lyrics. And there's something about the smoothness of those cheap ball point pens from her local bank that she finds irresistible. When she writes with them, the words flow. So if you see Robinson in your local bank branch when she's on tour, she may be doing more than just a bank transaction.As for the vacuum cleaner, that's for generating ideas. We talked a lot about the role of movement to the songwriting process. Most songwriters tell me that they get ideas while walking, running, hiking, biking, swimming, or driving. I've also heard cooking and gardening. But Robinson is the first one to cite an upright vacuum. It's not the vacuum itself that gives her ideas, but the repetitive and monotonous movement that helps her brain focus on the writing process, just as it does with the repetitive motion of walking, running, or cutting vegetables. And when your brain can engage in an activity that involves minimal higher order thinking, it can then use that space for creativity.