In-depth interviews with songwriters about their songwriting process. That's All. No talk of band drama, band names, or tour stories. Treating songwriters as writers, plain and simple. By Ben Opipari, English Lit Ph.D.
At some point I told Megan James and Corin Roddick, who compose Purity Ring , that this was the bizarro episode: I'd mention something that a lot of songwriters do, and they told me that they actually did the opposite. But th...
Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová of The Swell Season feel no need to write every day. They both wait patiently for a spark. "I have no worries if I don't write anything. I'm available 24/7," Hansard says. "I never noodle, nev...
"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 misconcepti…
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 Stevens...
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 songwri...
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 fi...