Deep Talk About the Songwriting Process.
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.
Recent Episodes
May 19, 2025
Matt Gervais (The Head and the Heart)
"Without the labor, channeling can't happen," Matt Gervais of The Head and the Heart told me. He has stacks upon stacks of Mead notebooks to prove it, all the way back to when he was a kid. Gervais finds art galleries to be p...
May 14, 2025
I'm With Her
When a band has seven GRAMMY wins and thirty-one GRAMMY nominations among them, they're a supergroup. So let's be clear: I'm With Her is a supergroup. The trio of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O'Donovan, and Sara Watkins are close frie...
May 11, 2025
Samantha Crain
"I need to have times of being fully in bloom, then fully hibernating. That's how I get my best, most genuine work," Samantha Crain says. She's a seasonal songwriter who actively takes time not to write, and those times are t...
May 7, 2025
Calum Hood (5 Seconds of Summer)
ED NOTE : here's my episode with Hood's bandmate Ashton Irwin. It's about time a songwriter referenced the movie Lost in Translation, as 5 Seconds of Summer bassist Calum Hood did in our conversation. It's part of Hood's proc...
May 3, 2025
Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Vega usually heads straight to the compost heap for song ideas. "I have a compost heap of at least 50 notebooks dating back many years, and I pull from those notebooks when writing a new album," Vega says. She starts ...
April 30, 2025
Stefan Babcock (PUP)
"I assign too much personal value to my creative output. Too much of my self-worth is wrapped up in that process in a way that is unhealthy," Stefan Babcock of PUP told me. It's natural for an artist to attach self-worth to w...
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