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
Feb. 5, 2026
Patton Magee (The Nude Party)
Patton Magee of The Nude Party has the best reason why reading makes you a better songwriter: it gives you a stronger and more wide-ranging vocabulary, which in turn gives you more ways to express yourself. "Words that you ra...
Jan. 20, 2026
Courtney Marie Andrews
"I am a taskmaster," Courtney Marie Andrews told me. When we talked back in 2018 , I marveled at Andrews' discipline. She calls it "chunk writing": Andrews doesn't write on tour but instead collects notes and ideas while she'...
Jan. 7, 2026
Lucinda Williams
"To write about something sad and dark, I need to feel content, to feel a sense of well being. I can't write when I'm depressed," Lucinda Williams told me. Much of my discussion with Williams focused on how we prepare to writ...
Dec. 29, 2025
KT Tunstall
"I've been very happy lately, and that's worrying," KT Tunstall told me. "It's much easier to write sad songs than happy songs. Happiness makes you want to be present, but pain makes you want to escape. And music has always b...
Dec. 15, 2025
Melody's Echo Chamber
Why do so many of us feel the need to clean our space before we create? Melody Prochet (aka Melody's Echo Chamber ) and I discuss why it's important to our respective writing processes. When she's not writing in that nice and...
Dec. 2, 2025
Whitney
"Pants delivery was my eureka moment," Julien Ehrlich of Whitney says on the pod, and with that we have my favorite out-of-context pull quote. Ehrlich was not speaking metaphorically: when he and bandmate Max Kakacek were wri...
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