Episodes

Eric Pulido of Midlake takes a deep dive into his songwriting process on today's episode. Pulido is an avid runner, and we talk a lot about how that four mile loop in the local park is a great way to both get out of a rut and...

(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, s...

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 get...

“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 creati...

"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 An...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ev...

“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 g...

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) ...

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...

“You’ve got to be open, you’ve got to fire the judge, you’ve just got to receive it all.” If you want to be a writer of any genre, says songwriter (and, yes, actor) Jeff Daniels, you also have to keep your radar on 24/7 for w...

"The good songs happen like someone is playing a record in space, and I have an antennae to pick it up. I actually hear it, and write it down as quickly as I can.”—Patterson Hood. "You don’t just get to have the muse all the...

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 onc...

For George Clarke and Kerry McCoy of Deafheaven, it’s not the ritual of the process itself that’s important as much as the preparation before the process. Both use a meditative and repetitive activity to prepare their mind: f...

Walter Martin’s most efficient writing process involves not sitting down with the intent to create. Also: being hungover helps. Like most songwriters tell me— Britt Daniel of Spoon was the last one—Martin does not sit down to...

Morgan Wade gets more done by 8am than you do. "The more active I am, the more energetic I feel. And that's when I get my best ideas," she told me. If you want to schedule a meeting with Wade, do it early. I mean really earl...

For the uninitiated: Debbie Gibson is still the youngest female to write, produce, and perform a #1 single, with "Foolish Beat" at age 17. I think I was just learning how to make toast at that age. She wrote all the songs on ...

Some artists create because they like the process and the product. They like what they do and they’re good at it, whether they’re amateurs or professionals. But other artists create because they need to create. They have to w...

No matter if she's writing great music or great books, Michelle Zauner goes by one credo: first thought, best thought. It's always garbage before the good stuff. "Raw source material is supposed to be crap,” Zauner says. “You...

Spoon's Britt Daniel finds that success as a songwriter comes when he's not trying to write songs. The less organization, the better. "When I try to write with intention, I come up empty," Daniel says. But if I'm not trying t...

Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches has an impressively organized songwriting process that involves spreadsheets, Pinterest boards, and a jar full of paper. For Mayberry, that organization involves writing every day. She has the jar ...

For Mia Berrin of Pom Pom Squad, how a song looks is as important as how it sounds. And her latest album Death of a Cheerleader looks and sounds red. Pom Pom Squad’s video for “ Head Cheerleader ” is fantastic. (The song its...

For Yola , songwriting is all about the colliculus. And sometimes a good vacuum. There’s a common motion many songwriters make when telling me where their songs come from: they start grasping in the air, mere conduits pulling...