Ben Bridwell from Band of Horses
Photo by Stevie and Sarah Gee
Listen On
“You would think that suffering leads to good art, but that’s false. I find it stifling.”
Like most songwriters, Ben Bridwell from Band of Horses has found the past two years to be a bane to his creative process.
Is it easy to write songs under intense emotional weight? Do the songs still drop from the sky under a heavy burden?
With few exceptions, songwriters have told me that dark days are not conducive to creativity. As Carl Newman of The New Pornographers said to me, “Some people say that they write best when they're sad or depressed. I don't get that. Because when I'm sad or depressed, I'm crippled beyond writing.’” In our 2019 interview, Jim James of My Morning Jacket decried the myth of the tortured artist. Patterson Hood and Lilly Hiatt told me that they wrote a lot for about a month after the pandemic started, but that was it. Gloominess aside, if your songwriting centers around conversations you hear and people you see, what’s there to write about if you hear nothing and see nothing?
Suffering is not good for anyone, and it’s certainly not good for the artist.
The pandemic has not been good for Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses. “It did not lead to me writing more stuff. It messed me up,” he told me. Large expanses of time—no touring, after all—have not led to more songwriting. In fact, all this time has made him feel “listless.” The breakup of Bridwell’s marriage has made things even tougher, and the freedom to write whenever he wants actually makes him want to write less. “All this freedom makes me push it away,” he says. “I never did that when there was structure. When I had a routine, it was easy to create. Without that, I’m listless.”
This is not the first time I’ve interviewed Bridwell; the first was in 2015. While Bridwell’s creative process may have changed in seven years because of family upheaval, one element remains constant: crossword puzzles. Just as he told me seven years ago, he uses crossword puzzles as a way to explore language and wordplay. This is genius.
The latest album by Band of Horses is called Things are Great.
