S. Carey (Sean Carey) wrote his new solo album Break Me Open during a time of tremendous domestic change: the dissolution of his marriage, the death of his father, and the growth of his children. Fly fishing helped him through it.
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Why do songwriters always sing about “walkin’ down the street”? And should you always write when you’re hungry? Listen to Tim Kasher answer those questions as we delve into his songwriting process.
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Like many artists, Katie Pruitt and Molly Tuttle have found the creative process to be a hard road over the past year. But as you’ll hear, when those songs do come, dreams are an especially fruitful time: both women have been awoken in the middle of the night by incredible melodies running through their head.
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Journaling is not just an important part of the songwriting process for Paula Cole, it’s an important part of her life. Yet it’s just one piece of the Grammy winning songwriter’s very kinesthetic process. “I feel it in my body, like there are songs burgeoning,” she says.
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For both Sarah Jarosz and Margaret Glaspy, the creative process doesn’t allow for much off time. Jarosz doesn’t write on tour: it’s where she collects her ideas. And when she gets home, that’s when she sifts through all those ideas. “Even if I’m not working on a song, I’m always checking into the creative process every day,” Jarosz told me. Glaspy’s process involves using improvisation as a part of her songwriting process, “acting like I know how the song is supposed to go,” she says
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I’ve been a fan of King Gizzard for a while, but when I realized that they put out five albums in one year (2017) and had sixteen studio albums over the course of ten years, I had to discover how Mackenzie creates. Surely this man is always creating. Surely he spends all day thinking about songs. Surely he gets anxious when he’s not creating something, anything, right?
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Steve Gunn’s songwriting process never stops. Even when he’s not writing, his receptors cast a long throw over his environment as he mines for ideas.
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“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 since the most provocative things are clear statements of good and evil,” Anand Wilder says.
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There are days when the songs just won’t stop coming, says Bartees Strange. His job as an artist is to stand there and try to catch all those ideas. “It’s like holding a bucket outside in the rain,” he says.
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I'm sure you're thinking, "How in the heck did you get these two guys together?" I've interviewed Fallon twice for Songwriters on Process, and I've been an LA Guns fan since their first s/t album. I first saw them live on the "Cocked and Loaded" tour in the late 80s while in college. I follow both of these guys on social media and noticed that they'd always comment on each other's posts. I figured they knew each other, so I reached out. They were both game to talk.
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Erin Rae’s most effective songwriting process comes when things are glow-y and her phone is far, far away.
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As one of the songwriters for The Go-Go’s, Kathy Valentine wrote two of their most popular hits in “Vacation” and “Head Over Heels” as well as several other songs. So we’ve been able to check "killer songwriter” off the list for a while. Now we can add “fantastic prose writer”: All I Ever Wanted is a great book that’s already making some year-end lists.
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The word “processing” came up a lot in my interview with Sarah Beth Tomberlin (aka Tomberlin) when she discussed how she writes songs. She uses songwriting as a way to process the events in her life, much more so than most songwriters have shared with me. It’s difficult to write songs, for example, when things are “pleasant” in her life. “There’s no urgency to the process,” she told me.
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A good songwriting process for Emily Scott Robinson involves bank pens and vacuum cleaners.
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Sure, you know Jeff Daniels from his many films, but he's also been writing songs and playing guitar since 1976.
This is a conversation about the artistic process writ large, so if you're a songwriter, a playwright, an actor, or any combination of the three, you’ll love this interview. The playwriting process and the songwriting process overlap as Daniels effortlessly segues between the two in our discussion; at some point, he exclaims, "It's all fucking connected!"
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There are two points during my interview with Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers and Lilly Hiatt when each reaches to the sky, grabs a piece of air, and pulls it down. Both were describing their songwriting process: songs come from the muse, from the sky, from somewhere they can’t explain. And it’s their duty to grab that song, pull it down, and create it.
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When Martin Sexton is in a rut, he drives his internal editor crazy through utter chaos: two radios playing two different songs simultaneously.
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For George Clarke and Kerry McCoy of Deafheaven, it’s the ritual before the creative process that’s more important than the ritual during it.
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Walter Martin’s most efficient writing process involves not sitting down with the deliberate intent to create. Also: being hungover helps. Photo credit: Melissa Martin
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