Jonny Pierce says that The Drums’ new album Jonny is “a little less practice, a little more mess.” And he’s much happier with the mess.
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“I’m allergic to routine. I wake up and follow all my whims and desires. But inspiration strikes every couple of days, and when it does you don’t want to be around me because I have a one track mind,” Clem Creevy of Cherry Glazerr says.
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No songwriter has cited Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka as influences. Until Genesis Owusu.
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"If you're writing alone, you're still collaborating," Devendra Banhart says on this episode of the podcast. I love that idea: even in solitary writing, you're always running ideas by yourself.
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“Surprising yourself is the only way to stay inspired,” M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger says in this episode of the podcast.
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The key to Blondshell’s fruitful songwriting process is not making it look too much like a songwriting process. The more precious she makes the process, the harder it can be to write. "Normalizing it makes me more productive," she says. Yet some awareness of what works is important too, which is why I love the perfect balance in her credo: "Know your process but respect the mystery."
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At some point in my interview with Jerry Harrison, guitarist and keyboardist for Talking Heads, I asked him to respond to a quote by the iconic Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Harrison told me that Ginsberg was a friend. And that’s why he is Jerry Harrison. Talking Heads are one of the most influential acts of the past 50 years. Call it new wave, art pop, post punk, whatever: any act with that label can at least partially thank Talking Heads.
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Jenny Owen Youngs had me at "Shitty First Drafts."
This is the Anne Lamott essay espousing the idea that the first draft of anything is supposed to be atrocious. Just get it down, dammit. "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts," Lamott writes. The polish comes later.
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If have plans to meet Bethany Cosentino and she’n not on time, look outside. There’s a good chance she’s out there, in her car, writing. Cosentino finds a (parked) car to be a especially fruitful place for ideas.
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Academy Award nominee Emile Mosseri has written with people (The Dig), for people (like the film score Minari), and now he’s writing for one person: himself. Mosseri talks about the differences among the processes—while balancing that with parenthood.
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Josh Ritter wants you to know that even though he’s a narrative songwriter with roots in Idaho, he doesn’t use a quill pen for his lyrics.
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"I'm pretty much always thinking about lyrics every day of my life,” Jess Williamson says on the podcast. But what happens when you're always thinking about songwriting and you’re unable to write a song?
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"A washing machine with a clumpy pair of shoes can be a beautiful thing." Legendary drummer Dave Lombardo, a founding member of Slayer, finds beauty in the mundane. And also in the annoying: "Even the rhythm of a jackhammer and the bumps in a road can be inspiring," he says in the latest Songwriters on Process podcast.
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Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman makes a lot of mistakes. And that's a good thing, he says, because that's when the good stuff happens. "The excitement is in the mistakes," he says
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Both Amy Ray of The Indigo Girls and H.C. McEntire find the outdoors to be a great place to write songs. For Ray, dog walks are an especially fruitful time. And for McEntire, there’s nothing like a good lawnmower.
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NOTE: This interview is from December 2020, and I've converted it to podcast form. It's like opening a time capsule now when I listen to songwriters talk in 2020 about how they were navigating the pandemic as artists. For some, it was a bane: the isolation paralyzed their creativity. For Alex Skolnick of Testament, it was a boon.
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"All the time in the world is too much pressure." Shana Cleveland of La Luz prefers a good deadline when she writes songs. And with a toddler in the house, her day is nothing but deadlines.
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