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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Morgan Wade’s songwriting process doesn’t involve a lot of sitting around. But it does involve some really early mornings. And I mean early.
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Debbie Gibson thanks The Song Fairies—and sometimes a carousel horse—for the zen-like calm that allows her to write so many iconic songs.
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Julien Baker and Matt Nathanson make music not just because they want to, but because they have to. For both songwriters, it’s a vital form of self-expression that’s not always easy.
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“Raw source material is supposed to be crap,” Michelle Zauner says. “You have to allow yourself to be terrible.” Her best writing comes in the revision process, not in those “garbage” first drafts.
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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 like red.
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Artists are always searching for the ideal creative state, that perfect time when the songs effortlessly flow. For both Anaïs Mitchell and Charlotte Cornfield, that ideal state involves, well, not really being aware of when they’re in that ideal state.
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