Songwriters on Process

"Pants delivery was my eureka moment," Julien Ehrlich of Whitney says on the pod, and with that we have my favorite out-of-context pull quote. 

Ehrlich was not speaking metaphorically: when he and bandmate Max Kakacek were writing Whitney's first album, he drove a clothing delivery van that had no working radio. The monotonous drives were great sources of inspiration. Kakacek, on the other hand, was a competitive swim...

“I’m a ‘go in phases’ type of gal. It took me a year and a half to write this record, but it came in blocks,” Gatlin says. It’s how she manages her routine in those blocks that makes her songwriting process so fascinating. Gatlin is most effective between 3pm and 5pm, and thanks to a typing class she took as a child, she can type those lyrics at 95 words per minute. She finds walks to be particularly inspiring for lyrics, but when ...

"I made a conscious effort on this album to be more disciplined in my writing because my ideas were getting stale and I was writing from the same place," Mariel Buckley told me. "I realized that my material was becoming repetitive when I was waiting for inspiration to strike." 

Buckley's new process involved writing every day and writing from a more joyful place. The result is her fantastic new album Strange...

Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten of Momma return! Momma is my favorite band and their new album Welcome to My Blue Sky is my favorite album of 2025. At least I'm consistent since I said the same thing about them when they were on the pod in 2023. (Their live show is absolutely killer too.)

Friedman and Weingarten have been writing together since their teens, and one thing hasn't changed over the years: they still write...

"I'm a professional daydreamer," Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes told me. That's the catch-22: are you really daydreaming if you're aware that you're doing it? Daydreaming leads to eureka moments, but only when you don't sit down and say, "I'm going to daydream." As with most people, the eureka moments for Oberst involve mundane activities for a practical reason: no one interrupts him w...

"I get a physical tingling sensation. It's beyond my control, an impulsive feeling where I have to sit and wait for it," Billie Marten says about that moment before a wave of inspiration strikes. The problem, Marten told me, is that it's been a while since she's written anything.

But as we soon realized, Marten has been writing a lot: she pulled out her Notes app and scrolled through all the freewriting and ...

"I allow myself to miss the guitar. And the guitar comes calling when I start to feel bored," says William Prince. A multiple JUNO award-winner, Prince is also a member of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, Canada, writing often about his experience as a member. Prince finds long drives to be productive--and those long drives in Canada are common. "So many voice memos happen on those long drives from Calgary  to Vancou...

"It's important to separate my sense of self-worth from my creations. If I was so self-aware of my output, I don't think I'd be having fun," Melina Duterte, who goes by the performing name Jay Som, told me. She says that output is proportional to her introspection: "How much I express through music depends on how much work I've been doing on myself," she says. And there's no better place...

It's the return of Hayes Carll! I first interviewed him in 2013 and again in 2016. A recurring theme of those early interviews was Carll's admitted lack of discipline in the writing process. "I'm always looking for something else to do other than write," Carll told me in 2013.

But 2025 brings a new Hayes Carll, one who sees discipline as an ally. "I don't turn away from the knock at the door, even ...

"The decision has been made, and now it's time to f**k off," Mitch Rowland told me. To be clear, Rowland wasn't saying this to me; instead, it's Rowland ruthlessly killing his darlings in the editing process. 

Rowland is a solo artist, but he's also the guitarist in Harry Styles's solo band and has co-written many songs with Styles, including "Watermelon Sugar" and "Golden." (Ro...

If you took a contemporary poetry class in college in the last 30 years, Paul Muldoon was probably on your syllabus. The New York Times has called him “one of the great poets of the past hundred years. . . . Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.” The Times Literary Supplement referred to Muldoon as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.” He's a Pulitzer Prize winner, a...

It's the return of Molly Tuttle! (The first time I interviewed Tuttle was in 2021, when I interviewed her and Katie Pruitt.)

Tuttle won the GRAMMY for Best Bluegrass Album in both 2023 and 2024. And you don't become great without rigorous discipline. As you'll hear, Tuttle kept a flip phone as a student at Berklee because she wanted to maintain her focus on music, not a phone screen. 

Molly Tuttle's latest album i...

I cannot imagine a world where Scott McCaughey is not writing. But first, some background. He was an auxiliary member of R.E.M. from 1994 to 2011, working with them in the studio and playing with them live. He founded The Baseball Project and The Minus Five, among other bands, both with members of R.E.M. He also founded The Young Fresh Fellows. 

McCaughey doesn't feel pressure to create every day because he's already doing...

Dev Hynes had me at the bookshelves.

All those bookshelves behind him on our Zoom interview, rising to the ceiling and stuffed with books. Small wonder, then, that Hynes works best in daily consumption mode rather than creation mode. He's adamant about not writing every day.

The creative process is all about keeping it fun for Hynes. He likes to write in the afternoon for the simple reason that he likes his mornings, and who wan...

There's a difference between wanting to write and needing to write. For Will Taylor of Flyte, it's usually a need. Taylor says that he doesn't write every day, but instead writes after an accumulation of experiences. "I know it's time because a sadness comes over me. It's a quite noticeable funk, and the clouds need to break," says Taylor. 

But for Taylor and his bandmate Nicolas Hill, that need to...

"I write the most when I'm supposed to be doing something else because it tricks me into thinking that songwriting is rebellious," Meg Duffy (aka Hand Habits) told me. "It feels like I get to choose to do it." I love this quote so much. It illustrates how we sometimes have to trick ourselves into being creative. 

Duffy used the word "summon" a few times in our conversation regarding their songwriti...

The theme of today's podcast is nourishment.

It dawned on me a few minutes into my conversation with Hannah Cohen that when she said proper nourishment was critical to her writing process, she was being literal.  It was no metaphor. If Cohen's not hydrated and fed, the creative process becomes much more arduous. She's the first songwriter to ever tell me that. 

But when Cohen also told me that "the body keeps scor...

Ed Note: Lzzy Hale has collaborated with Mark Morton (Lamb of God) in the past. I co-authored Mark's new book Desolation: A Heavy Metal Memoir, hence the occasional reference to Mark and our book in this episode.

Many songwriters I interview have a journal. Very few have two. Lzzy Hale of Halestorm is the only one who has three. She has a five-year journal, a freewrite journal, and a pocket field note journal "for when the...