Songwriters on Process

Nate Ruess's songwriting catalog includes his Grammy winning band Fun; his co-write and co-performance with P!nk on "Just Give Me a Reason"; and songs for Hayley Williams, Kesha, and Young Thug. After feeling no urge to write for ten years, he's back with the first new material in twenty years for his band The Format.  Their new album is Boycott Heaven. And as you'll hear, nothing gets Ruess in the songwrit...

Procrastinators unite! Thank you, Tyler Ballgame, you are a kindred spirit. Finally someone who admits that procrastination is a great tool for writing. So much has been written on the evils of procrastination, yet some people achieve peak efficiency only when they're under pressure. 

But sleep works for Ballgame too: as you'll hear, some of his best songs started as dreams. And his ideal state of mind for songwriting is w...

“When I go to the grocery store, that’s part of the songwriting process. When I work on my truck, that’s part of my songwriting process. Every aspect of our life feeds into our creativity. The more present I can be, the better the songs,” says Buck Meek. 

Meek, the guitarist in Big Thief, is the first songwriter to discuss how “fluid dynamics” impact his songwriting. The ocean—with its waves, shifting sand, temperature fluctuation, ...

Jade Long and Jessica Thompson of Athens, Georgia based Hotel Fiction have a simple routine for their songwriting sessions: make some brownies, pour some wine. And they like to be outside. It's not complicated. 

But while food, drink, and the outdoors are all common sources of inspiration for songwriters, one element of the Hotel Fiction writing process is unique. When they're outside, they often prefer the top of a parkin...

Nat and Alex Wolff had me at Sam Shepard. The playwright/writer/actor was one of my dissertation topics and the brothers acted in his plays, so we agreed early on that he's one of our favorite writers.  (After you listen, please read Shepard's Pulitzer Prize winning play Buried Child.) 

I’ve interviewed other actors who are also songwriters, and as you’ll hear, all channel their stage experience when they write songs. The ...

Patton Magee of The Nude Party has the best reason why reading makes you a better songwriter: it gives you a stronger and more wide-ranging vocabulary, which in turn gives you more ways to express yourself. "Words that you rarely use are a lot more fun to play around with," he says on the pod. This reminds me of one of my favorite lines in William Zinsser's book On Writing Well, when he says that if a word comes too ...

"I am a taskmaster," Courtney Marie Andrews told me. When we talked back in 2018, I marveled at Andrews' discipline. She calls it "chunk writing": Andrews doesn't write on tour but instead collects notes and ideas while she's there. Then, when she's home, she blocks off chunks of time on her calendar and does nothing but write.

This discipline makes for prolificness: besides being a fantastic ...

"To write about something sad and dark, I need to feel content, to feel a sense of well being. I can't write when I'm depressed," Lucinda Williams told me. 

Much of my discussion with Williams focused on how we prepare to write. By her own admission, she's obsessed with paper. "I could spend hours in an office supply store," says Williams. A comfortable chair is necessary too, but not too comfortab...

"I've been very happy lately, and that's worrying," KT Tunstall told me. "It's much easier to write sad songs than happy songs. Happiness makes you want to be present, but pain makes you want to escape. And music has always been a way for me to get out."

Tunstall is adamant about not writing every day. "I love doing nothing, so mindless puttering is especially effective. When she finally sits ...

"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 ...