Songwriters on Process

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...

"I see no point in being bored. I just don't understand the concept.  So I'm always looking for things to occupy my time and get me excited," Peter Berkman of Anamanaguchi told me. Berkman actually told me this in 2011, when he was one of my first interviews for this site. And let me tell you: he hasn't changed one bit. 

Talking to Berkman and Ary Warnaar, it's obvious that music plays only a tiny role ...

Cody Jinks had me at "I could talk about books forever." He estimates that he reads 80-100 books a year. All that reading leads to a lot of writing: songs, poetry, a journal, and an almost completed memoir. Oh and he paints. That's a great example of the through line between reading and writing: if you want to write well, you have to read. 

(Shameless plug: one of the books he read last year was my book)

Jinks's l...

"Songwriting is about being awake to something you've never thought of or a way of thinking about something you've never experienced before," Mary Chapin Carpenter says on the pod. The five-time GRAMMY winner has a poet's way of thinking about songwriting. And on those rare occasions when she's stuck, she goes songwalking.

I've always been a fan of Carpenter's music, but when she mentioned Dav...

"I'm realizing how neurotic my process is as I'm talking to you," Jade Bird said, laughing, during our conversation. Indeed, Bird is pretty specific about her writing ritual, which can be intense: she usually takes a walk after writing to relieve back stiffness that comes from hunching over her notebook. And while many songwriters boost their creativity through movement, Bird says that there's nothing like ...

Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová of The Swell Season feel no need to write every day. They both wait patiently for a spark. "I have no worries if I don't write anything. I'm available 24/7," Hansard says. "I never noodle, never rehearse, never just play around." For Irglová, she feels a current. "There's something calling me to the piano. There's a feeling. I plant the seed, then let it ...

"I'm always chasing that ADHD thing: whatever it tells me to do, I just do it," John Gourley of Portugal. The Man told me. 

This episode hit hard. I used to be a middle school special education teacher. I taught kids with severe learning disabilities, and most also had severe ADHD. A big misconception is that people with ADHD can't focus on anything, when in fact the opposite is true: they focus on everything. &q...

Laura Stevenson returns to the pod! This was an easy decision to have her on again (the first time was 2011) because I love her music and she's one of the funniest songwriters I've ever interviewed.

I don't know how Stevenson has time to make music. We might imagine artists creating their art free of life's responsibilities, but Stevenson has responsibilities and then some: she's a mother, she's a music...

Cautious Clay and I spent the first ten minutes of this episode talking about the role that painting plays in his creative process. Then a few minutes later, the topic turned to the through line between basketball and songwriting. And later he mentioned that planks and stretching are a part of his writing ritual. 

He also plays seven (at least) instruments: drums, bass, guitar, piano, sax, flute, and vocals. Cautious Clay is a true ...

This episode with Shura marks a first: we managed to draw a through line between Marcella Hazan's bolognese sauce and the songwriting process. We also talk about why peeing brings great ideas. (To be sure, Shura is not the first songwriter to tell me that.) Lest you think her inspiration is confined to those indoor pastimes, Shura told me that few things beat a hike in the mountains. This was one fun conversation!

Shura's ...