Songwriters on Process

When a band has seven GRAMMY wins and thirty-one GRAMMY nominations among them, they"re a supergroup. So let"s be clear: I"m With Her is a supergroup. The trio of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O"Donovan, and Sara Watkins are close friends who say that great songs can come from a good trip to the grocery store. I"ve had all three

"I need to have those times of being fully in bloom, then fully hibernating. That"s how I get my best, most genuine work," Samantha Crain says. She"s a seasonal songwriter who actively takes time not to write, and those times are the hibernation stages. Some of Crain"s songs hibernate too: the title track off her new a

ED NOTE: here"s my episode with Hood"s bandmate Ashton Irwin. It"s about time a songwriter referenced the movie Lost in Translation, as 5 Seconds of Summer bassist Calum Hood did in our conversation. It"s part of Hood"s process: he finds inspiration everywhere. And he likes to create every day, but that doesn"t always

Suzanne Vega usually heads straight to the compost heap for song ideas. "I have a compost heap of at least 50 notebooks dating back many years, and I pull from those notebooks when writing a new album," Vega says. She starts the process with a theme in mind then heads straight to that pile of notebooks to look for idea

"I assign too much personal value to my creative output. Too much of my self-worth is wrapped up in that process in a way that is unhealthy," Stefan Babcock of PUP told me.  It"s natural for an artist to attach self-worth to what they create, but Babcock says he"s working on loosening that attachment. "Trying to write

It"s not easy being a songwriter. It"s also not easy being a PhD student. I don"t know how Uwade is able to do both simultaneously. Uwade is in the first year of her PhD program in Classics at Stanford University, and in this episode we explore how these two lives intersect. We also go deep into her songwriting process