Songwriters on Process

"The more I do this, the less I want to understand where it comes from," Orla Gartland says on the pod. Like most songwriters, Gartland likes to walk as a part of her songwriting process. She"ll usually listen to music on these walks, and she walks to the tempo of the music she"s listening to. So if you see her on the

It"s the return of Nick Kivlen and Julia Cumming of Sunflower Bean! We had so much fun in 2022 that we had to do it again. Kivlen says, "One of things I"m realizing as Julia I talk is that our processes are totally different." And as you"ll hear, differences can actually streamline the process. Sunflower Bean"s latest

"Without the labor, channeling can"t happen," Matt Gervais of The Head and the Heart told me. He has stacks upon stacks of Mead notebooks to prove it, all the way back to when he was a kid. Gervais finds art galleries to be particularly inspiring; they were a rich source when he worked in the Seattle Art Museum The lat

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