Songwriters on Process

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 responsibil

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 a

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 pas

"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