JP Pitts, Surfer Blood
“It wasn't until I gave myself room to write stuff I didn't like, room to fail, and room to mess around and try different stuff that I really started to expand my creative capacity.”
JP Pitts of Surfer Blood says that good songwriting involves failure. And reading Pablo Neruda.
Anthony Doerr, the Pultizer Prize winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, once told me that he didn’t believe in writer’s block. Instead, he called it “a failure of courage.” That’s almost the same language that JP Pitts used when I asked him about writer’s block, only he calls it “a fear of failure.” That’s the mantra that Pitts uses as he writes, and it’s one that every writer, songwriter or otherwise, should follow. If you don’t give yourself room to fail, you’ll never get a word on the page. “The worst thing that ever happens is that it never sees the light of day. That really freed me up because no one's going to bat a thousand,” he told me.
What I enjoyed about this interview is that all of the advice Pitts gives—and there’s plenty—is for a writer of any stripe. In fact, if you didn’t know Pitts was in a band, his words here could pass for a novelist’s. He’s got a method to every part of the process. He writes on a different type of paper, depending on the stage of the process he’s in. He uses running as a way to generate ideas. He turns to Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman for inspiration. And again, he’s not afraid to write garbage. (For more on writing garbage, read Anne Lamott’s great essay “Shitty First Drafts.”) He’s got a fantastic capacity to reflect on the different parts of his process: if something doesn’t work, he changes it, just like he did when he realized that writing lyrics at the last minute wasn’t working.
Surfer Blood’s fantastic new album Carefree Theatre is out September 25 on Kanine Records. Read my interview with JP Pitts below, which has been edited for length and clarity. You can watch the Zoom version of our interview below as well.
I guess this is related to the quarantine, but do you find that having large expanses of time makes you more creative, or does having no time limit or places to be make it more difficult since there’s less urgency?
A
Honestly, quarantine isn't that much different from my normal life as a songwriter. When you wake up and try and write songs every day, you're used to spending a lot of time in your house by yourself. We have the idea of the tortured lonely artist, because anyone who's not a narcissist is going to be self critical. And when you spend a lot of time in your head at your house with a pen and paper, you're going to go a little bit insane.
Having a deadline forces you to make decisions. There's a lot of tough decisions with writing. I'll have a few different ways to phrase a verse, and I'll just put off making a decision about it. And then the second we have a date for recording, the night before I'll sit down and in an hour make the decisions I tortured myself over for a month beforehand. I'm constantly chipping away trying to come up with new ideas, but there's nothing like a deadline to make you pull the trigger on it.
I was going to ask this later, but since you mentioned “pen and paper,” how particular are you when it comes to colors, brands, and types of pen and paper?
A
I think it's just pure superstition. I don't think it really matters in the long run, but I do all my journaling on one of those composition books, and I do all of my lyric writing on a legal pad so I can just rip it off and throw it away if I don't like it. I give myself a lot of room to play with the syntax and rewrite them on the fly.
But the downside to what you’re doing is that once you rip that page off and throw it away, you can never go back to it.
A
Yeah. When I started writing songs, I had this idea that every great poem or song or novel was written all in one take: just put the pen to paper and don't lift it up until it was done. With the first record, that really worked for me because it's an entire adolescence of pent up creative energy coming out all at once. But it wasn't until I gave myself some room to write stuff I didn't like, some room to fail, and some room to mess around and try different stuff that I really started to expand my creative capacity.
So it’s important to write through all the garbage first before you can get to the good stuff?
A
Absolutely. Like a lot of artists, I'm pretty critical of myself and my own work. I have that voice of an editor in the back of my head who's always having a conversation with me. Learning to turn that voice off was something that really helped me because I like to do a lot of writing at night, and I'll read it the next morning and think Ugh. You have to give yourself that space to just throw things at the wall and see what you end up liking.
“It’s nice to throw pretty images around and clever turns of a phrase, but the song should at the end of the day have a central concept or mood and should ideally tell a story.”
Are there any rituals to your process, like time of day or place?
A
As far as time of day, it's gone back and forth through the years. I'm naturally a night owl; I've always stayed up a little bit too late for my own good. Especially right now, what are normal hours? I'd say the past two years or so, I've been starting at 8 or 9pm, when I’m less likely to get a phone call or have to respond to an important email. The anticipation of not being interrupted is important for me. I also need a fridge stocked with LaCroix.
I need a table or a desk. I'm pretty flexible with that, but I need a flat surface, because I have open composition books with the drivel that I was journaling earlier in the day. Then I have another sheet of paper where there's lots of verses scratched out or words moved around. Then there's the one that's the final draft of something. I need lots of rooms to spread out.
Is it important for you to write every day?
A
I've resolved to do it over and over again. I'll be good about it for two weeks and then I'll get lazy with that.
On the road, forget about it. We drive ourselves, we sell our own merch, we pack up our own gear, and there's so much else that needs to be done. Writing is the first thing that falls through the cracks. Plus, when I'm in the genesis of an idea, I need to be alone with my own thoughts. I'm extremely collaborative later in the process when we're doing the arrangements and harmonies and stuff like that; I listen to anyone's ideas. But the meat of the song, the chord progression, the melody and the lyrics I like to do early in the process.
I used to wait until the night before we went to the studio to write the lyrics. But so many bands spend all the time on the instruments, then record the vocals on the last day. And that's what I was doing with writing. So I've resolved to make sure that there was at least a strong lyrical foundation early on in the process. The song really needs to be about something. It's nice to throw pretty images around and clever turns of a phrase, but the song should at the end of the day have a central concept or mood and should ideally tell a story.
What made you decide to change that way of writing songs?
A
Talking to people who were more serious writers than me. I grew up with a lot of creative people. I went to a magnet arts high school, so there were people doing theater and music and dance and the whole creative writing thing. They explained that to me. Lyrics were always something that didn't come natural. I didn't have to think about them too hard. I think that allows you to rely on a rhyming dictionary or thesaurus.
A chord progression with a nice mood and nice melody are the first things. Those are the things I'm really confident about. With lyrics, I get self conscious: I get in my head and torture myself. But I finally realized that something that important should really be the initial concept of a song.
Do you write in your journal as a way to spark ideas for songwriting, or are they completely separate?
A
I treat it as an independent thing just to keep that internal monologue going. It helps me explore things that I might be confused about until I write them down and realize that they make perfect sense. I will, if I need help getting started on something, open it up and flip through it to find something off the top of my head that I could turn into a song.
photo by Zak Bennett
Some people say that boredom is a necessary part of the writing process, that ideas come to you when you aren’t looking for them.
A
I'm trying to have some writing discipline these days now that I'm in my thirties, but the right direction or the right line will come to you when you're not looking for the answer. If you're actively digging through your mind, it won't come. I like to break up the day and go for a run right around sunset. There's something about the rhythmic pitter patter of the feet, where I'll start going through the verse that I abandoned early in the day. And the pure rhythm of it will make me think about it over and over again until it just falls into place.
I’ve written about how aerobic exercise has an immediate benefit on cognitive functioning. So do you use running as a way to brainstorm? Or more generally, does motion help those ideas?
A
About two years ago, I went to the doctor and found out that my blood pressure is higher than it should be. And exercise is an easy way to solve that problem. I know exactly what you mean. There's that little window of time after your run where you feel invincible and just really lucid.
Any kind of motion works. I pace all over the house when I'm writing and when I'm thinking of the next idea. There's something about movement that helps free up the brain to think about things. And I feel like writer's block is one of those things where again, you have to warm up that muscle. A lot of people are afraid that they're going to write a verse they don't like. It's a fear of failure.
A few years ago, I interviewed Anthony Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel All the Light We Cannot See. And that’s exactly how he described writer’s block: he called it a “failure of courage.”
A
When I started writing songs again, everything just flowed out because it was every good idea I'd had on one record. And then I remembered the first time I wrote a song, I didn't want to show it to anybody. In a way it was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders because the worst thing that ever happens is that it never sees the light of day. That really freed me up because no one's going to bat a thousand. No one's going to sit down and write the next Beatles album in one take. That was probably the most liberating thing for me that I've learned in the past 10 years, as someone who sometimes dreads having to come up with lyrics for a whole record.
The scariest feeling in the world is sitting in a room with no ideas, a legal pad and acoustic guitar. There's going to be some growing pains, like taking this from just the kernel of an idea into something else. It's this tiny nugget of an idea that only you can see and nobody else even knows exists yet. At some point, you get to the top of the hill, and the best feeling in the world is looking at a a cohesive song with a nice melody that you could record. It's a journey to get there. Sometimes a painful journey, but it's worth it.
Do you use running as a way to work through times when you’re stuck? I’ve also heard songwriters talk about how the rhythm of the cadence helps them.
A
Absolutely. But you always need something to work out in the first place. You have to have taken those first baby steps to hit that brick wall and then need a problem to solve. And I think that that's really helpful for helping you break through that wall.
When I was a kid, I used to go down to the lake and skip stones and come up with crazy stories. There is something about the repetition; It's very easy to break your steps into measures of four beats. I've always preferred a lyric that sounds good when sung over something to something that looks nice on paper. I will definitely choose not exactly the right word, not exactly my favorite word, if it rolls off the tongue nicely when you sing it. You should be able to sing it to yourself when you're running like that and gasping for air.
All four of the Surfer Blood members went to the same high school, and they have the yearbook pictures to prove it!
Alaina Moore of Tennis told me recently that melody rules over everything else, and Paul Banks of Interpol told me the same thing. He told me that he’ll change a word, even if it means changing the meaning, for the sake of melody.
A
I usually come up with the melody first. I have an idea of what I want it to be, and the phrases are structured around what the melody is. Everything plays second chair to that.
I've started to become a heavier reviser. Sometimes I take something apart and put it back together differently, and those are always the songs that get buried in the track listing, usually because the best songs just come to you naturally. Sometimes when you have to Frankenstein them together, that's usually not the best sign. That's when you're assembling disparate components that don't belong together.
Do you mix and match, say a lyric from here and a melody from there? Or maybe pull different lyrics from different places in your journals?
A
Fortunately, I don't have to resort to that too often. I do challenge myself. I get bored pretty easily, which I know our fans lament because everybody wants consistency where they can turn on the new Surfer Blood record and it's reliably like the last one. But I don't really do that because my mind wanders too much.
For this record, there's a few songs that are a narrative. I was always a big fan of Belle and Sebastian and how that guy could tell a story that was very literal. There's a song on the new record called “Summer Trope” that tells a story. It's only three verses, but that is something new for me: instead of trying to describe a moment in time or an emotion, it's actually a story. I'm pretty proud. That's a big step for me.
Was it a difficult song to write?
A
It was harder because it was one of the ones where I knew what I wanted to say, and I knew what looked good if I were reading it on paper. It was just very hard to fit the words into the phrase.
What was the most diffucult song on the new album to write?
A
I wrote one song where I ventured into sensitive current events. It’s a song about the Parkland school shooting, which was 40 miles south of here. I just wanted to do something that came across as sincere because it's inspirational when people are able to take their pain and turn it into something positive. I definitely didn't want to come across as insensitive or like I was giving a book report about it.
How about the easiest song on the new album to write?
A
The last two on the album, "Dewar" and "Rose Bowl." Both are actually pretty long and have lyrics with depth. There's not too many oohs and aahs. They were both tangible ideas. I wasn't really stretching. They were both feelings that I could taste in my mouth before I even put pen to paper. One's about my father and the other's about my ex girlfriend. I wrote them both in one sitting and I already had some strong, melodic ideas. Sometimes you have a phrase where you have so much you want to say, and there's only enough room for four or five syllables. They're both a little bit slower tempo, so you can fit more syllables in between the beats.
I imagine you have a lot of old journals around somewhere. Do you ever go back to them for song ideas?
A
I try and keep them around like hidden way in the back of a closet where no one could ever find them because I would be absolutely mortified. I do put things on the back burner. Sometimes there's songs where the lyrics need work, or the lyrics are good but there's just nothing going on in the song. I keep them on the back burner, and sometimes when we're together as a band late at night, I'll pull them out and bounce ideas off of other band members. Feedback when you're showing someone something for the first time can be difficult. It's something I'm also trying to get better about because a lot of people see things that you just can't see in your own work.
Given your handle on the writing process, I imagine you read a lot. Who are your favorites?
A
If I ever need like a quick start, somebody to help me take an idea that's just bullet points and to help get the wheels turning, I'll read Pablo Neruda. He always creates these romantic, ethereal, detached poems. That's usually what I'm shooting for anyway. I'll skim "Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman sometimes if I'm looking for a quick start. Because if I start reading a novel in the morning when I'm supposed to be writing, I'll read it until the afternoon and not get anything done.
I’m surprised how so few songwriters tell me they read poetry. It seems like a natural connection. And very few tell me they look directly to literature for inspiration like you do.
A
It's something I got into later. I had a grandmother who was also an English teacher and she forced me to learn T.S. Eliot poems growing up.. There's just something nice about somebody writing poetry just for the sake of it. It seems like something that we make fun of more than appreciate in our culture these days. And we'd miss it if we didn't have it. There are times where you can be self conscious and afraid to open your own mouth and just let the ideas come out. And that really, really helps me to see someone dance around an idea like they do.