Stu Mackenzie//King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
“I feel truly, truly filled with dread if I can’t create something.”
Your favorite song by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard may have originated in the time signature of a car alarm.
I’ve been a fan of King Gizzard for a while, but when I realized that they put out five albums in one year (2017) and had sixteen studio albums over the course of ten years, I had to discover how Mackenzie creates. Surely this man is always creating. Surely he spends all day thinking about songs. Surely he gets anxious when he’s not creating something, anything.
Yes. Yes. And yes.
Not even a newborn has stopped Mackenzie from constantly. I mean, look at that promo shot. He’s so busy with the creative process that he can’t even be bothered to look at the camera! (For the record, I love this promo shot and Mackenzie does too, and I do think it represents him well.)
“I don’t love stopping,” Mackenzie told me. “It’s hard to stop, but I also realize it’s a problem I have. When I go on holiday and decide not to write, I’ll do something like 500 sudokus. I have to be filling my brain with something.” He’s at his most calm when his hands are busy. And as you’ll hear, Mackenzie draws inspiration from everything around him—even the time signature from the alarm in his old Ford that would tell him when he left his lights on.
Watch our interview below or listen to the podcast!
I’ve been a fan of King Gizzard for a while, but when I realized that they put out five albums in one year (2017) and had sixteen studio albums over the course of ten years, I had to discover how Mackenzie creates. Surely this man is always creating. Surely he spends all day thinking about songs. Surely he gets anxious when he’s not creating something, anything, right?
The key to The Black Pumas' creative process? Turn signals! Adrian Quesada told me that he’s mesmerized by the rhythm of his car’s turn signals when he’s driving. “I’m always superimposing a 6/4 rhythm on them whenever I’m at an intersection,” he told me. So much so that that his wife has to remind him that the light is green.
Jim James of My Morning Jacket wants to be a happy songwriter. And a healthy one too.
A fair amount of the songwriters I’ve interviewed extol the virtues of writing while hungover. Others talk about how marijuana helps their creativity. Still others credit sobriety with making them better thinkers. But few, like James, have openly advocated physical exercise as a means to boost creativity. He wants more songwriters to get out of the studio and into fresh air. He’s also sick of the idea that misery is an essential component to writing.
I was surprised when Courtney Barnett told me that she doesn’t like solitude when she writes. Almost all of the songwriters I’ve interviewed have told me that they need to be alone, for the simple reason that they can’t have any distractions. But when Barnett told me why she needs to be around the action, it made sense: how can you be a narrative storyteller if you write while facing a wall?
Any artist will tell you that discipline is a necessary component of their creative process. Anyone who sits around waiting for the muse is probably not long for the craft. You have to work at it. Theresa Wayman of Warpaint certainly adheres to this idea: she creates something every day, even if it's nothing great. She told me, "Even if you're a creative person, it's important to go to work every day. . . . I have to exercise some aspect of myself, even if I create something that I never want to hear or see again. At least I've accomplished something if I do that. . . . You have get through the crap to create something beautiful."
Wayman wasn't always this disciplined, though. Another component of the creative process is the willingness to change your routine to stay energized creatively. To Wayman, that change meant becoming more disciplined. Using discipline as a way to disrupt the creative process would appear to be a paradox, although it really isn't.
Carl Broemel is a changed man.
In 2010, when I first interviewed Broemel, the guitarist for My Morning Jacket admitted that his "crazy lifestyle" unfortunately didn't leave him much time for reading. Sure, he had plans: he'd gaze longingly at that stack of books on his bedside table, wondering when he'd ever get to read them. But the stack mostly remained untouched.
It's a different story now, pun intended. Broemel devours books. He reads everything, and I mean everything. I always ask songwriters what they're reading, and I get some great responses. But Broemel and I could've talked forever about what he's been reading, and the enthusiasm in his voice was clear.
The sisters Catherine and Allison Pierce make up The Pierces. With a musician for a father and a painter for a mother, they've been around some form of art all their lives, so it's no surprise that Catherine has always been creative. She writes songs, she loves to paint, she's an accomplished ballerina, and she's even a creative writer. When it comes to inspiration, she takes the active route; in her words, she's "always looking for the muse." As a result, the initial inspiration for a song doesn't come from a melody; instead, it usually comes from a random line that pops into her head. The inspiration for their song "Secrets," for example, came from a Ben Franklin quote that she saw on a t-shirt in a restaurant.
After talking to Adam Granduciel from The War on Drugs, I want to thank his utility company for still sending him a paper bill each month. You see, Granduciel eschews the traditional notebook favored by most songwriters as the place to write his lyrics. Instead, he uses scraps of any paper lying around, which oftens happens to be the back of retail receipts, parking tickets, and electric bills. He piles these scraps into a heap on the table in his studio (and warns his girlfriend that it isn't trash), where they form the basis for his songwriting.
What I found most interesting about Granduciel's process is that he favors imperfection. As a teenager, he was immersed in photography and painting, and just as he does in those creative endeavors, he finds that the "unintentional little mistakes" that emerge from the creative process of songwriting often produce the best work. Those scraps of paper I mentioned above only contain lyrical ideas, because Granduciel tends to hold lyrics in his head and "write" them in that space until he's ready to sing them. He doesn't do much revising: much of what you hear in his recordings is a first take improvisation after the lyrics have stewed in his head. With "Brothers," for example, eighty percent of the lyrics were improvised; it went, in his words, "from nothing to something in six minutes."
Whether he’s longboarding or reading to his kids or drawing, Bardo Martinez of Chicano Batman is always thinking about his next song.