Allison Russell and Aoife O’Donovan are celebrated songwriters—and working moms. This makes for a songwriting process in which the only ritual is recognizing that you don’t have one.
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A good songwriting process for Emily Scott Robinson involves bank pens and vacuum cleaners.
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Andrew Marlin of Watchhouse (FKA Mandolin Orange) gets his best writing done between midnight and 4am.
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BJ Barham of American Aquarium and poet/novelist Joe Wilkins discuss the powers of poetic observation and why reader empathy is important. And listen to BJ explain why he’ll never write a song about pancakes.
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I first interviewed BJ Barham of American Aquarium in November 2020, and we had so much fun we decided to do it again! This time we added a third: S.A. Cosby, author of one of our favorite books from 2020, BLACKTOP WASTELAND. Watch these two creative heavyweights discuss the writing process and books and music.
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For both Sarah Jarosz and Margaret Glaspy, the creative process doesn’t allow for much off time. Jarosz doesn’t write on tour: it’s where she collects her ideas. And when she gets home, that’s when she sifts through all those ideas. “Even if I’m not working on a song, I’m always checking into the creative process every day,” Jarosz told me. Glaspy’s process involves using improvisation as a part of her songwriting process, “acting like I know how the song is supposed to go,” she says.
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Like many artists, Katie Pruitt and Molly Tuttle have found the creative process to be a hard road over the past year. But as you’ll hear, when those songs do come, dreams are an especially fruitful time: both women have been awoken in the middle of the night by incredible melodies running through their head.
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Jeremiah Fraites of The Lumineers wrote most of his new solo album Piano Piano pre-pandemic, but, like most songwriters, he says that the past year has wreaked havoc on the creative process. “Last year was not a good headspace to write from. All that isolation was not good. There was, and is, an underlying element of fearfulness that’s bad for the creative spirit,” he. says.
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Most artists need external stimulation, some interaction with their environment, to create. That’s why the pandemic has made it difficult for songwriters: while some have taken advantage of the lull in touring to write, many others have found the isolation debilitating to their creative process. The two Nashville-based songwriters I interviewed in this video, Langhorne Slim and Jillette Johnson, have struggled at times to write songs during quarantine.
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B.J. Barham of American Aquarium has a writing process like no songwriter I’ve ever interviewed. Plenty have told me that for them it’s as simple as scribbling lyrics on a sheet of paper. But not Barham. His songwriting process is akin to the research routine of a graduate student.
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There are two points during my interview with Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers and Lilly Hiatt when each reaches to the sky, grabs a piece of air, and pulls it down. Both were describing their songwriting process: songs come from the muse, from the sky, from somewhere they can’t explain. And it’s their duty to grab that song, pull it down, and create it.
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