Sure, you know Jeff Daniels from his many films, but he's also been writing songs and playing guitar since 1976.
This is a conversation about the artistic process writ large, so if you're a songwriter, a playwright, an actor, or any combination of the three, you’ll love this interview. The playwriting process and the songwriting process overlap as Daniels effortlessly segues between the two in our discussion; at some point, he exclaims, "It's all fucking connected!"
Read MoreB.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.
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreThe word “processing” came up a lot in my interview with Sarah Beth Tomberlin (aka Tomberlin) when she discussed how she writes songs. She uses songwriting as a way to process the events in her life, much more so than most songwriters have shared with me. It’s difficult to write songs, for example, when things are “pleasant” in her life. “There’s no urgency to the process,” she told me.
Read MoreFor Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam and Mason Jennings, songwriting involves whole body movement and lots of swinging of the limbs. It also involves both temporal and emotional distance. And that distance was a big asset in creating Painted Shield, their self-titled album.
Read MoreDave Hause and Kathleen Edwards have known each other for a while and are huge fans of each other’s music, so this was a fun conversation on the creative process. We talked a lot about whether large expanses of time make them more productive, how reading affects their songwriting process, and what they do when they get stuck. And how twins and dogs affect their songwriting process.
Read MoreFor his latest album Phoenix, David Bazan made a lot of phone calls. To himself.
Each day, rather than journaling, he’d use the voice memo on his phone for ten or fifteen minutes to talk to himself. These calls were a “meet and greet with myself.” And through them, he got to know himself better.
Read MoreI 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?
Read MoreWhen Brian Fallon writes, he's constantly being watched. There's Paul, Tom, B.B. and George, among others, looking over his shoulder. And yes, that's McCartney, Waits, King, and Harrison. You see, there's a room in Fallon's house where he does most of his writing. (When's up there, he's always dressed as if he's going to work. No slippers or pajamas. But that's another story.) And in that room Fallon, also singer of The Gaslight Anthem, hung pictures of some of his songwriting idols. Fallon purposely put them high, close to the ceiling, so he always feels like he's being watched, even judged. He looks to them for inspiration and affirmation. He'll even carry on the occasional conversation, imagining how they might react to a line he's written.
For a guy who writes so much and who has such impressive chops, one thing stands out among the songwriters I've interviewed for this site. Most, if not all, have all their old lyrics and journals from previous albums stored somewhere. They might be in a closet or a box, but they keep them. Some might never look at these journals again, while others go through them for inspiration. Not Fallon. He has nothing, save for the notes from the Horrible Crowes project and the notes from Handwritten. He joked that the notes from the Gaslight classic The '59 Sound are probably on the I-95 shoulder somewhere. Fallon's reason is simple: "I purge a lot of stuff on records, so whatever that last record was about, whatever was weighing me down, I don't want to ever bring that stuff back. A record is like an exorcism to me." Of course, Fallon doesn't keep a steady journal, though he admits he'd probably benefit from it since it would help him remember things.
Read MoreRobyn Hitchcock has been writing songs since the 1970s, both solo and with acts like the Soft Boys and Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians. He's earned praise and adulation from critics and songwriters the entire time. Like most songwriters with long careers, he writes constantly. Some of his writings become songs, some don't, although he hates journal writing. Hitchcock likes to write in the morning when his mind is fresh, but he admits that a hangover can be a good tonic for songwriting (something many other songwriters have mentioned to me). This would appear to be counterintuitive; after all, how can you write when you're in pain? But it's precisely that discomfort that Hitchcock finds so stimulating.
Read MoreHayes Carll is not a disciplined person. He’ll be the first one to tell you that. He told me this much when I first interviewed him in 2013 . He said, "To be honest, I'm always looking for something else to do other than write. I wish that wasn't the case." It’s now three years later, and it still hasn’t gotten better. With a short attention span, he gets distracted easily. “If I turn on the TV or find some distraction, I’m done. I won’t come back,” Carll told me.
So while the Austin based singer/songwriter loves to write, he also loves to not write, which is why it’s so difficult for him to write for long stretches: if anything even remotely interesting appears on TV, he’s hooked. According to Carll, it can be a cricket match or even “Martha Stewart boiling an egg.” He tries to keep himself as far away from the TV as possible when he writes. If he does get stuck, he returns to his tried and true method of pushing past that block: “a cleaning bender.” This is no metaphor. He cleans his apartment.
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Melissa Etheridge has been nominated for fifteen Grammy Awards, won two, and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2007 for "I Need to Wake Up." With those accolades, she can probably offer a few pointers on what it takes to be a great songwriter. And according to Etheridge, it's pretty simple: books and cannabis. Not together, of course.
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