David Kilgour (The Clean, and David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights)

In the late 1970s, David Kilgour formed The Clean, one of the most popular bands in New Zealand and responsible for the development of the punk scene there.  The Clean were pioneers of the Dunedin Sound and one of the original signees to Flying Nun Records. Kilgour has long been recognized as one of the biggest (and most respected) songwriters and guitarists to come from New Zealand.  But did you know he's also a pretty good painter, a creative outlet that also serves him well as a songwriter?

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Max Bloom, Yuck

After talking to guitarist and songwriter Max Bloom of Yuck on the phone recently, I have an image in my mind: Bloom and his bandmates jamming loudly in his parents' house, so loudly that they wake the neighbors, who come out and shout up at the bedroom window, "Turn that f***ing music down!"  Typical young kids, I guess.  It's almost a stereotype.

Only it's true.  Bloom and co-songwriter Daniel Blumberg write and demo all the Yuck music in Bloom's parents' house.  And when they play, the neighbors get angry. This house is also where they recorded the album.  According to Bloom, it's the only place he feels comfortable enough to write; it's clearly where he gets his best writing done. So while Bloom is at the age when most young adults (at least here in the US) would do anything to get out of their parents' house, Bloom wants to get back in.  Though he still has some trepidation about the neighbors' reaction when the band starts recording new material...

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Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans, YACHT

You'd be selling YACHT short if you just called them a band.  Sure, Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans make music that has been praised by many, including Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times.  But they are, in their words, "a belief system," and the two spend a lot of time on the visual aspect of the band as well: the shirts, the logos, the web design, the videos.  So when you think of YACHT, don't just think of two people who make music, think of two artists.  And when you read about their creative process below, it's easy to do.  Their new album, Shangri-La, is out June 21 on DFA Records. Listen to "Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire)" from the album:

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Nat Baldwin, Dirty Projectors

Nat Baldwin has two things going for him that are unique among the songwriters I've interviewed. The Dirty Projectors' bassist lives on the coast of Maine, an environment perfectly suited to the ideal writing environment he needs in order to be creative: total seclusion. And his background as a basketball player provides him with the inherent discipline needed to spend hours in such seclusion, immersed in the creative process.

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Marissa Nadler (2011)

It's easy to see how Marissa Nadler's experience as a songwriter is informed by her extensive experience as  a visual artist.  She studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received both her undergraduate and graduate degree.  In fact, she started as a visual artist before becoming a songwriter. The intensity and honesty she exhibits as a visual artist manifest themselves in her songwriting, as you'll read, though poetry also influences how she writes.  Songwriting and illustration, she says, is about "trying to find the beauty or ugliness" in a subject, using the artist's ability to approach that subject from a unique point of view.  It's also about "compressing life into a couple of lines," as a good poet does. 

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Josh Epstein, Jr. Jr.

Josh Epstein and Daniel Zott have gotten a good amount of ribbing (and worse) in the music press for naming their band Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.  But how is it that while Epstein and Zott get ribbed, plenty of indie rock darlings get a pass for their names?  We have bands named after racquet sports, punctuation marks, makeup, and primates who live on the North Pole. There are artists named after zoo animals. I mean, I'm a huge Echo and the Bunnymen fan, but come on!

All band names have meaning in their own way.  There's an element of absurdity in many of them, but there's also creativity in that absurdity. Which was kind of the point when Epstein and Zott named their band. And if you miss this point, then you've missed the very reason why they named the band Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. in the first place.

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Heather Robb, The Spring Standards

It took only a few minutes of seeing The Spring Standards in concert before I knew that this was one creative trio.  I caught them here in DC at the Red Palace when they played with Ha Ha Tonka. It wasn't just the fact that Heather Robb, James Smith, and James Cleare all played every instrument at some point.  It wasn't the fantastic voices or the terrific songs. It was that, as I told Robb, their set was so theatrical.  It was a stage show: the way they played, the way they bantered with each other, the way they bantered with the audience. 

It was like a stage show, as it turns out, for good reason: Robb is an actor by training who still is involved in theatre in New York City.  She attended Syracuse University, where she majored in theatre. (In a true small world coincidence, we were both there in the Department of Drama at the same time: I as a professor and she as a student, though we did not know each other.) Robb claims to be somewhat of an introvert, something not readily apparent in her charismatic stage presence.

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James Vincent McMorrow

James Vincent McMorrow is nothing if not patient and methodical.  A lesser songwriter might be driven crazy by the snail's pace of his writing process: it took McMorrow nearly six months to write his debut Early in the Morning (Vagrant Records).  Some days he wrote only a few sentences; on others, just a few words.  It would be easy to call this writer's block; after all, if you sit for a whole day and only write five or six sentences, surely your creative spigot is closed.

But this is all part of McMorrow's process, and here's the difference.  Any good writer will tell you that their writing process never stops.  It's happening when they eat, sleep, talk, stare, read, whatever.  The actual pen-to-paper part, the end product, is only a small part of that process. Sure, it's the most gratifying, but it's only one part of many. So it's not that McMorrow writes slowly. (Well, he might, since I've haven't seen the speed of his penmanship.)  Instead, he writes deliberately. And he's fine with that. 

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Thao Nguyen, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down

Earlier this week I posted my interview with Mirah, and today it's Thao's turn (of Thao and Mirah, as well as Thao and the Get Down Stay Down). Thao and Mirah begin touring in May to support their album that comes out April 26 on killrockstars. I've interviewed over 80 songwriters for this site, and few (probably enough to count on one hand) mention exercise as an aid and a regular part of their writing process.  But both Thao and Mirah exercise regularly and use it as a way to boost creativity.  Which makes me think that if they haven't already, the should run together if they decide to write and record again.  Maybe train for a 10k together.

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Mirah, Thao and Mirah

One thing that distinguishes artists from everyone else is their hyperattention to their surroundings. Specifically, good lyricists (and that means songwriters and poets) see beauty in even the most mundane of things.  And there's no better example of that than Mirah, who maintains a Tumblr account that features nothing but pictures of discarded banana peels she finds on the streets of San Francisco.  She claims on the site that she doesn't think this has anything to do with her music, but I must disagree.  It's all part of her creative package. This is exactly what makes songwriters artistic: they see purpose in everything, even (really, especially) in things that most of us never notice.

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Jonathan Meiburg, Shearwater

It's a telling indication of the depth of Jonathan Meiburg's experience that if you Google his name and search for images, you'll see a lot of birds.  As any professional writer will tell you, what makes for powerful writing is engagement with the world. Good writers engage with their environment and seek out novel ways to interact with it.  Of course, mere interaction with the environment isn't necessarily an indicator that you'll write well about it; to do so, you have to engage and reflect on that engagement. Ernest Hemingway experienced a couple of wars and lots of bullfighting, but it's how he wrote about those experiences that made him great.

All this is to say that this is why Meiburg, the Shearwater singer and songwriter, writes such quality music.  His experience is vast: he's been to the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego, an Aboriginal settlement in Australia, the Chatham Islands of New Zealand, and Baffin Island in Canada.  His masters degree is in geography, and his thesis (which I am reading now) is entitled The Biogeography of Striated Caracaras (Phalcoboenus australis). Not surprisingly, Meiburg is an avid birder.  As you'll read below, he spends a considerable amount of time not only writing about the natural environment but thinking about his place in it with keen metacognition.

Read my interview with Jonathan Meiburg after the video. A special thanks to Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak, who introduced me to Jonathan and affectiontely told us two "nerds" to go at it.

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Brian Roberts, Ha Ha Tonka

This is not an album review site, since I do that for the Washington Post.  I try to maintain some sense of objectivity when I write these short pieces before my interviews.  But for this, my second interview with Brian Roberts of Ha Ha Tonka, I am suspending that practice to say that Ha Ha Tonka is one of the best bands making music now.  Their new album,Death of a Decade (Bloodshot Records), only futher reinforces my opinion.  It's beautiful, it's soulful, it's energetic.  And the four-part harmonies from these guys from the Ozark mountain region are mesmerizing. Predictably, the reviews for Death of a Decade are overwhelmingly positive.   Their music has been described as indie, roots, alt-country, bluegrass, southern rock, among other label.  It's hard to pin down, but that's probably why they are so good: it's got all those influences.

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