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 MoreAs one of the songwriters for The Go-Go’s, Kathy Valentine wrote two of their most popular hits in “Vacation” and “Head Over Heels” as well as several other songs. So we’ve been able to check "killer songwriter” off the list for a while. Now we can add “fantastic prose writer”: All I Ever Wanted is a great book that’s already making some year-end lists.
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 MoreElizabeth Cook and Lydia Loveless have some great advice for writers of any stripe in this interview. Like Cook, I’ve always told people that good writers understand that the actual pen-to-paper part of the writing process is only a small part of it. And like Loveless, I don’t think an idea for writing has ever come after sitting down to think about what to write.
We talk about how Pilot Pens (black), hot toddies, and voodoo deities played an important role in the creative process behind their last albums. Watch our Zoom interview to find out which one of them ate corndogs on Christmas day as part of that process!
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 MoreI'm sure you're thinking, "How in the heck did you get these two guys together?" I've interviewed Fallon twice for Songwriters on Process, and I've been an LA Guns fan since their first s/t album. I first saw them live on the "Cocked and Loaded" tour in the late 80s while in college. I follow both of these guys on social media and noticed that they'd always comment on each other's posts. I figured they knew each other, so I reached out. They were both game to talk.
Read MoreSongwriting does not come easy to Grammy-nominated Mary Gauthier. She says that “songwriting is an ordeal for me; sometimes it's just not pleasant. It's hard.” (Appropriately, there are a few fishing metaphors in our conversation.) Gauthier is critical almost to a fault of her songwriting process, but I think that’s a good thing because this self-reflection allows her to fine tune her process. She calls herself out a few times in our interview for overthinking her songs, which slows her. And when things aren’t working, she goes on the writer’s walk: a five mile walk that clears her head and gives her “productive exhaustion.” It’s on these walks that she’s often able to solve her struggles. Unfortunately, Gauthier is at her most productive in a hotel room, so time off the road has made the process even more challenging.
Read MoreSadie Dupuis has a studio set up in her house where she does most of her work for her band Speedy Ortiz and her solo project Sad13. Once she’s down there, she has no trouble getting into the flow of the creative process; in fact, she often has to tell herself to take a break so that she doesn’t work through the night.
The hard part is getting started down there in the first place. She often find her studio “overwhelming and stressful.” It puts too much pressure on her. And who wants to feel overwhelmed and stressed at the start of a project? Her solution is brilliant: she starts on her couch or her table, which she finds less intimidating because it doesn’t feel like work. Then, she says, “I'm excited to go down to the basement and continue. If I sit on my couch or sit at the living room table, it's so much less intimidating to get into a new project. I don't think I'm working, so it doesn't feel scary.”
Read MoreFor Mark Morton (Lamb of God) and Alain Johannes , inspiration for songs often comes from the ordinary, everyday life. The environment is an especially fertile place: Morton says songs come to him while gardening, while for Johannes it can be the sounds he hears throughout the day.
This is the second time I’ve interviewed Morton and Johannes; I interviewed Morton in 2014 and Johannes in 2010. I’ve kept in touch with both since then, so it was easy to get these two guys together to talk about their creative process, especially since there’s mutual admiration between the two. In fact, they collaborated on the recent Mark Lanegan solo album Straight Songs of Sorrow: Johannes produced and played on it, while Morton co-wrote and also played on it.
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