If you see Cecilia Castleman browsing the paint aisle at Home Depot, she’s probably not looking for paint. She’s looking for song ideas. Castleman finds inspiration everywhere, but paint nam...

Rebecca and Megan Lovell, the GRAMMY-winning sisters who compose Larkin Poe, call themselves “serial idea keepers.” This means they don’t wri...

Flipturn's Tristan Duncan (guitar), Devon VonBalson (drums), and Dillon Basse (vocals) join the pod and go deep into their creative processes....

Is Vera, the debut album by Phil and Tim Hanseroth (The Hanseroth Twins), really a debut? After all, they've won three GRAMMYs an...

The last time I interviewed Josh Carter of Phantogram was in 2010, before this site was even a podcast. It was on...

Whenever Sophie Allison (aka Soccer Mommy) puts something out, I know I'll like it. Her new album 

Ed note: Here's my 2022 podcast episode with Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten.  Unfortunately, I stopped recording be...

Hello Mary on the pod today! Stella Wave, Helena Straight, and Mikaela Oppenheimer released their debut album in 2020, when Wave was 19 and Oppenheimer and Straight were 16. The band talks about their...

"Bravery is underrated when it comes to art," Mike Einziger, guitarist and songwriter for Incbus, told me. In other words, don't be afraid to write the bad stuff. (I'd listen to a guy whose band has sold ...

Here's a sampling of the authors and artists that Jake Duzsik of HEALTH mentioned in our conversation: Pascal, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Oscar Wilde, Thom...

Does writer's block really exist? Or is it just a reluctance to write the bad stuff? The writer Anthony Doerr once told me that writer's block is just "a failure of courage." Pete Yorn tends to agree. ...

Wunderhorse is why you should always get to the show early to see the support act. I was introduced to Jacob Slater's band when I saw them open for Fontaines D.C. (

It’s always fun to interview two songwriters who have a history together! Before his solo career, Kishi Bashi was a member of Kevin Barnes’ band of Montreal.&nb...

Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Lewin of Magdalena Bay love hybrid cars. While I’m sure they appreciate the environmental benefits, it’s the humming sound the cars make that the duo finds inspiring. In fact, the...

"I'm always writing and always creating. I relate to the world by writing," Eva Hendricks of Charly Bliss told me on the podcast. Besides songwriting, she's written a YA novel and is a big journaler. Hec...

Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura has a superpower: she's able to write entire songs in her head before putting them to paper. If Campbell gets an idea and can't write it down immediately, she'll ...

Matthew Koma of Winnetka Bowling League stops by the podcast to talk about how writing a song is like solving a crossword puzzle, why he doesn't like to dig through discarded melodic and lyrical ideas for...

Ashton Irwin, drummer for 5 Seconds of Summer, often writes songs out of necessity. While he likes to journal, Irwin finds songwriting a much more effective vehicl...

ED NOTE: This is from 2021, before this was a podcast and I was posting the video interviews to YouTube. I've taken the audio from that interview and turned it into podcast form. As you can tell at the beginning, we did this in the middle of th...

The circle is complete. I’ve had recent interviews with Anais Mitchell (together with Charlotte Cornfield) and with

All four members of DIIV (Zachary Cole Smith, Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman) joined me to talk about their individual songwriting processes. This interview could've gone on forever because they are so...

Does the mind of Eric Earley from Blitzen Trapper ever rest? I think not.  After all, he told me that he liked to solve math problems in college while he was making breakfast. Earley is a voraci...

Deerlady is Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego, and their debut album

Aaron Lee Tasjan has a pretty simple writing process: he gets up around 8am, has a glass of water, and pets his cat. Then he writes. But not every day. "I only write when my body tells me to, when I ...

Jane Penny, co-founder of  TOPS,  makes her solo debut with her fantastic EP Surfacing, out now on