Nate Ruess's songwriting catalog includes his Grammy winning band Fun; his co-write and co-performance with P!nk on "Just Give Me a Reason"; and songs for Hayley Williams, Kesha, and Young Thug. After ...

Procrastinators unite! Thank you, Tyler Ballgame, you are a kindred spirit. Finally someone who admits that procrastination is a great tool for writing. So much has been written on the evils of procrastin...

“When I go to the grocery store, that’s part of the songwriting process. When I work on my truck, that’s part of my songwriting process. Every aspect of our life feeds into our creativity. The more present I can be, the better the songs,” says ...

Jade Long and Jessica Thompson of Athens, Georgia based Hotel Fiction have a simple routine for their songwriting sessions: make some brownies, pour some wine. And they like to be outside. It's not complic...

Nat and Alex Wolff had me at Sam Shepard. The playwright/writer/actor was one of my dissertation topics and the brothers acted in his p...

Patton Magee of The Nude Party has the best reason why reading makes you a better songwriter: it gives you a stronger and more wide-ranging vocabulary, which in turn gives you more ways to ex...

"I am a taskmaster," Courtney Marie Andrews told me. When we talked back in 2018, I marveled at Andrews'...

"To write about something sad and dark, I need to feel content, to feel a sense of well being. I can't write when I'm depressed," Lucinda Williams told me. Much of my discussion with Williams focused on how we prepare to write. By h...

"I've been very happy lately, and that's worrying," KT Tunstall told me. "It's much easier to write sad songs than happy songs. Happiness makes you want to be present, but pain makes you want to escape. ...

Why do so many of us feel the need to clean our space before we create? Melody Prochet (aka Melody's Echo Chamber) and I discuss why it's important to our respective writing processes. When she's not...

"Pants delivery was my eureka moment," Julien Ehrlich of Whitney says on the pod, and with that we have my favorite out-of-context pull quote. Ehrlich was not speaking metaphorically: whe...

“I’m a ‘go in phases’ type of gal. It took me a year and a half to write this record, but it came in blocks,” Gatlin says. It’s how she manages her routine in those blocks that makes her songwriting pr...

"I made a conscious effort on this album to be more disciplined in my writing because my ideas were getting stale and I was writing from the same place," Mariel Buckley told me. "I realized that my ma...

Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten of Momma return! Momma is my favorite band and their new album Welcome to My Blue Sky ...

"I'm a professional daydreamer," Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes told me. That's the catch-22: are you really daydreaming if you're aware that you're doing it? Daydreaming leads to eureka moments, but ...

"I get a physical tingling sensation. It's beyond my control, an impulsive feeling where I have to sit and wait for it," Billie Marten says about that moment before a wave of inspiration strikes. The p...

"I allow myself to miss the guitar. And the guitar comes calling when I start to feel bored," says William Prince. A multiple JUNO award-winner, Prince is also a member of

"It's important to separate my sense of self-worth from my creations. If I was so self-aware of my output, I don't think I'd be having fun," Melina Duterte, who goes by the performing name Jay Som, told me....

It's the return of Hayes Carll! I first interviewed him in 2013 and again in

"The decision has been made, and now it's time to f**k off," Mitch Rowland told me. To be clear, Rowland wasn't saying this to me; instead, it's Rowland ruthlessly killing his darlings in the editing p...

If you took a contemporary poetry class in college in the last 30 years, Paul Muldoon was probably on your syllabus. The New York Times has called him “one of the great poets of the past ...

Patrick Hetherington of Parcels says that the urge to write usually strikes when he's had some kind of new input, but then he needs distance from that input to be able to process it and write about it....

It's the return of Molly Tuttle! (The first time I interviewed Tuttle was in 2021, when I interviewed her and Katie Pruitt.)

I cannot imagine a world where Scott McCaughey is not writing. But first, some background. He was an auxiliary member of R.E.M. from 1994 to 2011, working with them in the studio and playing with them live. He founded The Baseball Project and T...

Dev Hynes had me at the bookshelves.All those bookshelves behind him on our Zoom interview, rising to the ceiling and stuffed with books. Small wonder, then, that Hynes works best in daily consum...