Will Sheff believes in writing every day, first thing in the morning. But he’s also a firm believer in loafing.
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A move to Upstate New York has given Derek Miller of Sleigh Bells two boons to his creative process: football and the chance to get really, really loud.
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Steve Gunn’s songwriting process never stops. Even when he’s not writing, his receptors cast a long throw over his environment as he mines for ideas.
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Whether he’s longboarding or reading to his kids or drawing, Bardo Martinez of Chicano Batman is always thinking about his next song.
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“Raw source material is supposed to be crap,” Michelle Zauner says. “You have to allow yourself to be terrible.” Her best writing comes in the revision process, not in those “garbage” first drafts.
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Josh Kolenik of Small Black draws from both Excel spreadsheets and Raymond Carver when he writes songs. He looks everywhere for inspiration. “It’s important to have a breadth of material to draw from,” he says.
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There are days when the songs just won’t stop coming, says Bartees Strange. His job as an artist is to stand there and try to catch all those ideas. “It’s like holding a bucket outside in the rain,” he says.
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The experiences of Tim Showalter (Strand of Oaks) and Jessica Dobson (Deep Sea Diver) during the pandemic couldn’t be more different. Showalter’s tour cycle for his last album Eraserland ended in February; this meant the quarantine had little impact on his songwriting cycle since he already planned on spending 2020 writing. Dobson fared differently: Deep Sea Diver released Impossible Weight in October, so of course they were unable to tour behind the album, which threw all their plans out the window.
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For 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.
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Sadie 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.”
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