Interviews

Jim Lauderdale

Jim Lauderdale has been called a "songwriter's songwriter," and for good reason: he's written songs for artists like George Strait, The Dixie Chicks, Elvis Costello, Blake Shelton, Patty Loveless, Vince Gill, and Gary Allan. He's released 28 studio albums since 1986, with a new one out this spring called London Southern. He's won two Grammy Awards. He's also the host of the fantastic "Buddy and Jim" show on Sirius/XM Radio. In short, Lauderdale is enormously respected in the country, bluegrass, and Americana music genres.

Americana, Country, Yep Roc Records, Dualtone Records, Grammy WinnerBen OpipariFebruary 21, 2016Comment

J.D. Cronise, The Sword (2016)

"I was just telling my girlfriend the other day, 'People don't take the words of Yoda seriously enough." And with that, J.D. Cronise of The Sword just gave me one of my favorite lines in the six years I've had this site. Most songwriters I talk to usually can pinpoint an ideal emotion or state of mind under which they get their best writing done. To Cronise, though, it's an absence of emotion. He tries to get, in his words, into the most Zen state possible: a mind free of clutter, thoughts, distractions, anything. "It’s the non-emotional space that’s best for me. I like to be in a very Zen headspace. Peace and calm is the most important thing to me when I write." Cronise never forces the writing process, only writing when he feels ready. In itself, this puts him in a relaxed state: there's no pressure to write, so he never gets blocked.

Metal, Rock, Hard RockBen OpipariJanuary 10, 2016 Comments

Allison Moorer

Everyone offering career advice seems to want to steer people away from the humanities. Don't be an English major, they say. You won't make any money. Singer/songwriter Allison Moorer has fortunately dispensed with this silly bit of advice: she's finishing her first semester at The New School in Chelsea, where she's getting her MFA in creative non-fiction. As someone with a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, I fully support her new career path.

Americana, Country, Alt Country, Folk RockBen OpipariDecember 5, 2015Comment

Ray Wylie Hubbard

I know no better demonstration of the link between reading and songwriting than the advice Ray Wylie Hubbard gives songwriters: "Don't just listen to 'The Ghost of Tom Joad.' Read The Grapes of Wrath. That’s a classic song, but Springsteen wouldn't have written it if he hadn’t read Steinbeck." Of course, Steinbeck is probably a beach read for Hubbard. His staples are writers like Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. And before he goes to bed each night, he'll often pull down Dante's Divine Comedy from the bookshelf to see how that text might inspire his songwriting.

Country, Outlaw Country, Americana, Influencers, Rounder RecordsBen OpipariNovember 4, 2015Comment

Melissa Etheridge

Melissa Etheridge has been nominated for fifteen Grammy Awards, won two, and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2007 for "I Need to Wake Up." With those accolades, she can probably offer a few pointers on what it takes to be a great songwriter. And according to Etheridge, it's pretty simple: books and cannabis. Not together, of course.

Folk Rock, Influencers, Grammy Winner, Singer/Songwriter, Roots RockBen OpipariSeptember 16, 2015Comment

Ashley Monroe

Ashley Monroe has been writing songs since she was a young kid, which means she's been carrying around that bucket for a loooong time. This bucket is her "idea bucket." By her own admission, Monroe is never not a songwriter. She's always thinking about songs, so whenever she goes out (much to the chagrin of her husband), she's always attuned to her environment, its sights and sounds, for song ideas. And that's why she has her "idea bucket." She carries it everywhere she goes, and in that bucket go the song ideas that she gets by being hypersensitive to everything around her.

CountryBen OpipariAugust 6, 2015Comment

Joy Williams

In February 2011 I interviewed a new group called The Civil Wars, ten days after the release of their debut Barton Hollow. The rest was, of course, history, as Joy Williams and John Paul White went on to huge success, including four Grammys and worldwide critical adulation. The group broke up in 2014.

Williams released her solo debut Venus this year. In the 160 or so interviews I've done for this site, one pattern has emerged among the truly creative souls here: they are always songwriters, and they are always thinking about creating. John Oates, for example, told me about his songwriting antennae that are always up. Melissa Etheridge, whom I just interviewed yesterday and as you'll read soon, told me that she's always carrying her "idea bucket" around. And so it is with Williams: the creative process is always at the forefront in some form. She writes every day, she's reading five books at any given time, she loves cooking and the creativity inherent in that process.

Singer/Songwriter, Folk Rock, Dine Alone Records, Pop, Grammy WinnerBen OpipariJuly 25, 2015Comment

Bethany Cosentino, Best Coast

Put Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast in a hotel bathroom, and she's one happy songwriter. If you're with her and she's in there for a looong time, don't worry. She's creating. Music.

The traveling ways of the songwriter dictate that they can't be too picky with their environment when it comes to writing. They have to adapt to their surroundings and write whenever they can, wherever they can. But according to Cosentino, environment plays a "huge" role in her songwriting process. When she's at home, she writes in her "music room," which contains nothing but music related stuff, from guitars to CDs to posters. She loves to write there because the room's solitude gives her privacy. "I try on tour to write, but the problem is that I don't want people to hear me when I'm trying to write. I like to be able to make mistakes and sing badly and play really bad chords that don't sound good together. It's a very private process for me that I enjoy doing entirely on my own. A place like that is hard to find on tour."

Indie, Indie Pop, Indie Rock, Alternative, Mexican Summer RecordsBen OpipariJune 19, 2015Comment

Li-Young Lee

Ed Note: today I digress slightly to interview one of the best poets today, Li-Young Lee.

Reason number one why I am not introspective enough to be a poet:

When I get up in the morning and look at a messy bed, I see a bed that needs to be made. The poet Li-Young Lee, on the other hand, sees beauty in the absence of a body and the shape of a body simultaneously.

Poets have a different perspective on the world around us. They see beauty in things that I cannot possibly imagine. Heck, they just see things that I cannot imagine. Which is why, I suppose, they became poets. When Lee says, "I am aware of the fact that there are poems everywhere. My whole experience, both inside and outside, is one giant poem: my dreams, the things I am looking at. I am sitting here talking to you and looking at these books on my shelf, and there is a poem there somewhere," this is what I mean. And when he has trouble writing, it's not because he doesn't know what to write about. It's because he is so overwhelmed by everything around him that he doesn't know where to start.

Ben OpipariJune 14, 2015Comment

Dan Deacon

Dan Deacon is best known for his work as an electronic musician and, more recently, even as a classical composer. He's received tremendous (and well-deserved) critical acclaim for the novelty of the sounds in his electronic music, not to mention his live shows. His new album, Gliss Riffer is the first of his releases to feature vocal tracks, to see his voice as an instrument to ply just like all the myriad instruments we hear on his albums.

As you'll read, my interview with Deacon was not about the specifics of the writer's routine, as many of my interviews are. Deacon sees himself as an artist in the true sense of someone who creates art; he's much more than just a songwriter. So this conversation is more about the amorphous idea of creativity. More specifically, it's about Deacon's frustration with not having enough time to create. As his popularity increases, so do the demands of his career: the interviews, the meetings, the emails. Even the live shows. When he's touring for an album, he's not able create new art. And that means less time to create, which frustrates him.

Carpark Records, Electro Indie, Domino Records, ElectronicBen OpipariJune 10, 2015Comment

James McMurtry

James McMurtry wants his old iPhone back. The singer-songwriter hasn't been the same writer without it. And it's all because Apple changed its Notes app.

In the days before computers were the default method for composition, McMurtry wrote lyrics on legal pads. He has boxes filled with legal pads filled with lyrics. He became intensely familiar and comfortable with those yellow pages; there was something about that yellow and those lines that made the words pour forth from his felt-tip pen. McMurtry eventually turned to computers, but with them he sacrificed portability. Cell phones solved that problem. And when McMurtry found that the Notes app on his iPhone 3 looked like that old yellow legal pad paper, well, the words flowed. It was creative nirvana.

Influencers, Roots Rock, Americana, Folk RockBen OpipariMay 10, 2015 Comments

Mac McCaughan, Superchunk

Mac McCaughan is a busy guy, but does that surprise you? He's married, has two kids, runs Merge Records (which he also co-founded), fronts Superchunk, and has the side project Portastatic. Now, on May 4, he'll release Non-Believers, his first solo album. As you can imagine, McCaughan has little free time, which is why his creative process is more disciplined than most artists'. His window for creative work on the new album was small: since he made the album at home, he did most of the work in the morning, when the kids were at school. Then he'd head to work at Merge in the afternoon. At night, when the kids were in bed, he'd work on it some more.

Merge Records, Indie, Influencers, Matador RecordsBen OpipariApril 24, 2015indieComment

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