Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers) and Lilly Hiatt
"The good songs happen like someone is playing a record in space, and I have an antennae to pick it up. I actually hear it, and write it down as quickly as I can.”—Patterson Hood.
"You don’t just get to have the muse all the time. It’s mysterious. But you have to experience stuff and have time to process those experiences to be able to write about them."—Lilly Hiatt.
There are two different 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.
Both Hood and Hiatt talk about the need to create. It’s not something they do because it’s their job or because they enjoy it. Those things are true, of course. But songwriting is such a part of their lives that it’s almost a matter of survival. The problem now is that their songs are borne from experience, and those experiences come from the road and from interacting with people. That’s hard to do when you’ve been stuck inside for seven months. As you’ll hear—and as many songwriters have told me—the pandemic has taken a toll on their songwriting output.
Sure, this interview is over an hour long, but when two of the best songwriters around (and good friends) get together to talk about the songwriting process, there’s not a lot to edit.
Most artists need external stimulation, some interaction with their environment, to create. That’s why the pandemic has made it difficult for songwriters: while some have taken advantage of the lull in touring to write, many others have found the isolation debilitating to their creative process. The two Nashville-based songwriters I interviewed in this video, Langhorne Slim and Jillette Johnson, have struggled at times to write songs during quarantine.