"The more I do this, the less I want to understand where it comes from," Orla Gartland says on the pod. Like most songwriters, Gartland likes to walk as a part of her songwriting process. She'll usually listen to music on these walks, and she walks to the tempo of the music she's listening to. So if you see her on the streets of London walking briskly one day and slowly the next, you now know why.Gartland's latest album Everybody Needs a Hero is out now.
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50:52
Sunflower Bean
It's the return of Nick Kivlen and Julia Cumming of Sunflower Bean! We had so much fun in 2022 that we had to do it again. Kivlen says, "One of things I'm realizing as Julia I talk is that our processes are totally different." And as you'll hear, differences can actually streamline the process.Sunflower Bean's latest album Mortal Primetime is out now on Lucky Number Records.
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50:30
Matt Gervais (The Head and the Heart)
"Without the labor, channeling can't happen," Matt Gervais of The Head and the Heart told me. He has stacks upon stacks of Mead notebooks to prove it, all the way back to when he was a kid. Gervais finds art galleries to be particularly inspiring; they were a rich source when he worked in the Seattle Art MuseumThe latest album by The Head and the Heart is Aperture, out now.
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51:36
I'm With Her
When a band has seven GRAMMY wins and thirty-one GRAMMY nominations among them, they're a supergroup. So let's be clear: I'm With Her is a supergroup. The trio of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O'Donovan, and Sara Watkins are close friends who say that great songs can come from a good trip to the grocery store. I've had all three on the pod before, but never together.The latest album by I'm With Her is Wild and Clear Blue on Rounder Records.NOTE: here are my past interviews with Jarosz, O'Donovan, and Watkins.
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47:15
Samantha Crain
"I need to have those times of being fully in bloom, then fully hibernating. That's how I get my best, most genuine work," Samantha Crain says. She's a seasonal songwriter who actively takes time not to write, and those times are the hibernation stages. Some of Crain's songs hibernate too: the title track off her new album took twenty years to write.Crain's writing process is like a wide-angle lens. She likes to write at the dining room table in a chair that gives her a view of the entire room. "It feels like an unplanned mood board if I need a starting point, with lots of stuff in my periphery," Crain says. That mood board produced one of my favorite albums of the year. I first discovered Samantha Crain's music on Reservation Dogs, one of the best shows on television ever. (I've also interviewed Deerlady, a phenomenal band whose music is also on the show.) Crain's latest album is Gumshoe on Real Kind Records.
In-depth interviews with songwriters about their songwriting process. Nothing else. No talk of band drama, band names, or tour stories. Treating songwriters as writers, plain and simple. By Ben Opipari, English Lit Ph.D.
Ireland