“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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Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon is a book hoarder at her local library in Sweden. She browses the stacks across all subjects, from photography to poetry to flowers. Then she walks out with as many books as she can carry. When she gets home, she peruses those books for both words and images. Sometimes the words make their way into her songs, and other times the images give her ideas to spin off of. "It could be a book about flowers, for example, and I might find a beautiful name for a flower that could be a song title," Nagano told me. And when she gets home, she does most of her writing in the kitchen. There's something about the "nice, soothing hum" of her refrigerator that's conducive to her creativity.
For today's interview, I have a companion. Last November I interviewed Theresa Wayman from Warpaint. It remains one of my favorite interviews. I recently read that Wayman was a big fan of Little Dragon, so I asked her if she wanted to interview Nagano with me. She gave me an enthusiastic yes, and somehow we made this happen: I was in New York, Wayman was in Rhode Island, and Nagano was in Sweden. We had a fantastic discussion about the creative process.
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Regardless of what kind of art you create, some level of self-awareness is important. If you're a songwriter, you may marvel at the miracle of inspiration and how sometimes songs just fall into your lap. But at some point, you have to think about your process: you have to think about the parts that work, the parts that don't work, and why they do and don't. Successful songwriters have that level of self-awareness. It's hard to be productive if you're oblivious to your process. Jenn Wasner knows what works and what doesn't work, and this is one of the reasons why she is so prolific and so talented
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You'd be selling YACHT short if you just called them a band. Sure, Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans make music that has been praised by many, including Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times. But they are, in their words, "a belief system," and the two spend a lot of time on the visual aspect of the band as well: the shirts, the logos, the web design, the videos. So when you think of YACHT, don't just think of two people who make music, think of two artists. And when you read about their creative process below, it's easy to do. Their new album, Shangri-La, is out June 21 on DFA Records. Listen to "Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire)" from the album:
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There's no doubt in my mind that Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak would be lost without her phone. It's the key to her songwriting. That phone is where she documents all her observations for the day. She's constantly in touch with her surroundings, and all of her lyrical and melodic ideas that come from this connection go into the phone's voice recorder for later, when she actually writes a song. Wasner says her "switch is on all the time . . . if you're always looking around and noticing your environment, it's a big help."
What impresses me most about Wasner is that she calls herself a writer, period. And she knows that being a writer takes hard work. Like any good writer, she knows that the time spent actually crafting her words is only a small part of the writing process. Wasner recognizes that writers are always writing, even when they aren't. That is, her writing process takes place when she's driving, walking, shopping, anything. During this time, she's inventing ideas, trying out lines, just doing everything except putting pen to paper. In fact, she approaching her writing process with this wonderfully simple mantra: "living is work."
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It's a tribute to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark that the sound they helped create, the shimmering synth pop that was so innovative when the band started three decades ago, is now de rigueur in music. OMD is out with a new album called History of Modern; it's their first in fourteen years and their first in over twenty with the 1980s "If You Leave" lineup. It comes at an appropriate time, given the popularity of synth pop and the band's influence on groups like The xx and LCD Soundsytem. And the public has responded: OMD were conservative when booking venues on this tour, but now they are having to book second shows in some cities and move shows to bigger venues in others.
When it came to making History of Modern, Andy McCluskey, the band's singer and co-songwriter with Paul Humphreys, told me, "We analyzed our history and realized that we had created our own musical voice with the first four albums, and we wanted to go back to expressing ourselves in the language we invented ourselves. We had to strike that balance between something that was OMD but also not some nostalgia trip."
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How can I not promote a songwriter who reads Shakespeare to prepare to write for his band's latest album? That's what Jesper Anderberg, keyboardist and songwriter for The Sounds, did. The band hails from Sweden, so English is not their native language. Anderberg read some Shakespeare, a man whose writing he admired for its lyrical quality; Midsummer Night's Dream was his favorite. According to Anderberg, you can almost sing the lines from that play.
The Sounds' newest effort, Something to Die For, will be out the end of March on SideOneDummy Records. It's the band's debut release for the label. (photo credit: Markku Anttila)
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Sure, when you first see the face of John O'Regan, aka Diamond Rings, you might notice all that colorful makeup across his face. And you might notice the shiny lips as well. And you might call him "glam" and not pay attention to much else.
But I think you'd be missing the point.
Because, you see, this is about a lot more than a guy wearing makeup. It's about theatre, and while Diamond Rings is, in his words, "fastidious" in his songwriting process, he also likes to engage his audience in the visual aspect of his craft. After all, he's been an illustrator for longer than he's been a songwriter. It's a creative outlet that, as you'll read, informs his songwriting process. For one, the way he approaches the subject of a painting resembles the way he approaches the topic of a song. But what's interesting is that he has no idea what a song is going to be about until he picks up a guitar and starts playing. He's not one to approach songwriting with a ready-made idea.
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