Songwriters on Process

"A great way to write is to overwrite. Write more verses than could be contained in a song. Then take the best of what's there," says Rostam Batmanglij. I cannot agree more: good writers know that the first pass is never the time to decide what to keep and what to leave out. Overwriting will always be faster. Just ask Anne Lamott.
Of course, overwriting for Rostam comes easy because when he's not writing, he's thinking about writing. "I'm always collecting building blocks," he says. "Lots of kernels all the time. I've never truly let go of an idea." 
Rostam's latest album is American Stories.

"When I'm not self-conscious, I tend to write better stuff. I need the dud sessions before I make progress," says Emma Jansson of Girl Scout. Good writing in the initial stages is indeed all about getting out of your own way and applying the Anne Lamott method. And it's why Jansson often starts her writing process with a pen and paper instead of a keyboard because, as she explains, "I don't edit as much when I use pen and paper. I respect the initial thought more."
Girl Scout's debut album Brink is out now.

"We should see how many disco records were made in the winter," Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene said. And with that, we ventured into the intersection of songwriting and meteorology: how weather patterns and temperature affect the creative mind. 
The Canadian songwriters I've interviewed tend to be seasonal writers. Many tend to write more during the winter, when they're likely to be holed up inside. Drew and I even dared start a new east coast vs. west coast feud as we pondered whether east coast writers are more productive because their seasons are more defined. But regardless of location, Drew says morning is his best time for writing because "it's one of your best chances to be free."
The latest Broken Social Scene album is Remember the Humans on Arts & Crafts Records.

Jena Malone had me at the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. When the actor/songwriter started our discussion talking about Millay and the profound effect poetry has on her songwriting process, I swooned. There’s a theme here: I’ve had a lot of actor/songwriters on the pod recently (Maya Hawke, Sasha Spielberg, The Wolff Brothers) and it’s not surprising that, given their other day jobs when they’re not singing, language is particularly important in their songwriting process. 
Malone is also a parent, and we discuss the role that motherhood plays in her songwriting process. But as you’ll hear, for Malone there’s no place like the back of an Uber to do some good writing. Her latest album is Flowers for Men.

All you need to know about Maya Hawke's dedication to wordcraft is summed up in this memory: "The day I fell in love with my husband was the day we got into a fight about free verse poetry versus formal poetry." (Hawke's husband is singer/songwriter Christian Lee Hutson, whom I interviewed last year.)
Hawke is of course an actor (Stranger Things, Inside Out 2, among others) and a visual artist, but she's really a poet, first and foremost. Rarely have I encountered a songwriter with such passion for the literary artistry of the words on the page: how they sound, how they feel, how they look, what they mean. By the way, Hawke was on the side of formal poetry in that argument. 
Maya Hawke's latest album is Maitreya Corso on Mom+Pop Records.