![]() ![]() But I've also found that if I put something down prematurely, the creative flow stops. If I sit down to write a song, my phone is never there. The phone cuts off part of the creative process. I don't feel comfortable writing things in my phone I believe in the juju of the pen and paper. It's all about the timing of writing it down. By keeping them in your head, are you worried that you might forget them? I hear that a great deal from songwriters about songs swirling around in their head, but they usually write them down or record the melody as soon as it happens. It stays there until I put it down or decide that it's done. I'm doing that right now, in fact a song is circling in my head. When I'm working on a song, it's swirling around every moment, all the time. My being prepares me to birth that thing, almost like pregnancy. It's all in my head, but I may not even know it's there. I might be writing a song for three weeks before I even write it down. Even then, they are interweaving themselves into my psyche and coming through in my songs. Writing is about capturing those observations, capturing that space when you can really see things and be with them every second.īut sometimes I don't have time to write down those observations. Sometimes you can see the frame that someone puts around something just by how they interact with it, and as I'm walking through the world, I'm always trying to find the presence that allows me to see things. She's creative in how she sees things and speaks about them. She doesn't actively create art, but she's one of the most creative people I know. There are so many ways to interact creatively with the world. I don't like imposing the energy of force onto the writing.Ĭome to think of it, though, I do write every day, but I don't put pen to paper. When I start associating the feeling of sitting down to write with a chore, I start to hate it. And I don't like that feeling where it becomes an obligation. I've tried that before, periods where I've forced myself to write every day. It sounds like you don't think it's important to write every day. But when I'm actually writing poetry, I'm not thinking about songs at all. If that's the case, I'll go back to it and take some of the words I was using, or maybe just the tone, and use that in the song. ![]() I keep them separate, but if I'm writing a song, I'll often remember that I've written something else around a certain theme in my journal. Do those words ever make their way into your song lyrics? It's more like therapy instead of thinking This is going to be part of a song. When there's no pressure and it's not intended to be for anything, it's liberating. I like doing that because it's a release. Sometimes it is, but it's usually just abstract writing that turns into poetry or that makes its way into a song. That writing is not always about spilling my guts to myself about how I feel. There are times when I'll get into writing a lot of poetry because my brain gets activated in that direction, but I do keep a journal and write in it every two or three days. Outside of songwriting, how much writing do you do? Read my interview with Adrianne Lenker after listening to the beautiful guitar solo in "Real Love." I try to see metaphor in everything, and it's important to see the story that everything around you is trying to tell." "That's the kind of art I'm drawn to: it happens as a result of life. But Lenker saw a pattern in the red, and to her it was art. The red brick was there for utility: the wall needed repair. Here's an example. While we were talking, she mentioned the wall of white brick across from her, interlaced with replacement red brick. "My mind puts frames on everything," she told me. She treats everything she sees and everything she hears as a work of art. Much of this has to do, I think, with how Lenker travels through this world. And for good reason: the music is powerful and Lenker's lyrics are intensely personal. ![]() Since Masterpiece's release last year, the band put out Capacity, and on the strength of those two incredible albums (both on Saddle Creek Records), the band has leaped to the top of many critics' short list of best new bands, or just best bands period. That guitar solo is played by Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief's vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter. It's unbelievably good, and the song "Real Love" has a guitar solo that literally made me cry." She wrote, "I just found a band called Big Thief with a debut album, Masterpiece. Back in June 2016, Alaina Moore of Tennis (whom I interviewed for this site) emailed me about a new band she discovered. ![]()
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