Songwriters on Process – Details, episodes & analysis

Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten of Momma return! Momma is my favorite band and their new album Welcome to My Blue Sky is my favorite album of 2025. At least I'm consistent since I said the same thing about them when they were on the pod in 2023. (Their live show is absolutely killer too.)

Friedman and Weingarten have been writing together since their teens, and one thing hasn't changed over the years: they still write most of their songs in Etta's bedroom. But as you'll hear, there are exceptions. Weingarten wrote the riff to "Medicine" in the shower, and the title track to the new album got its start in a green room.

"I'm a professional daydreamer," Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes told me. That's the catch-22: are you really daydreaming if you're aware that you're doing it? Daydreaming leads to eureka moments, but only when you don't sit down and say, "I'm going to daydream." As with most people, the eureka moments for Oberst involve mundane activities for a practical reason: no one interrupts him when he's doing the dishes or cleaning a room. 

The perfect daydream for Oberst involves looking out a window when he's in motion and things are going by. When Oberst writes, he uses both sides of the notebook: the right side is the final version of the lyrics, and the left side is filled with the unpolished, rougher versions.

The latest release from Bright Eyes is Kids Table. 

I cannot imagine a world where Scott McCaughey is not writing. But first, some background. He was an auxiliary member of R.E.M. from 1994 to 2011, working with them in the studio and playing with them live. He founded The Baseball Project and The Minus Five, among other bands, both with members of R.E.M. He also founded The Young Fresh Fellows. 

McCaughey doesn't feel pressure to create every day because he's already doing it. It's a daily part of his routine. Many songwriters book studio time, then write the songs. McCaughey is the opposite: he books the studio time then "grabs songs off the shelf." Was there a hardest song to write on the new album? Nope. "It was my most effortless record," he said. McCaughey suffered a stroke in 2017 and lost all verbal ability for time, but after three days in the ICU he began writing songs. 

The latest album by The Minus Five is called Oar On, Penelope! on Yep Roc Records. 

"A washing machine with a clumpy pair of shoes can be a beautiful thing."

Legendary drummer Dave Lombardo, a founding member of Slayer, finds beauty in the mundane. And also in the annoying: "Even the rhythm of a jackhammer and the bumps in a road can be inspiring," he says in the latest Songwriters on Process podcast.

Lombardo's debut solo album Rites of Percussion (Ipecac Recordings) is an instrumental effort consisting entirely of percussive instruments. What kind? Here's the list: two drum sets (single and double bass kits), a large concert bass drum, a timpani, a grand piano, and a flock of shakers, maracas, Chinese and symphonic gongs, Native American drums, congas, timbales, bongos, batás, wood blocks, djembes, ibos, darbukas, octobans, cajóns, and cymbals.

Sisters Natalie, Allison, and Meegan from Joseph talk about their individual and collective songwriting processes in this episode.  And in that discussion, they each learn something about the others that they didn't know!

Joseph's new album The Sun is out April 28 on ATO Records.

"I'm a wrong hallway person. I like to make wrong turns."

Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman makes a lot of mistakes. And that's a good thing, he says, because that's when the good stuff happens. "The excitement is in the mistakes," he says. "The song is a house, and sometimes you walk into the wrong room."

Johnson's talking in metaphors, of course, but his literal rooms need to be a place of chaos too. The room where he writes starts off clean, but by the end there's stuff everywhere: cables, papers, notebooks, assorted musical accessories strewn all about. "The room has to be neat to start, but the good stuff happens when the room is a disaster."

The Fruit Bats' new album A River Running to Your Heart is out April 14 on Merge Records. Listen now to my latest episode with Eric D. Johnson!

"I've written whole songs on dog walks," says Amy Ray of The Indigo Girls.  "I write a lot when I'm on the lawnmower, says H.C. McEntire. 

What a great time this was listening to these two friends and fantastic songwriters go deep into their songwriting processes. For Ray, it involves writing five times a week for no more than two hours a day. For McEntire, it involves cork boards. We also discuss our shared love for Anne Lamott and Sharon Olds.  

Catch them on on tour together this May. 

(NOTE: This interview is from December 2020. I've converted the video to podcast form. You can watch the interview here.)

It's like opening a time capsule now when I listen to songwriters talk in 2020 about how they were navigating the pandemic as artists. For some, it was a bane: the isolation paralyzed their creativity. For Alex Skolnick of Testament, it was a boon. Quite simply, he says, "Not having to travel has opened me up to different ways to be creative that I didn’t have before."  But on those rare occasions when he's in a rut (and they are very rare), Skolnick knows what to do: "If I’m stuck, I know what to do to get inspired. I know which films to watch, which books to read, which tv shows to watch."

"All the time in the world is too much pressure."

Shana Cleveland of La Luz prefers a good deadline when she writes songs. And with a toddler in the house, her day is nothing but deadlines, which are also known as When Your Child Wakes From Their Nap.

If you're an artist like Cleveland, the best time to write is nap time. (We have four kids, so I know the feeling.) She discovered her knack for writing in those precious moments once she became a parent. "I can write just as many songs now in a much shorter period," Cleveland told me. And when she writes, she likes to sit outside in an office chair.

Cleveland's new solo album is called Manzanita, out March 10 on Hardly Art Records. It is amazing. Really. And I'm a big fan of La Luz, so this was a lot of fun. 

I first interviewed Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek in 2013, and this latest conversation reminded me why she is one one of my favorite interviews. The thoughtfulness and introspection she brings to this discussion are wonderful.

No matter the art you create, this episode is for you. We didn't focus on the practical aspects of the songwriting process nearly as much as we talked about Creativity (with a capital C): why we create and what it does to us when we do. Where does the urge come from? When is the drive the strongest? For Watkins, the ideal place to write from is curiosity. "The end goal is not to write songs. The end goal is to figure out my stuff, how to be me, how to work through stuff," she told me.

Nickel Creek's first album in nine years, Celebrants, comes out March 24.