Q: what's a song writing process look like for you? do you have something set you do every time or is it just organic?
A: at any time, anywhere, ideas can fall on me. even in dreams. that is one part of the process. learning to catch these is crucial to this part of the process. about 70% of the strongest ideas come unexpectedly, not during a songwriting session. So they must be captured and cataloged properly. At that time usually no work is done beyond the capture of the idea. Alternatively, to generate ideas, a more deliberate idea generation session can occur. this is planned, when you try to come up with ideas. remembering a key principle which is that songs can come from literally anywhere, there may be various clever strategies about which places to look. the fun part is, because they can come from anywhere, there is no limit to the places you can look. But still, this is just idea generation, separate from the remainder of the songwriting work. it's still just an idea generation session. Then there is the 'work', which is when you tend to entries in the catalog. depending on the situation, you may be tasked to finish an entire item, or just part of it, before moving onto another. But in either case, you are essentially playing hospital with the song. diagnose it, figure out what it is, what it wants to be, what it's meant to be, etc, and make decisions accordingly. 95% of the time i work strictly forwards, only being concerned with what comes next, and continuing along in order, forwards. The only situation where i would be forced to work backwards is if the original idea does not belong at the beginning. then it's a puzzle to fill in what came before, which seems to defy all laws of physics for me. very unusual. but it can be done and there are various tricks which work with varying degrees of effectiveness. So the majority of the songwriting process (basically all of it except the initial idea seed) follows the same idea of figuring out what comes next. so there are a few important practices that always seem to hold true. agree on an exact tempo as soon as you can, and run a metronome to keep from drifting. this avoids a crisis where you've drifted the tempo and now you may be writing at a level of density which is never gonna fit at the same tempo as what you've already written elsewhere in the song. another important concept is the fact that you really only know what's best the FIRST time you hear it. so you have to do whatever you can to protect this authentic, real time run through, from the mindset of never having heard it before. of course, when you're working, you're inevitably gonna hear it many times. a standard trick i use to help 're-set' is to walk to the door and touch the door handle (with the metronome running) and return and run-through from the beginning. it's also important to remember, full run-throughs are much much more valuable than only running the last part. the full-run through is the only thing that's going to truly reveal where we are at, at a certain point in the song, and thus to properly determine what happens (or does not happen) next. Another thing to realize, if nothing seems to be working and you keep trying things and ditching them, it's important to recognize that the ideas get worse the more you reject them. so if you reject 3 ideas, the 4th will be worse. so if you get too deep into a hole of rejecting, it can be useful to recognize that the first one might be the best one you're gonna get, and make extra effort to try to make the first one work, because in that case it's usually your best shot. Finally, another interesting trick which i've been using a lot recently is, pretend it's in a video. pretend it's taking place in a movie, inside a story. This doesn't even mean you're gonna write a video, but sometimes just pretending it's taking place in a video, will immediately cause interesting songwriting to materialize effortlessly. it's bizarre, because many times when this technique is working, it's not even associated with any particular video content. it's just because you told yourself to pretend you are thinking of visual content, this somehow creates an automatic trigger for songwriting