Thoughts on songwriting and the creative process.

Yesterday was another full day in The Map Room hashing out lyrics and melodic parts to a couple songs. We start next Monday (under a week!) and I'm really feeling excited. I know I keep saying that but it's true. It feels so good to pour so much of yourself into something...dreaming about what it could be...how it could be of use to people.

It makes me realize what a gift music is. The language of the spirit I think. We all understand it and it is a privilege to speak it.

Kierstin has made me swear not to post up on here what the plan is for this new album because she wants it to be a big surprise...but I can share just a little bit without being too specific:

My approach to these new songs, both in writing and recording, has been to focus on a sort of beauty and fullness that would catch listeners off guard when they listen. Not beauty for the sake of vanity but beauty for the sake of beauty. Beauty can be an agent of healing... it can be an agent of honesty and vulnerability. It can help create an atmosphere in which to ask questions and accept that a lot of times there aren't any good answers this side of living. Beauty points to a creator and all of the mystery that goes along with being wrapped up in skin and bones. So it is a means to an end, but an awfully nice one at that.

Perhaps you get my drift....I'm trying to verbalize it but it's not really working!

Songwriting is such an awkward process. There's this sense that you are trying to connect with what is floating around in the air above you...pulling down melodies and deciphering lyrics. The music almost always comes first for me. Sometimes in parts but usually in an almost completed form. When I first started writing back in high school and college, I wouldn't edit the music too much...just the lyrics. I remember how it felt to start working on a new song and feeling somewhere deep down inside of me that I didn't yet know how to change the shape of the music. I hadn't learned that skill yet. I started being able to really get inside of a song from all the angles (music and lyrics) right around Faith & Heartache. It just takes time to learn how to craft. I think the main thing for me was to learn how to craft in my own way and not in someone else's. I'm still learning and the process is as mysterious as it ever was.

My last album (which was unreleased because Universal Records are a bunch of Communists) stretched me as far as I could go at the time. I remember feeling at the end of that record that I was at my upper-most limits in terms of writing and working in the studio. That's a great place to be.

As an artist, you are always in a constant state of becoming. I really believe that.