Nat and Alex Wolff had me at Sam Shepard. The playwright/writer/actor was one of my dissertation topics and the brothers acted in his plays, so we agreed early on that he's one of our favorite writers. (After you listen, please read Shepard's Pulitzer Prize winning play Buried Child.)

I’ve interviewed other actors who are also songwriters, and as you’ll hear, all channel their stage experience when they write songs. The Wolff brothers call these elements “artistic nutrients”: all the things we ingest that help us hone our craft.

As an aside, this could’ve been the most fun I’ve had on a podcast. And in a first, we were somehow able to connect Watergate to the songwriting process.

Nat and Alex Wolff's self-titled album is out now.

Patton Magee of The Nude Party has the best reason why reading makes you a better songwriter: it gives you a stronger and more wide-ranging vocabulary, which in turn gives you more ways to express yourself. "Words that you rarely use are a lot more fun to play around with," he says on the pod. This reminds me of one of my favorite lines in William Zinsser's book On Writing Well, when he says that if a word comes too easily to you, don't use it because it's probably overused.

The Nude Party's new album is Look Who's Back.

"I am a taskmaster," Courtney Marie Andrews told me. When we talked back in 2018, I marveled at Andrews' discipline. She calls it "chunk writing": Andrews doesn't write on tour but instead collects notes and ideas while she's there. Then, when she's home, she blocks off chunks of time on her calendar and does nothing but write.

This discipline makes for prolificness: besides being a fantastic songwriter, Andrews is a published poet and a visual artist. And as you'll hear, it all has to go in a green journal.

Andrews's latest album is Valentine.

"To write about something sad and dark, I need to feel content, to feel a sense of well being. I can't write when I'm depressed," Lucinda Williams told me.

Much of my discussion with Williams focused on how we prepare to write. By her own admission, she's obsessed with paper. "I could spend hours in an office supply store," says Williams. A comfortable chair is necessary too, but not too comfortable because, well, it's easy to fall asleep in a deep chair. And coffee is important, not necessarily because of the caffeine but because of the nostalgic element.

We also did some close reading of her father's poetry. I've been a big fan of Miller Williams for many years and taught his poems when I was in academia. We discussed his ability to take decidedly unpoetic images and phrases like radar detector and cellular phone and make them beautiful.

Lucinda Williams' latest album is called World's Gone Wrong.

"I've been very happy lately, and that's worrying," KT Tunstall told me. "It's much easier to write sad songs than happy songs. Happiness makes you want to be present, but pain makes you want to escape. And music has always been a way for me to get out."

Tunstall is adamant about not writing every day. "I love doing nothing, so mindless puttering is especially effective. When she finally sits down, she has rules: no blue pens, and the paper has to be unlined. Why unlined? Because she hates being told what to do, and lined paper represents a means of control.

Tunstall is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her debut album Eye to the Telescope with a deluxe edition out now.

Why do so many of us feel the need to clean our space before we create? Melody Prochet (aka Melody's Echo Chamber) and I discuss why it's important to our respective writing processes. When she's not writing in that nice and tiny space, she's walking along the water, another important element to her songwriting.

The latest album by Melody's Echo Chamber is called Unclouded.

"Pants delivery was my eureka moment," Julien Ehrlich of Whitney says on the pod, and with that we have my favorite out-of-context pull quote.

Ehrlich was not speaking metaphorically: when he and bandmate Max Kakacek were writing Whitney's first album, he drove a clothing delivery van that had no working radio. The monotonous drives were great sources of inspiration. Kakacek, on the other hand, was a competitive swimmer until he turned 18. Swimming endless laps staring at the bottom of the pool was a boon to his creative process. Kakacek runs now, where the monotony takes on a new shape: he listens to the same song over and over for his entire run.

"Lyrics don't come naturally to our brain," they said. "Our North Star is the melody." One big change to their process is learning how to tweak less.

Whitney's latest album is Small Talk.

“I’m a ‘go in phases’ type of gal. It took me a year and a half to write this record, but it came in blocks,” Gatlin says. It’s how she manages her routine in those blocks that makes her songwriting process so fascinating. Gatlin is most effective between 3pm and 5pm, and thanks to a typing class she took as a child, she can type those lyrics at 95 words per minute. She finds walks to be particularly inspiring for lyrics, but when she’s with her guitar, Gatlin sits cross-legged and gently rocks back and forth as a way to focus. And just like many songwriters have told me, bathrooms are especially productive.

Gatlin’s latest album is Eldest Daughter on Dualtone Records.