Interview with Jackson Browne

Jackson Browne, an American singer-songwriter who’s been inducted into the Rock-n-Roll hall of fame, did an interview around his newest album Standing in the Breach and revealed a few nuggets about the creative process of making his album which I found relevant to any kind of creative process in general.

One of the first questions the host asked was if he had a personal favorite track on his record. He responded:

No I like them all. Each one of them, at one time or another, has been my favorite song. That’s what it takes to finish them, they have to be something I’m really interested in...[my] songs aren’t always finished when I start recording them. I may just rewrite a verse, or I may actually take something out. It’s a process of exploring. I want to know what the song is capable of doing musically before I finish the subject in terms of lyrics. Nothing’s worse that writing too many verses and having to throw some out. You know, if you find out you don’t really want to hear two verses before the chorus but you’ve already setup the narrative. That’s happened a couple times, where I songs just on the acoustic guitar but when I started to play it with a band I realized “I don’t want to hear another verse, I want to [go right into the chorus]”. I’m always rewriting but I don’t like to throw things away.

That last sentence of his is great: always rewriting, refining, simplifying, making better, making more concise yet impactful and deep. Great stuff.

Later in the interview he talks about his relationship with his album producer how well they work together and compliment one another:

We’re a perfect match because he’s a good engineer but he’s got infinite patience. I’m a neophite, in a recording I’m not technical at all, so I need someone to sit there with me while I think about what I want to think about and who doesn’t engage me with what he wants to do, but just does what he wants to do. Some engineers are ambitious and want to talk about what they want to do, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, can we do this?”. I need somebody that’s much more...patient. Someone who’s almost passive and who will allow me to move things around and turn the balances upside down. And things may remain out of balance for long periods of time and then [i’ll bring them back]...In a funny way, we’re bystanders to each others’ work.

I love this idea he expresses about allowing yourself (and having your producer, co-worker, boss, etc. allow you) to put things out of order to discover possibilities so when you arrive at the final product, you know there’s no other way the thing could be because you’ve explored all possible permutations.

In this same vein of continually exploring possibilities, the host asks if it’s hard for him to release songs because, at that point, the song would officially be considered “finished”:

It’s a bit of an acquired skill to know when a song is done because it’s very easy to keep going and keep adding things because it’s interesting, it’s fun. In a way you’re never done. The song is going to continue to grow after the album too, you just have to know how far you can go with this particular recording.

At the end of the interview, the host opens the discussion to questions from the audience. A guest in the crowd asked him how he remembers and tracks his half-baked ideas. He answers by talking about how he keeps track of snippets on his iPhone which helps him a lot because sometimes he remembers the idea of a song better than it actually was, like “oh yeah I was working on this thing that was really great” and then he’ll look up the snippet on his phone and realize “oh wow, that actually wasn’t very good” but that bad idea can spur other good ideas:

Most of my ideas come from mistakes that interest me...I could disappear into my music room with some of my recordings and make a bunch of songs out of the boxes and boxes of my recordings because each of them represents a moment when I thought I was doing something of value or interesting.

Love that first sentence: “most of my ideas come from mistakes that interest me”. That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of anything you’ve done in the past. It’s all experiential fodder for good things in the future.