If you got a second make sure you read Vienna Teng‘s latest interview with American Songwriter. It’s a great in depth article as they dive into her life on the road and her song writing process.
Here’s a peek:
Do you feel like your writing process has changed as time goes by?
I think that every time I write a song it’s like starting at zero, all over again. I don’t know how it’s done. Every time I think I have a method, it’s this step and this step, but generally songs don’t like to follow those kinds of rules, in my experience. They’ll get stuck at the weirdest times. I just have to do whatever it takes, kind of, to get around it. Sometimes it’s something as orthogonal as going to watch a movie that has nothing to do with the song, but something in the movie will somehow trigger the way to finish it. It seems like creativity is always kind of like that. You just have to stay open to all sorts of different stuff and just hope that one thing over here will spark something over there, and they just combine in your head for some strange reason. I think after that inspiration aspect comes in, then, there is the question of whether you have developed your own craft enough to know what to do with it. So, I run up against that sometimes. I have this cool idea and I’m not actually good enough to write it, to pull it off. So the question is, well what do you do with that?
Also, she gives a bonus performance which you can check out below! Make sure you read the rest!
a-Tunes 