My sister's lab professor used to tell her, "If more than 5 percent of your experiments turn out as expected, you're not thinking creatively enough." I don't think that's too far off from the percentage in songwriting. When I look at the total page count in my music notebooks, and add in all the other places I have scrawled song ideas (journal, planner, margins of editorial MSs, Post-It notes in freelance cubicles), and compare that number to the number of finished songs I have out in the world, 5 percent seems generous.

That ratio would be demoralizing if it happened steadily, but—for me, anyway—it tends to reflect long fallow periods where I'm sort of bumbling about in the dark trying to get a handle on anything, and then streaks where I know exactly what I want to do and the clarity of purpose shapes the songs. Looking back at the notebook from 2013–2014, there's a stretch of nascent ideas, and then, in immediate succession, "Everything I Think I Know Is Wrong," "Sleepwalker," "This Is Where I Get Off" (which never got past the demo, which is fine), and "<3." "Like" is a few pages after that.

Unfortunately you don't get to the streaks without bumbling about first. Or I don't, at least.

I love that first line, but what's left to say after that?

I don't think this one ever had a title. I tried so hard to finish it for EITIKIW, but just couldn't get it into a shape I liked. I think it was going to be in 6/8, with drumbeats for the "..." in "I...need you, I...love you"; that might make it a good example of a song undermined by its own attempts at cleverness. (Which is too bad, as I can only think of two other rock songs about punctuation.)

I have not even the faintest memory of what this melody was supposed to be. I am fairly confident that the "Dh E" in the chord progression means there's a D with a hammer figure—not a Dh chord, whatever that would be—but I don't know what figure I meant either. "Handclaps, then chugging bass" remains a solid idea, though. Maybe I should start there.

You don't always know what you're writing about when you write it. Sometimes something nudges you to use a certain word a certain way and you do it for no other reason than liking it, leaning into the weirdness and seeing where it takes you. 

"The Alchemists" began life—I thought—as a breakup song. I had the first "Hey, sugartooth" refrain and a sense that it probably wanted a Breeders-y grunge sound and some key shifts, but little else. I remember playing through the progression once at a band rehearsal, maybe in 2018 or 2019. But it stalled out there, as a lot of song ideas do, and that was it.