Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Teen Beat - Measure for Measure - Opinion - New York Times Blog:

But back to the teenage formula. Usually I would get say 80 percent of it done on Saturday night. I would work until about 1:00 in the morning. Most of the time there was a piece eluding me that I would sleep on. Maybe it was a final lyrical detail. Maybe it was a chord in the bridge that had to go somewhere unexpected. What I found was that by sleeping on it, some dream logic would creep into the song and give it an extra sparkle.

Now it’s different. I don’t have the hours at home that follow one after the other. I can’t imagine working from 8:00 until 1:00 in the morning without some kind of interruption, and when I wake up on Sunday morning I am not running over to the guitar to see what the missing piece was. Usually I am thinking, “Where’s Ruby? What does she have to do today?” (Ruby is my daughter.) Or answering the phone or staring at my husband in his sleep.

What worked for the last album was getting out of the house. I was having so much trouble concentrating at home (”I need to clean the closets!”) that I hired an engineer (Britt Myers) to come to my house to work with me for three hours a day, three times a week. Those first days were agony, and when I sang the opening lines of “Bound” to Britt for the first time, I felt as though something crazy and weird were coming out of my mouth, like snakes. Now it is a real song, and though I still sing it with heartfelt emotion, it feels finished. But any song in the beginning is raw and uncooked and wobbly.