Songwriter showcase spotlights the brutal, beautiful act of creation

A recent interview at Secret Studio turned grisly at times, with one person making reference to dragging a dead body around behind them and a second offering up a quick aside in which they talked about their fingers being chopped and mutilated, their voice stolen.

So it goes when you’re discussing the wonders of songwriting with Lydia Loveless, Josh Krajcik, Joe Peppercorn and Lily Bloom, who will convene at Natalie’s Grandview on Friday, June 13, joining forces for a concert in which the performers will share their favorite songs along with the stories and inspirations behind them.

At Secret Studio, this mostly meant discussing the challenges inherent in snatching snippets of melody and half-formed lyrics from the ether and transforming them via (mostly metaphorical) blood, sweat and tears into actual tunes. It’s an exercise that can be mentally exhausting, with brief moments of inspiration landing amid endless stretches of self-doubt, panic, crises of confidence, and repeated bouts with impostor syndrome. “It’s pretty much all that,” Loveless said, and laughed. “Once you get past that magical, this-has-come-over-me part, then you actually have to put the work in, which is like, ‘Oh, God.’”

Oftentimes, Bloom said, her excitement will build when she’s in the process of writing a song. “And then I’ll step away for a few days,” she said. “And when I come back to it, it’s like, ‘This is not good. What have I done?’”

On rare occasions, songs can emerge nearly fully formed. Other times, a track might begin as nothing more than a single word that embeds itself in the subconscious and over time flowers into something greater. Bloom traced the roots of her song “Kerosene,” for one, to the way the syllables in the title first tumbled around in her mouth. “It’s just such a crunchy word,” she said.

All four acknowledged the dichotomy at play in the creative process. Krajcik alternatively described songwriting as something utilitarian (“Like eating or shitting,” he said) but also this magical, ineffable force, the power of which he’s tasked with finding a way to harness. “And that’s a contradiction, that’s a paradox. But it’s also the thing,” he said. “It’s really an intangible sort of commodity, isn’t it? Songwriting is objective to view and judge. And it’s subjective for the creator of it, too, in so many ways. It’s a weird thing. And it’s a weird thing to monetize, because it’s hard to explain what the hell it even is – just thoughts and dreams in audio form arranged in patterns that are difficult to explain when you break it down mathematically. The whole thing really just spooks me out. But it’s almost more who I am than my own face. … I have to create. If I were to lose my voice and my fingers were chopped up, I’d still find a way to make something beautiful.”

This initial inspiration can arrive in myriad ways and at any time, with all four utilizing voice memos to varying degrees to record ideas as they arise, wary of something evaporating as suddenly as it surfaced. At one point in the interview, Peppercorn asked the others how many voice memos each had stored, with his 2,300-plus recordings dwarfing those captured by Bloom (474), Loveless (302), and Krajcik (152). “That’s not a good thing, though,” Peppercorn said. “I need to get control of it.”

“I feel like sometimes the death of a song is when I sing it into my phone,” said Loveless, who compared storing a treasured, unused line with dragging around a dead body. “But also, if I don’t, I’ll definitely forget it. So, I’m trying to be a little bit better about that, because every day I’ll be like, ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll definitely remember that.’ And then I fucking don’t.”

The way these ideas surfaced universally remained a mystery to the four, who in the course of their eclectic careers have auditioned different approaches and mindsets in an effort to maximize the potential inherent in those moments. Peppercorn recalled how in 2017 he challenged himself to write and record a song a week for the year, which meant adopting a more workmanlike approach to the craft than he had in the past. 

“It really taught me that sitting around and waiting on inspiration is a fool’s errand, at times, because sometimes that inspiration would happen on a day I never would have thought,” he said.

Krajcik, in turn, talked about his inability to force inspiration, sharing that if a person happened to watch him work, most of what they would observe would be a man silently pacing back and forth in a space. “Walking and thinking and thinking and walking and thinking,” he said. “And all that nothing is preparing me for the time when it does come, like, boom. And then I get it as far as I can until I collapse again into self-doubt.”

Bloom described a similar push and pull at play in her process, which is often torn between the anxieties that preclude any writing session – “I build things up in my head where it’s like, ‘I’m not going to be able to think of anything good,’” she said – and the clarity that settles in as soon as she puts pen to paper. “Almost every time I sit down to work, I feel so grounded,” continued Bloom, who begins most songs on piano, moving to the harp if she gets stuck and needs to jar an idea loose. “Because it’s the way I feel I can best express myself and connect with the world around me.”

While the musicians have recently explored radically different sonic realms – Krajcik’s EPIPHANIAC, from 2024, arrived steeped in layered, pulsating electronics that exist in steep contrast to the stripped-down piano takes Loveless recorded last year for Something Else – there is an undercurrent of emotional heaviness that unites the four. 

Loveless, for one, laughed while relaying the feedback she recently received from one viewer in response to a new series of videos she started recording and releasing via Patreon in which she talks freely about whatever might be on her mind in that moment. “And someone was like, ‘It’s just so good to hear you laugh,’” Loveless said. “And I was like, ‘I laugh all of the time. I’m the most unserious person.’ But when all of my songs are like, I don’t know, deeply emotive, I guess it comes across that I’m entirely miserable.”

This is magnified by the reality that all four said they are unlikely to write songs in those moments when they are at their happiest – a tendency Peppercorn traced in part to the more therapeutic role music played for him early in life. “I don’t know what it was like when you were first really listening to music, but for me it was very much like a shield, or medicine,” he said. “And so, the songs I really gravitated toward in my younger years were the ones that really spoke to my pain.” 

The sense of connection fostered in these formative moments is something the performers have now experienced from the other side of the equation, with Krajcik marveling at how songs he wrote mostly to and for himself can often speak so clearly to the lives and experiences of others. 

“People have written me really long and earnest testimonies about what a certain song has done for them, and it amazes me how deeply music can touch a person in that way,” he said. “But you always hope that. You hope the song you’ve done for you can do the same for someone else.”