How much writing do you do other than songwriting?

I do some journal writing, though I wish I did more. I've gotten started on some short stories, but I like to use all my best ideas for songs. It's instant gratification for me since I get to play them immediately for people and see their reaction. The feedback is immediate. It's a more living kind of outlet for a story.

When you say you get started on short stories, does that mean you start writing them then at some point realize that the idea is better suited for a song?

Oh yeah, absolutely. A lot of them do. But I think it's hard to write narrative songs. I've been writing a lot of songs like that lately--songs with a beginning, middle, and end--that have characters with feelings. These songs have an antagonistic element to them. It's much harder to do that in such a small space, especially when you include dialogue. That's what I've been into lately.

What made you want to go in a narrative direction in your songwriting?

I've always loved story songs. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Johnny Horton, and his songs were written by a history teacher in Arkansas named Jimmy Driftwood. He wrote tunes like "The Battle of New Orleans" and "Sink the Bismarck" to teach his high school history classes. I thought that was so interesting.

What's the most challenging part of the narrative songwriting process for you?

Character development. There's so little time to develop a character. I've actually taken a route recently where my characters appear in multiple songs, so they already exist. There's already a backstory, so the listener has a sense of what the character might do given their previous actions. Still, it's hard to make characters seem believable in such a short space.

How often do you sit down to write a song about a certain topic, and if so, does that happen more with narrative songwriting?

I want to do that a lot, but it's more about writing about a moment or a space of time in my past that I want to sum up, like being a kid in rural Oklahoma. Or something in my travels might inspire me. I want to let people know what tornado weather smells like in a song. I want listeners to be able to hear the scene in my head. The best person out there today doing that, the greatest song craftsman, is James McMurtry. (Ed. note: read my interview with McMurtry)

What about his songwriting is so inspiring?

The literary aspect, the way he gathers a character's cynicism or hopefulness pretty quickly so that you know what he's after. He finds beauty in some pretty mundane or ugly shit. There's beauty everywhere in his world, not just in the most obvious things.

How much distance do you need from the things you write about?

It depends. I like what Thomas Wolfe said about not writing about people too accurately when they are alive, especially if your portrayal is not going to be what they think of themselves. And I don't write about real stuff until I've had some distance, but if I do, I use fictional characters or I use those events as aspects of a fictional story.

Talk about your ideal writing routine.

When I'm really trying to write for a deadline, I'm disciplined. But if there's no deadline, I can be pretty lazy. I'm just writing stuff down, like two or three lines a day or even just a title. I'm much more productive under deadline.

I like writing on the porch at my parents' place in southeastern Oklahoma. I'd say that my favorite place to write is any place that I don't have to take care of or where I don't have chores. Laughs. If I have anything to do, I'm easily distracted. That's why hotel rooms work so well for me: there's not much to do. I try to write in the morning with some coffee for two or three hours until I'm sick of it, then I'll go goof around. When I was writing Goodbye Normal Street, I was down where I grew up at my mom and dad's place. I'd write in the morning, then go drink beer and eat dinner with my buddies, then write again at night in an altered state of mind. Laughs. That repetition really helps.

Why the porch at your parents' place?

I think it has to do with the nostalgia of it, especially in the spring or fall when the weather is nice. Being a kid who grew up in the country, there's something about the changing of the seasons that gets me thinking about the anticipation of new activities about to happen. As an outdoorsy family that did a lot of hunting and fishing, there was always something new about to happen in the transition of the seasons. The songs are a bit different when I'm down there because it makes me think about different things.

I haven't talked to many songwriters who write at night, only because they don't do too much in the morning. When you write in the morning, are you also going over what you wrote the night before?