Everyone wants the secret to a great song, and it turns out there isn't one. There's a Sesame Street writer teaching herself Dr. Seuss's exact rhythm, a bassist practicing in her head because she was only allowed thirty minutes a day, and a country star who couldn't bring himself to play his dying father the song he wrote about him. We combed through our full library of podcast episode summaries and pulled the conversations where musicians and writers actually open up the process, the failures, and the strange moments a song arrives.
This isn't a list of every musician who's ever done a podcast. It's the episodes where craft gets specific: how a hook gets written, what happens when a label says no, why certain songs take years and others show up in a single take. If you write, perform, or just want to understand what's happening behind your favorite records, these twelve are worth the listen.
NYT Bestselling Author on Writing 200+ Children's Books — Tish Rabe
Tish Rabe isn't a pop songwriter, she's the woman Random House trusted to finish Dr. Seuss's unwritten science books after he died, and her craft lessons apply everywhere. She explains how Sesame Street writers taught her to write the ending first, a technique she's used on every book since, and how she had to master Seuss's exact rhythm and pure end rhymes just to get the job. There's also a wonderful detour into Joe Raposo writing Kermit's 'Bein' Green' with zero end rhymes, a choice that stunned the Sesame Street staff at the time. Anyone who thinks rhyme and meter are just decoration should hear how deliberately the greats break their own rules.
Read the full episode notesDan Reynolds: Imagine Dragons | Lex Fridman Podcast #290
Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds sits with Lex Fridman and actually listens to his own songs on the show, dissecting what separates something true from something that just sounds like a hit. He talks about audiences having a 'bullshit indicator' that can sense whether an artist actually means what they're singing, a line that reframes the whole idea of writing honestly instead of writing for radio. The conversation also gets into his depression, his exit from Mormonism, and an ayahuasca experience he says brought him closer to something spiritual than anything else has. Songwriters wrestling with authenticity versus commercial pressure will find a lot to sit with here.
Read the full episode notesTim McGraw — Selling 100M+ Records and 30+ Years of Creative Longevity
Tim McGraw tells Tim Ferriss that 'Live Like You Were Dying' was written about his father Tug McGraw while Tug was dying, and McGraw never once played it for him because it felt wrong to hand a dying man a song about dying. He recorded it two or three weeks after his father passed, in a snowed-in Dutch farmhouse studio with his uncle weeping in the room and then telling stories about Tug all night. He also describes betting his entire career on 'Indian Outlaw' when his label called it too controversial, pairing it with 'Don't Take the Girl' to launch everything that followed. This is the episode for anyone who wants to understand how grief and risk actually turn into a hit song.
Read the full episode notesJoe Rogan Experience #2504 - Skylar Grey
Before she co-wrote 'Love the Way You Lie,' Skylar Grey was broke in LA, working odd jobs including a two-week stint editing porn that she quit after she started hallucinating footage. She retreated to an isolated Oregon cabin, and it was there, cut off from everything, that she rediscovered her voice and wrote the hook that became one of the biggest songs of the decade. Joe Rogan gets into her early years touring the Midwest with her folk-singer mother and dropping out of school at sixteen after a teacher told her music wasn't a real career. A vivid case study in how isolation and desperation can produce the exact opposite of writer's block.
Read the full episode notesTal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen | Lex Fridman Podcast #408
Bassist Tal Wilkenfeld learned to play almost entirely in her head, since childhood restrictions limited her to thirty minutes of practice a day, so she visualized the fretboard instead. She tells Lex Fridman that the resting gaps between short practice bursts let her brain rehearse far faster than active practice ever could, a detail Andrew Huberman later confirmed with research. The episode also covers her audition for Jeff Beck straight out of a hospital bed after food poisoning, and the grief of losing mentors Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen in close succession. Recommended for musicians who think talent is only built through hours logged, not hours imagined.
Read the full episode notesJessie J: I Quit Music, Deleted An Album, Then Changed My Mind | E139
Jessie J tells Stephen Bartlett that her first-ever song, 'Big White Room,' came from watching a dying boy in a children's hospital ward, a detail that sets the tone for how she's written ever since. She describes listening back to a finished album a couple of months before this recording, deciding 'this ain't it,' and scrapping it to start over just days before it was due. The conversation moves through a childhood heart condition, a stroke at seventeen, and a miscarriage she went through largely alone, all of which fed directly into the record she eventually released. A raw look at what it costs to insist a song isn't good enough, even after it's already finished.
Read the full episode notesJoe Rogan Experience #1878 - Roger Waters
Most of Roger Waters's conversation with Joe Rogan is politics, but the moments where Pink Floyd's principal songwriter turns personal are worth the price of admission. He recounts watching bandmate Syd Barrett's mental collapse up close, including Barrett standing at Hollywood and Vine muttering that it was 'nice here in Las Vegas' before darkening and spitting out a single word: 'people.' Waters also touches on writing his 500-page memoir during lockdown and the years of watching a friend's creativity dissolve into instability. Worth it for anyone curious how one of rock's most literary lyricists thinks about memory, loss, and the fragility of a working mind.
Read the full episode notesJoe Rogan Experience #2212 - Jelly Roll
Jelly Roll tells Joe Rogan he turned in 170 songs to his publisher in a single year, and the episode digs into how that volume translates into hits like 'Save Me,' which Eminem reworked by turning the first verse into the chorus, mirroring an instinct Jelly Roll already had while writing it. He also explains how a random AA meeting became the seed for his song 'Winning Streak,' and credits taking himself out of his own lyrics, writing for the 'every man' instead of his own story, as the shift that unlocked his commercial success. There's also a candid stretch on his 100-pound weight loss and addiction recovery running alongside the writing. Good listening for anyone who wants proof that prolific output and emotional honesty aren't opposites.
Read the full episode notesJoe Rogan Experience #2348 - Lukas Nelson
Willie Nelson's son Lukas tells Joe Rogan he wrote his first song, 'You Were It,' at age eleven, and that Willie liked it enough to cover it on his own 2004 album. He talks about songwriting as something closer to a download from the muse than a technical exercise, and connects that idea to getting sober around the pandemic, replacing weed and alcohol with meditation and discipline for what he calls his clearest album yet. The conversation also covers his complicated relationship with a famous, often-absent father and how learning guitar was partly an attempt to get closer to him. A solid pick for anyone interested in how sobriety changes what actually comes out on the page.
Read the full episode notesJames Bay: Imposter Syndrome, Trauma & Controlling The Voice In Your Head | E166
James Bay's entire career started from a pub clip with about 25 views over six weeks, and he tells this podcast a record label found it and signed him 98 days later. He's candid about how the sudden success of his debut, Chaos and the Calm, became a kind of trauma he's still processing, and how his follow-up record was partly a reaction against that pressure. Sam Smith once warned him that fame itself is 'trauma' and nothing prepares an artist for it, a line that clearly stuck. Worth hearing for songwriters wondering how to keep writing honestly once an audience of thousands is suddenly listening.
Read the full episode notesJoe Rogan Experience #1956 - Luke Combs
Luke Combs built his fan base posting six-second clips on Vine before Nashville ever noticed him, making him one of the first country artists signed directly off social media. Joe Rogan gets him talking about writing and performing while living with severe purely obsessional OCD, intrusive taboo thoughts that have muted his emotional highs even during his biggest career wins. It's a candid look at how a songwriter keeps producing hits while managing a disorder that makes it hard to actually feel the wins land. Recommended for anyone curious how mental health and creative output collide behind a stadium-filling catalog.
Read the full episode notesJoe Rogan Experience #2388 - Lionel Richie
Lionel Richie describes his songwriting philosophy as 'receiving' from silence rather than relying on technical training, a lesson he says he picked up watching Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and Motown founder Barry Gordy up close. He tells Joe Rogan there are only twelve notes in music, and the entire job of a songwriter is making them sound like nobody's heard them before. The episode also covers the brutal, gangster-run business side of 1970s music and the panic attacks he hid mid-show despite looking completely composed. A fitting closer for a list about craft, delivered by someone who's been doing it since the Commodores started as Tuskegee students in 1968.
Read the full episode notesThat's twelve different roads into the same question: where does a song actually come from. Some of these writers chase a rhythm someone else left behind, some retreat to a cabin to find it, and some just show up to the studio and see what happens. Browse the full episode summaries on Episode Notes for more conversations like these.