Ever wondered how songwriters capture scenery and stories so vivid that they seem to jump out of the song and into real life? Cary Brothers can offer some insight. In addition to releasing three full-length solo albums, the Los Angeles-based musician’s songs have been featured in dozens of film and TV productions, including Grey’s Anatomy, ER, Scrubs, One Tree Hill, Smallville, 90210, Garden State, and more.
Brothers moved to Los Angeles to work in film, but eventually turned to focus on writing music. His experiences in Hollywood gave Brothers a keen visual sense in music—and a deep appreciation for how sounds and visuals can augment one another. This time out on Before Your Very Ears, Brothers joins hosts Sean Watkins and Peter Harper to talk about how to balance the desires of both our eyes and ears while arranging tunes.
The end result is a deliciously striking last-call serenade. It starts with a Pogues-esque keys motif, then blossoms into a Waits-meets-Springsteen, back-of-the-bar heartbreaker. The details get filled in as the writing session goes on—the local watering hole with its broken jukebox and laissez-faire doorman—and before long, the cinematic, lonesome ballad takes shape.
Visit BOL.education for a free sample lesson, or use code “Song” for a 10% discount on your first non-degree course.
Mississippi-born, Los Angeles-based musician and songwriter Garrison Starr has been recording and releasing music since the early ’90s. The veteran rocker is an expert on creative expression—but also on navigating the “ballsack of an industry” that is the professional music world.
That includes the alienating experience of having to engage in a narrative—whether in song or in the press—that isn’t real or true for you, maybe even one that cheapens your personhood. “How many times have I done that to myself?” Starr wonders. These are the things the commercial music industry foists upon its would-be stars.
Along with Before Your Very Ears hosts Sean Watkins and Peter Harper, Starr hits on the key to writing great songs: Being honest creates more, and better, success. “The vulnerability is where the power is,” says Starr. Fueled by the experience of being outed in college, and then exiled from her evangelical community for being gay, Starr leads the trio on a songwriting expedition to examine the damage of having our stories ripped from us—and the potential of reclamation through song.
Visit BOL.education for a free sample lesson, or use code “Song” for a 10% discount on your first non-degree course.
If you’ve been in any bar past last call, you’ve heard Dan Wilson’s work. “Closing Time” launched his band Semisonic into the international pop-culture stratosphere in 1998, and since then, he’s become an A-list cowriter with some of music’s biggest names—including, perhaps, the biggest: Taylor Swift. The 62-year-old Minnesota native cowrote the Chicks’ Grammy-winning anthem “Not Ready to Make Nice,” Adele’s tear-jerker “Someone Like You,” and Chris Stapleton’s “White Horse,” which took home the 2024 Grammy for best country song. Wilson insists that he rebels against any “role” foisted upon him in the studio—he’s less “writer’s block killer” and more “creative therapist,” digging for truth and emotion.
Wilson’s creative craft has brought us some of this century’s most ubiquitous and popular songs, and on this episode of Before Your Very Ears, he applies it with hosts Sean Watkins and Peter Harper to write an alt-country tune in G major. The central idea? You’re not your feelings, and sometimes it’s only through the grace of those closest to us that we can pare down an overreaction: “It’s a long-term solution to a short-term problem/When you’re looking for answers, that’s when everybody’s got one,” the main hook calls.