Photo by Scott Dudelson/Getty
Dan Wilson
Dan Wilson doesn’t believe in writer’s block. When he says this, the impulse is to think, Easy for you to say. After all, Wilson’s spent his entire career writing songs, one after another, for himself and for many, many others. After starting off writing weird midwestern gothic story songs with his brother Matt in Trip Shakespeare, he struck out on his own with the more pop-oriented Semisonic, and pop is exactly what they did when he came up with “Closing Time” in 1998.
He toured with Semisonic for nearly a decade before heading to Los Angeles–to become a songwriter for hire in the mid-aughts. He wrote “Not Ready to Make Nice” for the band known as the Dixie Chicks in 2006 and “Someone Like You” for Adele in 2011, as well as seemingly millions of album-oriented songs for everybody from Taylor Swift to Spoon. He’s also released ample solo music under his own name. Then he got back together with Semisonic last year, releasing an EP in the middle of the pandemic. Wilson and Semisonic were finally going to play those songs at First Avenue, but their headlining shows September 9–10 were cancelled.
Perhaps Wilson is so skeptical about what he calls “the cottage industry of writer’s block” because both by training—he has a visual art degree from Harvard—and by experience, he’s found so many ways through any psychological blockages.
“It’s almost like they’re hypnotizing you into being more and more blocked,” he says over the phone from his new crib in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.
Wilson says he has amassed his myriad tricks and work-arounds for artistic frustration into a deck of cards that he’s hawking on his website called the Words + Music in 6 Seconds deck. He says it’s kind of like Brian Eno’s famous Oblique Strategies deck of cards, but where Eno’s deck is dry, and intimidatingly English, Wilson’s is playful and practical.
“I just wanted to make a deck of cards that is like the opposite of the writer’s block magic,” he says. “Just like, ‘Step outside. Take a look at the sky for a minute. Go back inside and write one line of your verse, and that will be great.’”
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I listened to your song “Under the Circumstances,” and it’s a superbly well-crafted tiny little story with real characters that’s sung very well. Why give such lucrative material away to yourself?
[Laughs.] First of all, I have too much material. I’d rather give it away than have nobody hear it. I felt like this song would sound cool with my voice. I like to put out a single once in a while. I haven’t done one since a year ago. I want to keep putting out records of mine. It was fun to put out Semisonic’s EP last year, but I do want to continue taking my songs and letting people hear them in the form that they get demoed in.
You’ve written for yourself, and you’ve been incredibly successful writing for others. Is there anything you’ve realized that your own voice can’t do, where you’re like, “Aw, man, this would be better for somebody else.”
I love singing songs, and I love singing songs at shows for people. If I have a song that I feel like really, really suits me in some way, that really speaks when I sing it, particularly, then I love the idea of being able to sing that at a show for people. Kind of almost selfishly, I find myself with the urge to make a version for myself and sing that for people.
And there are other things that my voice doesn’t do. My voice doesn’t do overwrought sorrow or regret; it doesn’t do epic grievance very well. My voice doesn’t boil over with emotion, and so there are certain things that other singers are more suited to do. I do have musical ideas and lyric ideas that are much more on that kind of fever pitch end of things, but those aren’t the things that sound good when I sing them. Do you know what I mean?
Do you mean writing something like “Someone Like You” for Adele?
One of the great things about that song is when the chorus starts and she sings “Never mind.” The way she sings “Never mind” is like an explosion—it’s like the earth has been flattened in the face of this pressure wave of that line. I don’t do that. It wouldn’t be convincing or real if I did it. It just sounds great when she does it. Now, I can rise up into a glorious melody. I like to do that.
Your voice is great at that.
But I can’t blast forward, guns blazing, in that way that some singers can. I once had a song with Semisonic that was very resentful and negative and dark. It was a demo that my playwright friend Craig Wright and I were listening to, and he said, “Dan, this is really dark and ominous and convincingly negative. But, if you don’t mind me saying so, we don’t need that from you.”
I thought, What a great way to put it. It helped me clarify that there are certain things that, even if my ego would love to be able to sing something with Bob Dylan’s sense of grievance and a cry for justice—from an ego point of view, I would love that, but people don’t need that from me.
So, your vocal wheelhouse is hope, like on “Closing Time,” or consolation, like the new Semisonic song “You’re Not Alone.”
Yes, rising up into a glorious melody. Now, when I’m writing a song, I don’t analyze my voice like this. I don’t think, “Oh, I’m doing that thing that I always do.” I just think, “Oh, this is pretty good.”
You shouldn’t be that self-conscious in a creative moment, right?
I feel the urge to rephrase it, because I think it’s more like, You can’t be self-conscious during a creative moment.
Right. It doesn’t work. During a creative moment, you forget about yourself, sometimes entirely. That’s when the whole thing is working the best, when you’re not thinking self-consciously or strategically. If I’m collaborating with someone and they do something and I’m like, “Aw, shit. That’s amazing,” I’m not being self-conscious. I’m not like, “Oh, this is gold. We can really make a hit out of this.”
You’re the oldest of three siblings who grew up in St. Louis Park, and all of you are artists. You and your younger brother Matt both went to Harvard together. Did your parents push that on you?
They were very supportive of us being artists. They thought it was a dicey life choice, and I suppose they thought if we had really, really good educations, we could do something else if the crazy art things didn’t work out.
What did they do?
My mom was a nurse specialist at the University of Minnesota, and my dad was head of the gastroenterology department and became vice chairman of medicine at the U. Then he moved to Little Rock for 20 years, where he was dean of the medical school there and then chancellor of the medical system there.
Were you and Matt already in bands and stuff before you went to Harvard?
Yeah. Matt started writing—good ones—before I did, by many years.
Photo by Steven Cohen
Dan Wilson alongside longtime bandmate John Munson and drummer Jacob Slichter here at First Avenue
Dan Wilson alongside longtime bandmate John Munson and drummer Jacob Slichter here at First Avenue
Really?
Yeah. He figured it out. He figured out how to make an artifact that was also a song. What I mean by “an artifact” is something that is complete unto itself, and it’s got a purpose, and it’s not purely an extension of your ego. Most young songwriters and artists are very, very hung up in their egos, and they can’t finish things, because the finished thing won’t be perfect.
Matt kind of figured out that a finished song, especially if it was a great one, was a really, really good thing for a band to play. That’s very different than a finished song being a test case for your own personal awesomeness—your legitimacy as a songwriter. He jumped past that stuff and figured out how to make songs that were finished songs that were really fun to play.
Existing as an artist in this social media time when people’s opinions are so prevalent and unfiltered—doesn’t that create the perfect conditions for endemic writer’s block?
I think writer’s block is like an industry.
What do you mean?
There might be some reason why writer’s block is such a theme in the culture and why it’s such an unnecessary phenomenon. You don’t have people making quilts who are like, “Oh, I’m blocked. I can’t make my quilt.” They’re just making a fucking quilt. No one said, “You might get this thing called ‘quilter’s block,’ and then you’re fucked.” There’s this thing about telling everybody that they’re going to get writer’s block. If writing a song were purely a matter of getting something together that you could play at the gig, you’d be like a quilter. “I need to give my kids something warm to sleep under that’s beautiful.” You know what I mean?
Maybe it’s different for a quilter who’s won three blue ribbons in a row at the State Fair. Then they start getting neurotic about how they can differentiate themselves or exceed their own standards.
I’m feeling compassion for this fictional quilter we’ve got going here.
How old was your brother when he figured it out?
He was probably 19 or 20 when he started listening to Big Star and The Velvet Underground. I think he figured out from Lou Reed how to write a finished song. Lou Reed was a real quilter.
I remember flippantly asking you about a Trip Shakespeare reunion 20 years ago, and you said, “Man, I don’t think that would ever happen.” Now that we have a more safe distance, what were those tender feelings?
When Trip Shakespeare was at a peak, there was always a tension between me and Matt. Matt would tease me—but he meant it—that I listened to the radio too much. I was always bringing ideas that just struck Matt as too pop. Matt really wanted to keep that portion of the band where the songwriting and the ideas happened as kind of a sacred playground that wasn’t about climbing the charts or making Trip Shakespeare a hit band. And Matt’s songs were almost about—much more explicitly than mine—about characters.
Yes, they were like fairy tales.
Almost like outside fairy-tale people, but they just happened to live in the Midwest. And my ideas had more of this open-ended general pop flavor, and there was a tension just in my tendency, musically, and Matt’s vision for the band. That happens in bands all the time. One of the things that was a real stressor for us was the kind of press attention that we got in Minneapolis—there was a painful awareness in the press that we were really uncool, but also succeeding. The press was very pained by that. And other rock musicians in town were very pained by that. It struck a nerve of injustice that uncool people could be enjoyed by audiences. All I’m saying is there was an atmosphere of friction that the band was living within. The band—I guess it was like a four-headed monster, and Matt was the main thinker. But everybody was trying to grab the—what do you stir a cauldron with?
A paddle?
A ladle? We were all trying to wrest control of the cauldron-stirring tool. It was definitely a source of friction, and eventually, it got really frustrating for Matt. I know that. I know it got really frustrating for Matt. Everybody got kind of weird, and we had been on the touring circuit for, like, eight years. It really wore us out. And we needed a break.
In your career, do you have to listen to more music and pay attention to what’s going on in the world, musically, on behalf of future potential clients?
Certain things that I’ve written have been completely based on the story and the message and the emotions, and the music comes very secondarily. But if I am working with somebody who is in a very current sonic space in music, sometimes my only watchword is, “Don’t insert a bunch of ideas that are comfortable for me just because they’re comfortable for me.” I work with a lot of people who are currently making records, so I don’t have a lack of exposure to what things are sounding like now. I don’t live in a little bubble that prevents me from understanding current music. I like current music, but I don’t feel it’s my job to adopt this year’s way of programming drums. I can just have someone else program those drums.
When Natalie Maines comes to you, or P!nk, or any pop star comes to you to write a song, is it ever like a therapy session?
Oh, I would never say that I’m a therapist. I have no idea whether I leave people feeling better or worse, but I think songwriting is a funny field. I was just talking with Chris Stapleton about this and how certain sessions, you go in, and everybody is wildly honest, open, and revealing to the point where you’d never tolerate it at a party. Spilling their guts over drinks to the point of deeply uncomfortable stuff. It doesn’t even depend on whether you know the person or you just met them. You can suddenly find yourself in a songwriting session telling them something that you never thought you were going to tell anybody. Chris and I were talking about how really great sessions are almost purely musical even though they have lyrics in them. They’re not about revealing your darkest thoughts or the worst things about you or your greatest fears. Sometimes a great song happens in a playful, lighthearted way even if it’s really heavy. It doesn’t have to be a heavy experience to have a heavy song come out of it. These are very strange paradoxes of collaborative art. You could have the most playful, silly day, and the thing you came out with makes people weep.
I understand the industrial needs of pop music, but sometimes I wonder why somebody like Jim James (from My Morning Jacket) needs songwriting help.
We just recently wrote a song together, and it wasn’t a matter of needing help. Sometimes a song just doesn’t want to go to the next point with someone. Then the other person says, “Oh, how about this?” Sometimes you just have to ask, “Oh, what about this?” Then you try a bunch of things, and now it’s done. Sometimes I end up with people, and they say, “Oh, I feel like I’m really blocked.” And I say, “I’m not sure how much I believe you or not—let’s try to write a song and see what happens.”
What does it feel like connecting with millions through somebody else’s voice? Is it as gratifying as “Closing Time” or “Secret Smile” was for you?
When I hear myself on the radio, I’m like, “Aw, shit. Why did I make that bridge so long? What got into me? This guitar is way too distorted. What was I thinking of?” I have the hardest time enjoying it. When I hear a song that I wrote with somebody else and they’re singing it, and I hear it on the radio or in a restaurant or whatever, it’s actually a much more pure feeling of happiness, because I’m partly going, like, “Oh, they sound so good. Oh my God, I love their voice.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
