Switched on Pop - Jump-starting the creative process with Allison Ponthier

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

Allison Ponthier knows the hardest part of making anything is getting started. When she was young, she “always wanted to write songs,” fanatically scribbling rhymes in a diary, but gave it up — the prevailing narratives of natural talent, artistic genius, and spontaneous inspiration put the brakes on her songwriting aspirations. She didn’t pick it up again until she turned 19: “It just took me that long to build the confidence.” Now, after a short stint in jazz school, a scholarly approach to YouTube song tutorials, and consistent writing practice, the 26-year-old Ponthier has crafted a songwriting method that reliably turns the mundane into the profound. Her 2021 EP Faking My Own Death shows the hand of a seasoned artist, with lyrics that mine her personal life for unexpected twists and turns. (“It took New York to make me a cowboy,” says the Texas-born, New York–based singer on “Cowboy.”) It helps that she has the backing of songwriting heavyweights such as recent collaborators Lord Huron, Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, and Ethan Gruska (whose productions with Phoebe Bridgers soundtracked the pandemic). To provide a closer look at her process, Ponthier gave us a tour of her songwriting notebook — but not before noting that “no one looks at this, by the way.” The details it contained on the making of her single “Autopilot” is a master class for anyone looking to break through creative barriers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. The other day I got this voice note from a listener. Hey, Nate and Charlie. I'm sending up the bat signal for your help. I discovered Alison Pontier through her work with Lord Huron, and I love her newest song, Autopilot.

She's this amazing indie rock singer-songwriter, and I've quickly become a huge fan of hers. I'd love to hear a good old-fashioned analysis of autopilot. It's such a fun song and definitely activating some airwere arms in my brain, especially elements of the chorus and intro. If you could help me out, that would be great. Thanks so much, guys. Shaking awake from my nightly fever, I shouldn't have watched Christine.

You know, the truth is, I don't always have a way of looking under the hood of a song, if you will, you know, get inside the head of the mechanic. So... Hi, I'm Alison Pontier. I reached out and was lucky enough that Allison was open to sharing her story. and I thought maybe that we'd get an answer about those earworms, but it turns out that her way of constructing a song is a masterclass in creativity, self-observation,

and how to break through major roadblocks. So to understand Allison and autopilot, we need to learn this process, which begins when Allison first tried songwriting. So I always wanted to write songs, and I wrote little songs. There's like a journal from when I was like six of all my like nursery writing songs that I like used to make.

But I didn't really start sitting down seriously writing as an artist until I was 19 because it just took me that long to build the confidence. I thought, oh, if you're not automatically good at something when you start, you can't be good at it, which is not true. Still, she has to start somewhere, and the process of writing nearly stops her before she even begins as a songwriter. I think everyone can agree the hardest part of the song is literally starting. Starting the song is so difficult.

how do you gain inspiration to get the motor going? Allison knows that if she wants to write at a professional level amongst her peers who started seriously writing as adolescents, that she's going to have to study up. So she spends a year and a half at jazz school, she's online watching YouTube videos for songwriting tips, and she develops a reliable creative method that rejects the idea of genius and the reliance on grandiose inspiration. Everyone has their own way that they write songs. maybe every day they write a song a different way.

I am not like that. I definitely have a process because I'm almost more creative and more daring if I have these proper tools that help me wrangle my thoughts and feelings. Okay, now I'm really interested. As someone with relentless writer's block, I'm starting to take notes just as she tells the story of how autopilot was made.

The process for this song was very similar to all my songs, which is I go on a walk, I come up with like a million different song concepts, and then when it's time to like actually write the song and sit down, I like Shark Tank style pitch these songs to myself or to whoever's in the room. Shark Tank, the ABC reality TV show, where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to real venture capitalists. Alison's method is kind of like that, but for songs. So I have all of the names of songs that I would like to write, and I have their little like blurb next to them. So maybe I want to write a song called faking my own death. I want to write a song about breaking cycles.

Or maybe I want to write a song called Cowboy, about being a little Texan stuck in New York. Or I would like to write a song called autopilot, which is about me being terrified to drive. And like when I am at this phase where I'm just writing things down, nothing is off limits. It's whatever sticking in my head and whatever stands out to me. And just like a business sometimes has to,

pivot to change its business model and find a better idea. Sometimes the initial pitch of the song isn't where Allison ends up. Autopilot was not called autopilot. When I wrote it down for this pitch, it was called Can't Drive, which is a way worse title than autopilot. But that's okay. This stage is all about no judgment. So she takes the sort of lackluster title.

And this is where she starts to build a plan for it to see what it could become. She opens her songwriting journal and starts free associating. So I actually have my journal you're with me from the day that I wrote the song. Let me just turn a couple pages and I'll tell you what I wrote down. No one looks at this journal, by the way. So I wrote down an old beater car. Christine, the Stephen King movie Christine, covered in sweat, shaking awake from a night terror, car alarms. I wrote down a bunch of rhymes like Christine, 16, Christine.

Literally, this stage is just like a word vomit stage. All I want to do is take the things that feel most obvious or interesting to me and get them on a piece of paper before I forget. Get ready for the next step. I write down the story of the song. She takes the original pitch plus the free associated ideas to see if she can build a narrative. So I can't drive turns into... I have a huge phobia of driving.

I'm terrified to get behind the wheel. And it always caused like big problems between me and my family. Because they're like, why won't you? to just get a license and go do something, kid. After I really get the concept of the song down, then it's kind of a free-for-all. So she's bought into this bad driving concept and brings it into a songwriting session

with her friends Adam Melcher and Ethan Griske to refine the idea. She has her co-writers prod at the story to find the emotional truth in the song. They were just asking me, like, say out loud how you feel about this. just start describing to me your feelings. I think I made an offhand joke. I just wish everything was autopilot.

I wish I didn't have to do anything. I wish it would just do it on its own. I didn't have to face my fear. My fears were like handled for me by modern science and technology. And I think when I said autopilot, we all knew that that was such a like beautiful word to describe not only the feeling of not wanting to drive, but the kind of state of arrested development you get in, when you're afraid to do something.

So now she has all of the pieces of the autopilot concept, and she's ready to start tackling the song section by section. I love starting songs with kind of a you don't know where you are, what's happening. In the first verse, I literally had just watched Christine by Stephen King the night before. There is no place you can hide, no place you can run, and nothing you can do. can stop her. Because how do you kill something that can't possibly be alive?

It's a movie about a car that comes to life and kills people, which I think is the perfect personification of my fear of driving. So the first verse, I was like, it has to be about me waking up from a nightmare. Shaking awake from my nightly fever, I shouldn't have watched Christina alone. And then it goes into

my personal fear of driving. When I was 16, there was like an old broken down car that my dad and stepmom wanted me to drive in. And it scared me because I was like, this car is going to fall apart, and I'm going to be in it. If my stepmom got me in that old beater, then I would have stayed 16 years old. The chorus needs to be about the concept of the song,

which is, I hate driving. I don't feel like I can do it. and the only way I'll ever drive is if everything is automated, if everyone has a Tesla, and I never have to touch the steering wheel ever again. And I can't drive it if I can't focus and I can't grow up if I'm not ready to die. It kind of feels like a run-on sentence. Every time I've ever described why I can't drive, it's me making ten excuses all lined up in one. it feels like when you've had to justify yourself a hundred times and other people don't understand, you try to explain as best as you can. You use as many words as you can to say the feeling and try to convey what you mean.

And then there's a breaking point. Then after that, I was like, well, what's another really funny thing that contributes to my reason for not being able to drive? And part of that is I've been in driver's ed three times. I'm on my third permit. So, So the next verse, I was like, it has to be about me being afraid to sit in a room with 16-year-olds. There's a really vulnerable part in the bridge where all the instruments come back. And I almost sound like I'm maybe crying. And then it goes back into kind of like a ripper of a chorus singing autopilot over and over again and me screaming out my feelings. Screaming out, I can't do it, but I'm trying. That sounds like someone who is frustrated, who doesn't feel understood, and is saying, like, yeah, this is my weakness, but this is also who I am.

And people need to accept that if they accept me. For so long, I've been very much of, like, a songwriter's mind. Like, I always heard that quote that said, if a song is great on just guitar and voice, it's a great song. Originally, Autopilot was a song that was like a campfire folk song. But the more and more I thought about my fear of driving. And yeah, it's funny, it's about my fear of driving, but it's really about a lot more. It's about my fight against myself to break through things that scare me and not feeling the same as everyone else and not understanding why I can't do the same things as other people. So the more I thought about that, the more it just made sense that it had this huge build toward the end.

sometimes I can be really wordy and want to say like a ton of words. And this one, it just felt right to kind of let loose musically instead of lyrically. That sounds like someone who is frustrated, who doesn't feel understood, and is saying like, yeah, this is my weakness, but this is also who I am. And people need to accept that if they accept me. How Alison Pontier uses this songwriting process to accept herself when we come back? attention Spotify. Has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera,

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When Allison first described her songwriting process to me, I felt that it was kind of industrial. It was like an assembly line. And yet it unfolds in this relational way where

all of the boundaries that she sets for herself help create these sonic worlds. Having rules in order to stay focused is what helps me be even more creative or more daring or take more sonic liberties. Taking those risks is what turns this sort of mechanical songwriting process to something much more human. I don't think I really realized fully what I was writing about until the song was done. Driving cars is very mundane for a lot of people. They do it every day. But for me, it's my biggest fear. It's something I think about all the time. It's something I use to, like, measure myself up against other people, and I feel like I fall short. Especially when I was in high school, especially when I was back in Texas. I think that so much of my life, I knew what the default was. And I always want to

to fit in. I was always like looking to other people to just kind of fly under the radar. And I definitely feel like for the first 21 years of my life, I was not present for a lot of it. It's way scarier to feel like you are driving your body through life and really like taking in everything that's happening around you. It's a coming of age kind of song. And even though I'm 26 years old, I do think that I've really become kind of a late bloomer in a way. I definitely feel a lot of those feelings that you were supposed to have when you were a teenager now, especially as like a queer person who came out in my 20s. I will say like I've loved my life so much more now than I ever have, but it just takes time. It takes time to come into yourself and it takes time to trust

yourself enough to not be on autopilot, not to literally say the title of the song. The songwriting process is very much one of self-discovery, but it's also in service of other people, too, her community. I have always said that my favorite songs are songs that describe a feeling that feel like, oh, yeah, no-brainer. I can't believe no one has written a song about this yet. So I'm just constantly practicing trying to make soundtracks for people that feel like they haven't had a song made for them yet. That's part of the reason why I love being like an LGBTQ artist because so many songs written by queer people, like for queer people are songs that are about representation or about your story and relating to like other queer people. At this point, Allison opened her journal again to go back to that pitch cowboy that became a soundtrack. about representation.

It took New York to make me a cowboy. Everybody knows even if I change my clothes. I wrote it because I met my girlfriend, who I've been with for five years since that song. It was the story of me moving to New York and realizing, oh, my God, I'm so different than everyone else. I look back and I'm like, wow, what a perfect blueprint of me coming to New York, coming out,

being terrified to tell people. So yeah, in a weird way, like, I just feel like the songs that I write understand me, and all I want to do is understand myself. So it's something I have to keep doing. I have to keep getting them out of my head. It's a great practice, not unlike meditating, not unlike, you know, talking to a friend except that friend is a song. This process of writing songs from a list of random thoughts,

adding a one-line pitch, which gets crafted into a story concept, and then finally a full song with lyrics, gives Allison a way to process her life and create space for unique insights about her growth and identity. But as for overcoming her fear of driving... I did drive in L.A. for the first time ever, like a few weeks ago, and I did scrape my manager's car, so... There's a reason I'm not on the road, I think. Switched on Pop is edited by Jolie Myers, engineered by Brandon McFarland, community management by Abby Barr,

illustrations by Iris Gottlieb. Our executive producers are Hana Rosen and Ashok Kerwa. Remember for the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can catch us on the web at switchedonpop.com on Instagram and Twitter at SwitchedOnPop. And we'll be back again next Tuesday with an episode on the new sounds of alternative music.

Until then, thanks for listening. Thank you.