Both this
Slate piece on how difficult it was for Bruce Springsteen to write "Born to Run" and this
Vulture interview with
Mika are fascinating reads, if only for what they illustrate about how different songwriters' processes are. Mika says:
Massively. Anything written down doesn't make any sense to me. I was always doing very badly at school until I came up with a technique of learning everything by tape. So I would record, I would get audiobooks with my textbooks, and I would record lessons and I would learn everything by hearing it. And I would never use any books. And that's when my grades suddenly shot up. Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.
And Louis Masur writes of Springsteen:
It took him six months during the spring and summer of 1974 to record the title track. Van Zandt now laughs at the thought of it. "Anytime you spend six months on a song, there's something not exactly going right," he says. "A song should take about three hours." But Bruce was working with classic-rock motifs and images, searching for the right balance musically and lyrically. Born To Run marked a change in Springsteen's writing style. Whereas previously it seemed as if he had a rhyming dictionary open beside him, now his lyrics became simultaneously more compact and explosive. What mattered to him was to sound spontaneous, not to be spontaneous. "Spontaneity," he said, in 1981, "is not made by fastness. Elvis, I believe, did like 30 takes of 'Hound Dog,' and you put that thing on," and it just explodes.
Both "Born to Run" and "Grace Kelly," for example, are intensely cinematic songs: they're visual and to a certain extent narrative. And yet, the authors who created them arrived at similar effects by totally different routes. I don't have a point to make exactly, except that as someone who has my own (strange, tortured) writing process, I'm always curious to visit other people's heads for a bit and see how they do it.