Martin Sexton on making up songs in the studio, 2007

"Most of my songs are just made-up stuff. This whole record, Seeds, is just scratch vocal stuff. I made it up when we were tracking the record, and then I tightened it up to give it a cohesive feel. I didn’t really write these songs, like with a pen and a pad. I wrote them like the John Lennon school of just making them up as I went along....

"Generally I’d have the choruses--I’d have the hook--but the verses wouldn’t be there. I’d say two-thirds of [the writing] was, I’m in front of the microphone recording, and what comes out is what you hear. About one-third was the other side of the brain. Like 'Happy,' there was a funny line in [the scratch vocal]: 'Happy like loving you all night long / Happy like doing you on my dong / Happy like hearing my favorite song on the radio.' Just making it up I came up with those. OK, I like most of it, but I probably shouldn’t say 'doing you on my dong.' So I put something else there. That made it easy--I could fill in the blanks."

From a interview published (minus the dong anecdote) in the October 2007 issue of Acoustic Guitar. That issue also features my guitar-and-voice arrangement of "Nowhere Man," played with a partial capo, and my article on songwriting strategies based on an interview with Paul Reisler (more on that in a later post).