With a Little Help from My Friends
Thesis: There is no such thing as a “solo artist.”
I’ll start my exposition with the act of songwriting. Most imagine the lonely writer in some sacred space welding melody to lyric in a spark of inspiration — the muse conducting every move. The truth is less romantic. Songs are written in fragments, worked on deliberately over long periods of time through rather boring routines that the artist can (mostly) rely on. The even more real truth is that a lot of songs come to being through skillful appropriation. Let’s just call it outright theft. And this is where the myth of the “solo artist” begins to crumble. At the very least, songwriting is a collaborative process in that all songs are inspired by other songs, by other songwriters.
Will I Only Harvest Some is my first release that was written in full with someone else: my good friend and talented songwriter and musician, J Seger. The very idea of the record was lifted wholesale from one of our favorite songwriters: Neil Young. Over the years, J and I have had numerous conversations about our mutual appreciation for Young’s work. It was during a trip to Asheville, NC, in 2022, when we were sitting around, fiddling on guitars, that we got to talking about Young’s Harvest. We were trying to put our finger on just what makes that record so great. We ended up writing a song, “Can You Understand,” in our attempt to capture and reinterpret the magic of Young’s 1972 magnum opus. You see, the very idea of our EP came in conference and partnership with Neil Young. Without those songs, we wouldn’t have written the songs on Will I Only Harvest Some.
And, of course, J and I wrote all the songs together. In fact, working collaboratively with someone else to write a song is more the norm than the exception. Take the most commercially successful artists you know; nearly all of their songs are co-writes. “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” off of Beyoncé’s Grammy winning Cowboy Carter has six songwriters: Beyoncé, Brian Bates, Elizabeth Lowell Boland, Megan Bülow, Nate Ferraro, and Raphael Saadiq. Indeed, almost all of the 26 songs on that album are credited to multiple songwriters. (The only tunes with a single writer: “Jolene” by Dolly Parton and “Oh Louisiana” by Chuck Berry.) Check out the best selling albums of the 21st century. The biggest pop hits by the likes of Adele, Eminem, Nora Jones, Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, and Pink were co-writes. Hell, Jack Antonoff alone has co-written seemingly every pop hit since 2013. None of these folks are sitting alone in some quiet room trying to think of a good word that rhymes with “name;” (it’s “flame,” by the way).
I still cherish the long weekend I spent with J in the spring of 2024 writing five more tunes for Will I Only Harvest Some. Working with someone else — someone whose musical talents I admire and whose compositional instincts I trust — opened me up to new and interesting ways of conceiving of what a song could be. There’s no way I would have come up with those chord changes or rhythmic patterns or lyrical images or melodic and harmonic contours by myself. These songs could only have been written by J and me together, through the marriage of diverse artistic perspectives and through the negotiation required to bring these songs to fruition. They are the better for this aesthetic partnership.
Let us now turn to the recording process. No matter who writes a song, recording is necessarily collaborative. J’s instrumental handiwork is all over Will I Only Harvest Some. That sweet harmonica and tenor guitar on “Can You Understand:” J. The delicate acoustic picking on “Paradise:” J. The piano and guitar solo on “My Intuition:” J. The groovy psychedelic effects on “Endless Summer Blue:” J. The hypnotic and dissonant fuzz guitar and bass line on “The Water’s Song:” J. Neither J nor I play the drums. That’s Emily Easterly behind the drum set, and that’s Clay White playing the horns on “Elvis at Graceland 1965.”
We recorded a lot of the acoustic guitar and vocal tracks at Deep End Studio in Baltimore, MD, which was built by owner, producer, and engineer Tony Correlli. Tony’s expertise and influence is all over the record. Those aforementioned horns on “Elvis at Graceland 1965” were composed and arranged in collaboration with him. The vocal harmonies were conceived with him, as well. So much about how the record sounds is due to his influence and ideas. Where you record something, how you record it, how you mic it — all of these important decisions depend on a competent, patient, and encouraging studio wizard like Tony.
Conor Kenahan mixed and mastered Will I Only Harvest Some. We went through seven rounds of recalls before we landed on the final mixes. So many important decisions were made collaboratively during this process. The types of effects used, track levels, how instruments and vocals are panned — these choices have to be made for each and every song. Everyone’s input matters, and every choice is vetted and negotiated by, in this case, three people who all want every aspect of the record to sound great. Conor even recut the drums on “The Water’s Song” when we weren’t hearing the dynamics we wanted. So, in every possible way, these songs sound like they do because of Conor’s finely tuned ear and talents.
You get the idea: when I listen to Will I Only Harvest Some, I don’t hear me. I hear this beautiful concert of influences and collaborators.
A little more than 400 years ago, poet John Donne penned the timeless lines: “No man is an island, / Entire of itself.” He’s right. One of the best parts of being a songwriter and musician is that you’re never on an island; you’re never a “solo artist.” You're always working in tandem with so many talented and interesting people all the time. What you create is never yours alone. And, of course, once you release your music into the world, it belongs to everyone who listens to it, to everyone but you. You’re but a small part of some mystical ritual that transcends place and time and any individual person.
It’s true: When it comes to music, you’re never alone.
