But, if you don’t mind me saying so, we don’t need that from you.” 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. I once had a song with Semisonic that was very resentful and negative and dark. I like to do that.īut I can’t blast forward, guns blazing, in that way that some singers can. Now, I can rise up into a glorious melody. It wouldn’t be convincing or real if I did it. 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. Do you know what I mean?ĭo you mean writing something like “Someone Like You” for Adele? 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. My voice doesn’t boil over with emotion, and so there are certain things that other singers are more suited to do. My voice doesn’t do overwrought sorrow or regret it doesn’t do epic grievance very well. Kind of almost selfishly, I find myself with the urge to make a version for myself and sing that for people.Īnd there are other things that my voice doesn’t do. 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. I love singing songs, and I love singing songs at shows for people. 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.” You’ve written for yourself, and you’ve been incredibly successful writing for others. 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. I want to keep putting out records of mine. I like to put out a single once in a while. I felt like this song would sound cool with my voice. I’d rather give it away than have nobody hear it. Why give such lucrative material away to yourself? 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. Go back inside and write one line of your verse, and that will be great.’” “I just wanted to make a deck of cards that is like the opposite of the writer’s block magic,” he says.
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. 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. “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. 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. Wilson and Semisonic were finally going to play those songs at First Avenue, but their headlining shows September 9–10 were cancelled.
Then he got back together with Semisonic last year, releasing an EP in the middle of the pandemic. He’s also released ample solo music under his own name. 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 toured with Semisonic for nearly a decade before heading to Los Angeles–to become a songwriter for hire in the mid-aughts.
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. After all, Wilson’s spent his entire career writing songs, one after another, for himself and for many, many others. When he says this, the impulse is to think, Easy for you to say. Dan Wilson doesn’t believe in writer’s block.