Singer-songwriter Abner James finds his creativity in the quiet freedom of analog tools. Learn how his creative process transcends different media.
Abner James went to school for film directing. But the success of the band he and his brother formed together, Eighty Ninety, knocked him onto a different trajectory.
The band has accrued more than 40 million streams since the release of their debut EP “Elizabeth," and their work was even co-signed by Taylor Swift when the singer added Eighty Ninety to her playlist "Songs Taylor Loves.”
Now, Abner is returning to long-form writing in addition to songwriting, and with a change in media comes an examination of the creative process. We sat down to chat about what's the same — and what's different.
ANNIE COSBY: Tell us about your songwriting process.
ABNER JAMES: The way I tend to write my songs is hunched over a guitar and just seeing what comes. Sounds become words become shapes. It's a very physical process that is really about turning my brain off.
And one of the things that occurred to me when I was traveling, actually, was that I would love to be able to do that but from a writing perspective. What would happen if I sat down and approached writing in the same way that I approached music? In a more intuitive and free-form kind of way? What would that dig up?
AC: That's basically the ethos of Freewrite.
AJ: Yes. We had just put out a record, and I was thinking about how to get into writing for the next one. It occurred to me that regardless of how I started, I always finished on a screen. And I wondered: what's the acoustic guitar version of writing?
Where there's not blue light hitting me in the face. Even if I'm using my Notes app, it's the same thing. It really gets me into a different mindset.
"I wondered: what's the acoustic guitar version of writing?"
I grew up playing piano. That was my first instrument. And I found an old typewriter at a thrift store, and I love it. It actually reminded me a lot of playing piano, the kind of physical, the feeling of it. And it was really fun, but pretty impractical, especially because I travel a fair amount.
And so I wondered, is there such a thing as a digital typewriter? And I googled it, and I found Freewrite.
AC: What about Freewrite helps you write?
AJ:I think, pragmatically, just the E Ink screen is a huge deal, because it doesn't exhaust me in the same way. And the idea of having a tool specifically set aside for the process is appealing in an aesthetic way but also a mental-emotional way. When it comes out, it's kind of like ... It's like having an office you work out of. It's just for that.
"The way I tend to write my songs is hunched over a guitar and just seeing what comes. Sounds become words become shapes. It's a very physical process that is really about turning my brain off."
And all of the pragmatic limitations — like you're not getting texts on it, and you're not doing all that stuff on the internet — that's really helpful, too. But just having the mindset....
When I pick up a guitar, or I sit down at the piano, it very much puts me into that space. Having a tool just for words does the same thing. I find that to be really cool and inspiring.
"When I pick up a guitar, or I sit down at the piano, it very much puts me into that space. Having a tool just for words does the same thing."
AC: So mentally it gets you ready for writing.
AJ: Yeah, and also, when you write a Microsoft Word, it looks so finished that it's hard to keep going. If every time I strummed a chord, I was hearing it back, mixed and mastered and produced...?
It's hard to stay in that space when I'm seeing it fully written out and formatted in, like, Times New Roman, looking all seriously back at me.
AC: I get that. I have terrible instincts to edit stuff over and over again and never finish a story.
AJ: Also, the way you just open it and it's ready to go. So you don't have the stages of the computer turning on, that kind of puts this pressure, this tension on.
It's working at the edges in all these different ways that on their own could feel a little bit like it's not really necessary. All these amorphous things where you could look at it and be like, well, I don't really need any of those. But they add up to a critical mass that actually is significant.
And sometimes, if I want to bring it on a plane, I've found it's replaced reading for me. Rather than pick up a book or bring a book on the plane, I bring Traveler and just kind of hang out in that space and see if anything comes up.
I've found that it's kind of like writing songs on a different instrument, you get different styles of music that you wouldn't have otherwise. I've found that writing from words towards music, I get different kinds of songs than I have in the past, which has been interesting.
In that way, like sitting at a piano, you just write differently than you do on a guitar, or even a bass, because of the things those instruments tend to encourage or that they can do.
It feels almost like a little synthesizer, a different kind of instrument that has unlocked a different kind of approach for me.
"I've found that it's kind of like writing songs on a different instrument, you get different styles of music that you wouldn't have otherwise... [Traveler] feels almost like a little synthesizer, a different kind of instrument that has unlocked a different kind of approach for me."
AC: As someone who doesn't know the first thing about writing music, that's fascinating. It's all magic to me.
AJ: Yeah.
AC: What else are you interested in writing?
AJ: I went to school for film directing. That was kind of what I thought I was going to do. And then my brother and I started the band and that kind of happened first and knocked me onto a different track for a little while after college.
Growing up, though, writing was my way into everything. In directing, I wanted to be in control of the thing that I wrote. And in music, it was the same — the songwriting really feels like it came from that same place. And then the idea of writing longer form, like fiction, almost feels just like the next step from song to EP to album to novel.
For whatever reason, that started feeling like a challenge that would be deeply related to the kinds of work that we do in the studio.
AC: Do you have any advice for aspiring songwriters?
AJ: This sounds like a cliche, but it's totally true: whatever success that I've had as a songwriter — judge that for yourself — but whatever success I have had, has been directly proportional to just writing the song that I wanted to hear.
What I mean by that is, even if you're being coldly, cynically, late-stage capitalist about it, it's by far the most success I've had. The good news is that you don't have to choose. And in fact, when you start making those little compromises, or even begin to inch in that direction, it just doesn't work. So you can forget about it.
Just make music you want to hear. And that will be the music that resonates with most people.
I think there's a temptation to have an imaginary focus group in your head of like 500 people. But the problem is all those people are fake. They're not real. None of those people are actually real people. You're a focus group of one, you're one real person. There are more real people in that focus group than in the imaginary one.
And I just don't think that we're that different, in the end. So that would be my advice.
AC: That seems like generally great creative advice. Because fiction writers talk about that too, right? Do you write to market or do you write the book you want to read. Same thing. And that imaginary focus group has been debilitating for me. I have to silence that focus group before I can write.
AJ: Absolutely.
"I think there's a temptation to have an imaginary focus group in your head of like 500 people. But the problem is all those people are fake... You're a focus group of one, you're one real person. There are more real people in that focus group than in the imaginary one."
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Learn more about Abner James, his brother, and their band, Eighty Ninety, on Instagram.
