Margaret Glaspy on Accidental Records, 15 Minute Writing Sessions, and Learning to Write Songs Again

When the Plan Is to Have No Plan

Margaret Glaspy is not a musician who wanders into a studio and hopes for the best. By her own description, her recording process is usually laser focused: know the plan, get in, get out. So when she and longtime friend Ryan Lerman decided to just hang out at his Los Angeles studio with no agenda beyond maybe cutting one song in a day, it was a deliberate break from how she normally works.

Four days later they had made an album.

That album is The Golden Heart Protector, a collection of covers featuring Madison Cunningham, James Bay, Norah Jones, Alam Khan, and others. What makes the story so instructive for anyone who makes music is that almost none of it was engineered. James Bay happened to be in Los Angeles for roughly 24 hours. Alam Khan happened to be playing a show Glaspy was also part of. Norah Jones lives nearby and turned her part around quickly. Madison Cunningham was in town.

"It was a really beautiful example of musical community for me, because I am kind of shy. I do not really reach out a whole lot, and I think it makes me a little nervous."

There is a lesson buried in that admission. The record did not happen because Glaspy overcame her shyness through willpower. It happened because she was in a room with a friend who made her feel safe enough to try things. Creative risk is much easier to take when the social risk is low.

"Play It Like It Is a Funeral"

The single best story in this conversation is about the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Have You Ever Seen the Rain. Glaspy had never played it. Not once. Her hands had literally never made those shapes in that order. The lyrics were sitting in front of her in case she blanked.

She took a breath to start, and Ryan Lerman said: "Wait. Play it like it is a funeral."

That take is the one on the record.

Think about how much information is packed into six words of direction. No chord changes were discussed. No tempo map, no key change, no arrangement chart. Lerman gave her an emotional frame and let her body figure out the rest. The result reframed a song most listeners hear as an upbeat piece of American soul into something reflective, holding happiness and sadness in the same hand.

What guitarists can steal from this

• Direct yourself with feeling, not notes. Next time a passage feels flat, do not reach for a new voicing first. Give yourself an emotional instruction. Play it like a funeral. Play it like you are lying. Play it like you are late for something.
• Record the first pass. Glaspy's most striking performance was her first ever attempt at the song. Unfamiliarity produces hesitation, space, and phrasing decisions you will never make once the song is in your muscle memory.
• Keep the lyrics or chart in front of you and do not apologize for it. Reading a chart while you record is not cheating. It frees up attention for interpretation.

Why Cover Songs Are a Songwriting Tool

Glaspy describes herself as naturally oriented toward interpretation. Her framing is worth quoting because it is a genuinely useful mental model:

"There is lyrics and there is chords and then there is me. I get excited about my job being me."

Notice that she does not treat the song as a fixed object to reproduce. The chords and lyrics are the given material. The performer is the variable. That is the whole job.

She also draws a hard line about why anyone should cover a song at all: there is no reason to do it unless you are offering a different perspective. The original version already exists and is already perfect. Your version has to justify its existence.

For students, this is a genuinely great practice framework. Take a song you love, and instead of learning the recording note for note, ask what your version would be. Different tempo. Different feel. Different harmonic reading of the same melody. Different instrument entirely. That process forces decisions, and decisions are where musical identity comes from.

The Jesus, Etc. arrangement

The Wilco cover on the record started as a studio experiment with pianist Benny Bock. Glaspy suggested trying it with a stride piano feel. That combination of sentiment and piano approach reminded her of Norah Jones, so she asked, and Jones said yes. Jeff Tweedy heard the finished version and said it made him cry.

The through line: the arrangement idea (stride piano) came first, and the arrangement idea told her who should play on it. Not the other way around.

East Coast Versus West Coast, and What Gear Says About Culture

One of the more entertaining detours in the conversation is about regional sound. Glaspy, a California native who has lived on the East Coast for 18 years, points out that rubber bridge guitars are an unmistakably Los Angeles instrument. She has never heard one on an East Coast record. Same with felted pianos, where felt is placed in front of the hammers to remove attack and produce a washed out tone. Meanwhile tack piano, where tacks are added to the hammers to add attack, feels more East Coast to her.

The pattern is not accidental. Soften the edges versus get to the point. She connects it to studio culture too. On the West Coast, sessions include walks and green juice runs. In New York, time is money and real estate pressure means studios open and close fast, so nobody is lingering.

Neither approach is better, but they produce different records. If you are chasing a certain sound, it is worth asking whether your working process actually supports it. A frantic session will not produce a languid record.

The Writing Process: More Prolific Than Ever

Glaspy says she is writing more now than at any point in her life, and the biggest change is that she removed technology from the process.

She used to work in Ableton, experiment with Max MSP, build demos in GarageBand on an iPad, and multitrack constantly. Now it is a typewriter, a pencil, paper, and a single microphone into Logic. She has even backed off using voice memos at home, though she still uses them on the road.

Her reasoning is sharp. Small conveniences hijack the brain. She uses rhyming websites as the example. If she could not find a rhyme instantly, she would look it up. Now she does not touch it, and she says she finds far more interesting options because she is letting her brain do the work.

"Parts of my brain atrophy if I do not use them."

She also mentions being diagnosed with ADHD about four years ago, and that a typewriter works exponentially better for her because there is nothing beyond it to access. No YouTube rabbit hole. No notifications. Just words on paper.

Her daily ritual, step by step

• Wake up and go straight to writing, sometimes still half asleep. Do not pass go.
• Fill a full page of an oversized notebook with subconscious, unfiltered writing.
• Pull over a single ribbon microphone on a boom arm, hit record, and make music for about 15 minutes.
• Start structuring what came out.
• Type a draft on the typewriter.
• Date everything: the Logic region, the typed pages, the handwritten pages, so all three formats cross reference.

She keeps one single Logic file for all of her writing, with each region named by date. If she is home for a month, that adds up to a large body of raw material she can later comb through and cherry pick for records. Ideas surprise her on playback.

The 15 Minute Rule

This might be the most immediately actionable idea in the entire conversation.

Glaspy does not sit down to write for three hours. She does not sit down to finish a song. She sits down for 15 minutes of continuous original music making, and that is the whole commitment.

If she has a chorus and half a verse already, that becomes the jumping off point. For those 15 minutes, everything is on the table. Change the story. Change the chords. Add a modulation. Rewrite the whole thing. No restrictions.

If she wants to keep going, she takes five minutes off (lie on the floor, make tea) and re-ups, Pomodoro style. She notes that once she is in it she can go for five hours, but the breaks matter, because overdoing it makes her not want to come back the next day.

Why the short timer works

Fifteen minutes is small enough that resistance never gets a foothold. You cannot really talk yourself out of 15 minutes. And crucially, the goal is time spent, not output produced. That distinction matters enormously, because output goals invite judgment and judgment is exactly what stops her.

When asked what actually blocks her from finishing songs, her answer was immediate and had nothing to do with craft:

"Any voices of self hate in any way are what stop me from finishing it. I am not smart enough to figure this out, or this is just cheesy. That murky sense of badness. It is really not anything else. If I am willing to be uncomfortable, then I can totally finish it."

Writer's block, in her experience, is not a shortage of ideas. It is an unwillingness to sit in discomfort. The 15 minute container makes the discomfort finite and therefore survivable.

The Title, and Finding Inspiration in the Archive

The album name came from the Library of Congress website, which Glaspy admits to prowling regularly. She keeps a folder on her computer of interesting things she finds. Among a collection of old medicine labels (she loved the emblems and fonts as much as the words) was a heart medicine called the Golden Heart Protector.

It fit, because making the record genuinely healed something in her: the part that felt she was not allowed to collaborate, or ask, or take up space.

She also talks about reclaiming the word folk. She started as a fiddle player, put it down during an adolescent rejection of folk music, and spent years being filed under the indie label. Her issue with indie as a genre tag is that it can imply a kind of erasure of lineage.

"No one is hatched. We are not hatched in a void. We have been given these things. I did not invent any of this."

For guitar students, that is worth sitting with. Studying where your vocabulary came from does not make you derivative. It makes you literate.

What Is Next

Glaspy has a new record coming in spring, produced by Joe Henry, with J Bellerose on drums, Patrick Warren on keys, and Ross Gallagher on bass. The aesthetic, she says, was chosen through casting: pick the players and the sound follows. It leans much further into the folk music she grew up with, rather than the electric rock trio format that has framed her previous work.

The most striking thing she said about it came near the end. After a career of writing songs that other songwriters study, after teaching songwriting, after multiple acclaimed records, she describes the shift toward narrative writing and character portrayal this way:

"I feel like I am learning how to write songs for the first time right now, which is really just so engaging for me."

Five Things to Take to Your Practice Room

• Set a 15 minute timer and make original music. Not practice. Not scales. Original music, every day. Time spent is the metric, not output.
• Give yourself emotional direction instead of technical direction. Play it like a funeral. See what your hands do.
• Record your first attempt at a new song. The unfamiliarity is a feature.
• Remove one piece of technology from your creative process this week. Try writing without the rhyme lookup, or without multitracking. Let the atrophied part of your brain work.
• Date and organize everything. One file, dated regions, dated pages. Future you will find things you forgot you wrote.

You can find Margaret Glaspy's music and tour dates at margaretglaspy.com. This episode of Playback Sessions was filmed live at Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville, Tennessee.