Lou Reed is interviewed by Pitchfork:

Pitchfork: As a songwriter in 1975, what kinds of contextual or personal cues made you want to experiment with things like drone, volume, and sustained sound?

Reed: In the Velvet Underground, my guitar solos were always feedback solos, so it wasn’t that big of a leap to say I want to do something that’s nothing but guitar feedback, that doesn’t have a steady beat and doesn’t have a key. All we have to do is just have fun on the guitar, you don’t have to worry about key and tempo. We just had tons of feedback and melody and licks flying around all over the place. I had two huge amps, and I would take two guitars and tune them a certain way and lean them against the amps so they would start feeding back. And once they started feeding back, both of them, their sounds would collide and that would produce a third sound, and then that would start feeding and causing another one and another one, and I would play along with all of them. (Link)

5 Ways To Make Your Digital Songwriting Life Easier on Musician’s Notebook:

These tips may save your career one day, from all kinds of catastrophes: good organization may prevent the loss of a hit song, and good protection stops some charlatan from running away with your song and making money off it for themselves. Commit them to memory, write them on your skull with a tattoo needle - just make sure you don’t lose your career to digital mishaps now that you’re working in a digital environment. (Link)

James Blunt on sophomore album songwriting:

Two years after his blockbuster Back to Bedlam came out, James Blunt hit the same Los Angeles studio with the same producer he worked with on his debut. “I guess the difference is I’ve got a few miles under my feet at this stage, and I’m more comfortable in a way with songwriting, and I understand the recording process. The first time around it was new and strange to me.” Watch Blunt talk about working with Tom Rothrock, who helped out with the songwriting process, and the making of his sophomore studio album All the Lost Souls right here. (Full video here)

SongwritingApples.com has a songwriting challenge they be issuing every month. This month’s “theme” is numbers. Here’s the blurb from their blog:

25 or 6 to 4!
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a challenge on here at Songwriting Apples. One of our editors, Steve, has come up with the theme of NUMBERS for the month of September. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to come up with a new song with NUMBERS as an element, theme, or topic (e.g. One - U2, Love Me Two Times - The Doors, Three More Days - Ray Lamontagne, 867-5309 (Jenny), 1979 - Smashing Pumpkins). You get the idea, now get crackin’! (Link)