5 lessons pop music can teach us about creativity
Featuring: The Beatles, Fred Again, Rosalia, Rick Rubins, Billie Eilish, Rosalia, Rick Rubin, U2
By this stage of the year most of us are exhausted.
Ready for a break, for pings to finally calm down. So let’s use this time for something different. Here’s five lessons about workplace creativity that pop music can teach us.
Am I obsessed with pop music? Yes. Do I ever bother this newsletter about it? No. Except today as a festive treat. Let’s explore some lessons that exciting, exhilarating pop music teaches us about our dull jobs. You might also get a couple of new tracks to listen to.
(Annoyingly YouTube embeds don’t consistently go to the right moment so click the link before the clip to see the exact quote)
1. Creative work is about putting the hours in
By far the biggest songwriter of the last 2 or 3 years has been the dazzlingly brilliant Amy Allen (recent writing credits include: Rosé/Bruno ‘APT’, Sabrina Carpenter ‘Espresso’, Tate McRae ‘Greedy’, Harry Styles ‘Adore you’ and Sabrina Carpenter ‘Taste’).
This year she’s certainly gone from industry secret to heavyweight status. What I love is how Allen articulates how creative work isn’t just glamour, it’s about turning up. When the NYT interviewed her she said she’d written a song a day, 7 days a week for 7 years (normally in a writing room with co-writers or artists).
Over those 7 years that meant she’d penned 2500 songs. ‘And talking about big songs I’ve had — that’s like, what, six? The batting average ain’t strong. But that’s enough to have a career.’
Six hits from 2500 songs.*
This has applications for our own jobs. In the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast episode about creativity Stanford’s Jeremy Utley explains that the best way to stimulate innovation at work is recognising that great ideas aren’t miracle births. To come up with a great idea, we need to accept that we need to create lots and lots of ideas. In Amy Allen’s case she became the hottest songwriter in LA by writing one hit a year. Do you really think your first idea is going to be your best?
* It’s worth accepting since she won Songwriter of the Year this year she’s had more hits as she’s been added to bigger rooms.
2. Julia Michaels says a different sort of creativity happens face-to-face
If Amy Allen is the hottest songwriter of the moment then she follows in the footsteps of Julia Michaels, who for a long-time was at the top of credits on the biggest songs in the world. (‘Issues’, Justin Bieber - ‘Sorry’, Selena - ‘Hands to Myself’, Hailee Steinfeld - ‘Love Myself’).
In 2020 Michaels endured a couple of years break in her song writing because she refused to write songs on virtual sessions. She felt the quiet vulnerability that made songwriting successful was lost on video calls:
“And then Covid happened. I wasn’t doing Zoom sessions. That for me was like, ‘no, I need to be in the room… I think the best thing about songwriting is that we’re all so insecure that most of the time we won’t say anything but you’ll hear someone mumble something and you’re like, ‘what was that?’ You know, like someone has a little idea but they’re afraid to say it. That could be really great. Zoom takes all of that out.”
In the back catalogue of Eat Sleep Work Repeat I spoke to psychologist Anita Williams Woolley who described this as ‘social perceptiveness – the ability to pick up on subtle non-verbal cues and draw inferences about what others are thinking or feeling.’ She says when we are attuned to this it serves to create better ‘collective intelligence’ of a group.
3. Creativity is chaos - don’t glamorise past ideas
Fred Again tells a story here that Brian Eno had related to him about creativity. Eno is a super-producer, maybe the original super-producer, who went from being a member of Roxy Music to running the desk for the likes of David Bowie and Coldplay. Eno, who was very familiar with helping artists overcome a creative impasse, had a story from the Berlin sessions for U2’s Achtung Baby.
‘Brian was working with U2, they were following up the Joshua Tree and they were in this place where he says they were expecting every song to just come. ‘Remember that afternoon where we just wrote Where The Streets Have No Name and it was all just great and we had a beer’.
They were in the studio expecting it to come and not embracing the chaos and struggle that often has to be part of making a song.
[Eno] took them to this three star Michelin restaurant. Everything was this absolute epitome of calm and perfection. They’re in this restaurant with a waiter per person and it’s so quiet with soft music. It’s really peaceful.
Then he took them back to the kitchen where obviously it’s just absolute chaos in a three star Michelin restaurant. You know if you leave a plate here for more than 30 seconds it can’t be served and everyone’s running around like crazy. He was like this is where you make your music stop trying to make your music in the restaurant you make it in the kitchen. Embrace the chaos.’
4. Creativity comes from being relaxed
If you’ve not revelled in Rosalia’s Lux then treat yourself in a quiet moment this week. I’m envious of you.
For an album so rich in emotion you might be intrigued what the creative process looks like. Here she explains to my two favourite music critics, Jon Caramonica and Joe Cascerelli, that she makes her best work with people she loves laughing with.
Talking about producers Noah Goldstein, Sir Dylan and Caroline Shaw (who have between them produced Kanye, Tyler, Bieber, SZA) she describes the room:
”They are the people I have most fun in the studio with, they are the people that I love hanging out with, we spend time together and we are always laughing. We actually need to tell ourselves ‘OK. Let’s focus and let’s make music.”
5. Creativity loves outside inspiration
Two examples here. Firstly Billie Eilish tells a wonderful story about writing ‘What Was I Made For?’, the soundtrack song for Barbie.
Billie allowed herself to write in character as the doll, producing an utterly beautiful elegy about struggling to find our place in the world. ‘I don’t know how to feel, but I want to try,’ she whispers.
Writing the song words flowed from her as she situated herself in character. ‘It wasn’t until two days later that I realised this is about me, and my life’. It occurred to her that she was actually singing about her own sense of identity and insecurities.
She’d been able to speak more freely by pretending this was about someone else, ‘an excuse to be a little braver’.
Man, I could watch Finneas and Billie talk all day about their work. You need to skip forwards to 13 minutes
Also, by the way, what a song.
Secondly Rick Rubin describes how System of a Down had an almost finished track but didn’t know how to fill the bridge.
They were getting nowhere and Rubin suggested they grab a book from a shelf and use whatever they found. As Rubin explains, ‘the first phrase he sees, that’s what’s in the song and it’s the high point of the song… it’s incredible’. (Trigger warning: he does use the word ‘rad’ to describe it):
Extra. Sometimes genius is just genius
Yeh. I’m not sure what the rest of us can learn here. It’s just genius of a different level but joyous to watch. Waiting for John Lennon to show up for that day’s session, Paul McCartney hacks Get Back out of the fresh morning air.
I’ve watched this clip 10 times, there’s no point where the thirty seconds you’re in doesn’t make sense from what came before. But by the end one of the most famous songs in the world exists and at the beginning it didn’t. Skipping between the last 10 seconds and the first 10 is stunning.
Paul allowed the passage of time to take him to a different place:
Thanks for spending time with me this year. More workplace culture chat in 2026. Love you.