Words first then music, or music and then words? The creative process is anything but predictable.
Some JUNO nominees pace through their apartments, others hunker down at a studio, while others prefer Parisian apartments, remote cabins, stairwells or even bathrooms to fuel their creative process.
There's no one formula for successful songwriting, but how do Juno nominees find their muse?
Dallas Green from City and Colour: Nominated for Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year
When Dallas Green writes music with his post-hardcore band, Alexisonfire, it's a collaborative process, but when he's writing for his JUNO nominated solo project, City and Colour, he works solo.
"It's a darker process because I only have myself to look to," he tells CTV.ca. "It's a lot more frustrating because it's a long, drawn out process."
For Green, the muse usually appears late at night when he's at home. "I'll just be strumming my guitar and when something comes to me, I'll build off it."
Where melodies come easily to him, the words take much longer and Green often finishes City and Colour songs while he's on tour. "When I'm at home, there's a lot more to distract me from writing songs. I'm a really organized, clean person, and I end up cleaning the house a lot even if it's not dirty."
Finishing City and Colour songs is a drawn out process for Green. "It's very seldom that I'll sit down and write a song in a couple of days," he confesses. "I have to let them come to me."
Right now, he says he has about eight half-finished songs. "And I know that's how they'll be until it's time to make another record," he laughs.
Tim Fletcher from The Stills: Nominated for Best Alternative Album and Best New Group
"Usually a few of us will get together and work on a song until it develops into something," Tim Fletcher from The Stills says. "Sometimes they're winners and sometimes they're losers. Some of them end up in the wrecked train yard and others we can run with."
Fletcher notes that it's important for him to be open to initial inspiration. "You can be walking down the street and see a sign and it'll trigger something, or you can have a dream that'll trigger an idea for a song," he explains.
"There's no rhyme or reason to it and you just have to be ready for the moment. "
The initial spark for the song Rooibos/Palm Wine Drinkard was a guitar riff Fletcher happened on while the band was recording in a studio. The riff was built on collaboratively by the band members until it became a full fledged song.
"But that's not the only way it can happen," Fletcher cautions. "It can be far more deliberate."
Fletcher doesn't have a fixed rule when it comes to music first or words first: "Sometimes you'll have a word or a phrase in your mind that evokes a world that has a certain sound to it. Then you try to represent that world musically."
"And sometimes you'll come up with music and you see a movie that goes along with the music in your head and try to tell that story in the lyrics."
Serena Ryder: Nominated for Artist of the Year and Adult Alternative Album of the Year
"I don't have a way," singer songwriter Serena Ryder says of her creative process. "I can write in a coffee shop or in a closed room. I can write on a bus, or on a plane, with people or in a room by myself."
The one trick Ryder does have is writing lines on scraps of paper and leaving them everywhere -- in books, or coat pockets. She then stumbles on them weeks or sometimes even years later.
"The words could be gone for a year, but then I'll find that piece of paper and start from there. It's kind of like a little treasure hunt," she laughs.
She walks into her room and finds a piece of paper. She laughs and reads out the line on this scrap: "No one walks with hard feet" -- perhaps the jumping off point for a future song.
The next step is "finding the song inside the words." For this part of the process, Ryder takes her guitar somewhere with great acoustics, like the bathroom, or a stairwell.
"I start making sounds on the guitar and I'll end up writing gibberish songs." She starts singing, offering an example, and the da-dee-de-dums end with the words 'thinking about you.'
"See, that's how it happens -- nonsense words give way to real words eventually. I write whole songs like this," she says.
Sarah Slean: Nominated for Adult Alternative Album of the Year
For her previous album, Day One, Sarah Slean went to a remote cabin in the woods to channel her songwriting muse. For her most recent, JUNO nominated album, The Baronness, she travelled instead to Paris.
"I like to throw myself into ignorance and shed myself of everything that I know," she explains.
In her tiny Parisian apartment, Slean would play her piano for days on end, occasionally inviting a string quartet over to play with her.
"It was hilarious, cramming these string players into my apartment while the French couple upstairs argued and threw dishes, and the little lady next door banged on her wall. It was just wild!"
To keep track of her music, Slean keeps all of her notes in one book -- a few chords here and there, or a title written down. But when she was in Paris, she wanted to be able to see these bits of inspiration all at once.
"I tore all the pages out and taped them to the wall," she says. "So I had this massive wall of all of these pieces and fragments of songs that were started. I would just look at them while I was playing the piano and take a thread and try to follow its path. Then songs started building."
It wasn't until after she returned to Canada from Paris that songs really coalesced. "I had to come back to something very solid and stable back in my home in Toronto," Slean says.
Matthew Barber: Nominated for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo
"I'd like to think I'm inspired by everything -- movies I watch, books I read," Matthew Barber says of his creative inspiration.
But songwriting itself is about as personal and solitary as it gets for Barber. "I'm open to collaborating with people on songwriting, and I think it would be a good thing for me to do, but it's not my natural inclination."
He writes most of his songs at home, strapping on his guitar and pacing between his living room and his kitchen. "I actually like to move around while I'm working on tunes as opposed to just sitting in one spot," he says.
Barber notes there are times when a song comes together all at once, with the music leading directly to the lyrics.
More often though, Barber starts with a tune and some chords and after a long while, words eventually follow.
"I feel like I'm a melody and tune writer more naturally than a lyric writer, so I have a surplus of songs that don't have words. Sometimes I'll just give it a couple of months but sometimes tunes just fall by the wayside."
Ndidi Onukwulu: Nominated for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo
For Ndidi Onukwulu, the process for writing songs is changeable.
The one constant though is that she is constantly penning stories and poems that she then transforms into lyrics.
With lyrics in hand, Onukwulu heads over to the piano, or picks up her guitar and starts playing with a melody. "The lyrics and melodies are pretty quick," she admits, "but the rest of the music to back it up usually takes me at least a week or two."
Elizabeth Shepherd: Nominated for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year
Like Barber, jazz vocalist, Elizabeth Shepherd likes solitude and silence when she's writing songs.
She, however, works very quickly once she has an idea in mind. "If I've got an idea, I'll come up with a bass line and play with some beat boxing on my MacBook and layer them. Then I'll create the lyrics afterwards."
She often works from home, in a bright corner with her desk and piano.
Though she usually starts writing songs on the piano, and did for her JUNO nominated album Parkdale, she's currently working on songs where she starts with her voice. "I'm reduced to a single line -- a simple melodic idea. It's great fun," she says.
The initial inspiration for the songs on Parkdale was the Toronto neighbourhood in which she was living. "There's a lot of seemingly lost souls and people really wearing their experiences on their sleeves, not trying to hide them," she explains.
"I really felt like that deserved some recognition. It touched me personally, all of this sharing without shame."
When she's looking for inspiration, instead of looking outwards, Shepherd takes the time to turn inwards. "I feel like that's the ultimate remedy," she says. "If I'm feeling in need of influence, I take some time and just have to allow the creativity to surface."
"I don't like clutter or adding layers. I just have to trust myself."
