Better Than Ezra, Say She She and Sébastien Tellier share their perspectives on how weed can work wonders when crafting a hit song.
Ever been so stoned you thought you were dying?
If you’re like most casual cannabis consumers, chances are you’ve experienced at least one smoke-filled session of panic paranoia.
That’s because consumption is a science.
Particularly in artistic fields, marijuana can either aid the creative process or inhibit the creative flow, a pendulum swing largely dictated by one’s weed tolerance.
But no matter where one sits on the smoking spectrum, we each possess a personal threshold within: the moment when elevated creative consciousness morphs into a stoney ball of mush.
The skill is finding the sweet spot, that intangible existence where your soul is closely aligned with source and your creative flow effortlessly shines through.
Musicians, you might say, are the imbibing experts, creative professionals with the time and resources to experiment and discover their own personal thresholds in a way that allows them to consistently deliver their hearts and minds to that sweet spot without going over the line.
“There’s something to be said about getting too into your head and second-guessing yourself when writing music,” Kevin Griffin, frontman for storied alternative rock band Better Than Ezra, said to me in an interview. “When you’re a little high, you can unlock super creativity, but only up to a certain point. There’s a beautiful, sweet window.”
It’s a window many musicians chase, but if it’s missed, the results can be less than productive.
“I write with a lot of musicians who get baked hitting their pen or whatever, and we were working on the song ‘Stuck Like Glue,’ which was a number one for Sugarland,” Griffin said. “But we couldn’t finish the song. Shy Carter went out for some ‘herbal inspiration,’ which meant he was going to return stoned and I’d have to be ready to record. Those moments are like running around with a butterfly net and you need to be ready because the first 30 minutes are going to be the most glorious shit you’ve ever heard, but after that, it’s diminishing returns. So I hit record and we got a number one song, all because he went out and smoked a little weed.”
In fact, Griffin and Better Than Ezra bassist Tom Drummond told us how lyrics to one of their biggest songs, “At The Stars,” were actually revealed through cannabis.
“When we were writing the song, the chorus wouldn’t come,” Griffin said. “One summer night after playing a show in Copper Mountain, Colorado, we walked up a ski run with my acoustic guitar. We got baked and were literally looking up at the stars, and that’s when the chorus came.”
Used this way, cannabis is a tool that can help overcome creative blocks, a tool that’s magnified because of the band’s preexisting levels of trust and comfort with one another, built upon decades of playing music together.
“We’ve done it for so long together that we’re all in tune with what the other person’s going to play and what they’re going to do,” Griffin said. “I can tell Michael [Jerome] knows when I’m going to end a song by something I do, and it’s really cool synchronicity we have with each other. It becomes muscle memory and ultimately something spiritual. Music is spiritual.”
Music spirituality has its roots for Griffin at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, a celebration of Gulf Coast art and culture that he and friends Michael Whelan and Brandt Woods would frequent in their youth. Following a move to Tennessee in 2010, Griffin discovered a farm that could finally house the vision he, Whelan and Woods had to bring the New Orleans Jazz ethos to Middle Tennessee, and the Pilgrimage Music and Cultural Festival was born, a multi-genre festival now returning to The Park at Harlinsdale Farm in April next year.
“It’s validating that authenticity still resonates even with all the noise we have today,” Griffin said. “That’s how we choose the bands at Pilgrimage. The main thing is authenticity. Whether you’re southern gospel, roots rock, alternative or super pop, you have to just fucking bring it.”
Another band that can rock a crowd is Say She She, the disco-funk trio of Piya Malik, Sabrina Cunningham and Nya Brown, with backing from members of Orgōne, who view marijuana as both a tool to decompress and a catalyst to unlocking one’s own creative channels.
“There’s a funky moment, we call it ‘the six-week mark,’ when you’ve been touring on the road for a while and everyone is kind of over each other,” Malik said to me during a recent interview. “Weed is the medicine that helps unite us.”
Say She She is currently between albums, spending time on collaborations with Asha Puthli, The Gabriels, and Tom McFarland from Jungle, where cannamedicine also helps the group unwind after a day in the studio.
“When it’s time to get serious and work on a song, we’ll typically save weed for after the grind is behind us, when we can really just relax,” Cunningham said. “We always say we’re going to ‘eat the frog’ and do the hardest thing first so we can have a bit more fun later.”
Following a recent back surgery, Malik has been more enamored with the array of cannabis lotions, creams and tinctures at her disposal, which she says help with the pain.
“Growing up with strict Indian parents, my mum would always find our smoking paraphernalia,” Malik said. “Now she asks us if we can get her weed gummies. It’s so amazing to see how the culture has changed.”
And while weed is now immersed in society more than ever before, the ladies do not sing well when they’re high, since they require their faculties, leaving it to the other members of their creative team to use cannabis as an aid during the creative process.
“The guys definitely smoke during sessions,” Malik said. “Our producer, Sergio Rios, uses weed to get into the sweet spot, and before a show has to smoke just the right amount so as to not get into some weird zone. During our sessions, weed helps him get out of his head and lose his inhibitions, because otherwise, he can be one of those sweethearts worrying about what people think and if they’ll like his ideas. We’re like, ‘Dude, you’re amazing, relax.’ Weed helps him experience his creativity uninhibited. Dan, our keys player, also feels weed opens up his creativity and his ability to think of melodies.”
But he’s not the only one.
Acclaimed French singer-songwriter Sébastien Tellier also uses cannabis to find creative freedom.
Hot on the heels of his latest album, Kiss the Beast, and current tour of the same name, Tellier said weed opens him to the vast sea of anything is possible.
“I have this song on Kiss The Beast, ‘Romantic,’ where I’m very happy to play beautiful French strings, but because I’ve been listening to a lot of Japanese jazz fusion, the end of the song has a Japanese jazz fusion vibe,” Tellier said to me during a recent interview. “Sometimes weed can have a real impact on what I do in the studio like that, but in general, it helps me open my ears and my mind to a range of music. So now, my musical world is not just my heroes from when I was a teenager; it’s everything.”
Because for Tellier, weed is a musical palette expander.
“When you smoke weed and you play music, you forget the rules,” Tellier said. “In a way, you just follow your body, like feeling into a beat that you like. Music becomes a flavor and you can taste when it’s good. When you smoke weed, you don’t need a chorus, you don’t need a bridge, you just need a good loop and that’s enough. Four chords, again and again. Weed can be a very good friend for a musician.”
As humans, we tend to overcomplicate life, and by using weed to break creative rules and expand one’s musical horizons, it can actually help abstract away life’s complexity.
“Usually in the studio you don’t have windows, so you don’t know if it’s day or night,” Tellier said. “In my studio, I feel very far from the world. You don’t hear the street. You’re totally in your bubble. It’s a little bubble and it’s great to escape to. I mostly compose alone; I write alone and before an album, I’ll do all the demos alone before the real recording. I spend so much time alone in my studio that it’s easy to become crazy. The studio is the best place for that because it’s super safe and there’s nobody to judge you. You’re totally free and it allows me to be the artist that I want to be.”
The guitar is Tellier’s toy and he’s able to use it to connect with others on a deeper level.
“Sometimes I’m at the house with a friend, but we don’t talk,” Tellier said. “We’ll drink or we’ll smoke but when I’m playing music, I have the sensation that I’m really talking to them because of how I express myself.”
Because sometimes the most nourishing moments of interpersonal connectivity come when no words need to be exchanged.
“The human relationship can be really complicated, but when you play music, it’s no longer complicated because the music talks for you,” Tellier said. “Everything’s more simple with music.”
Perhaps that’s why the relationship between music and cannabis is so intertwined. If weed opens the mind and music connects people, then music and cannabis might exist in a symbiotic feedback loop: cannabis drives enhanced creativity leading to deeper, more connective music, which in turn, leads to feelings of joy and a stronger sense of unity.
If we open ourselves to the possibility, cannabis can thus be a tool for all of us to enhance our creativity by opening our channel to the divine, widening the scope of our artistic output and allowing us to better connect with one another and the world.
