Neil Finn On Songwriters' Struggle, Learning to Dance & Miley Cyrus' Brand of Feminism — billboard.com

Submit to the struggle, to existential crisis. And make sure to put in the hours. Those are some of Neil Finn’s tips for tackling the songwriting process. Finn shared sound advice and took his standing-room audience on a trip through his earliest musical years during a keynote conversation Wednesday to open the Bigsound conference in Brisbane. The great New Zealand songsmith admits he still has a lot of music inside of him. But it doesn’t always come easy, especially for older artists. “Bands have an arc. I’m in awe of some bands that can keep going and create great work.” Embrace the struggle, he said. “There’s an element of it every time you make a record. There’s a default setting. It’s a trade-off between knowing you’re cosmically insignificant and knowing this is the most important thing and the world needs to hear it. Some days you feel like you don’t have a musical bone in your body. When you get a good idea pop out of hours of struggle it feels so worth it. It feels worth chasing it to the ends of the earth.”

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