AJR Reveal Their Songwriting Secrets

• AJR is a band of three brothers (Jack, Ryan, and Adam Met) with over five billion Spotify streams and 8.5 million monthly listeners, whose music and career have been shaped by the internet, TikTok, and social media. In this episode, Jack and Ryan break down their creative process, the role of embarrassment and truth in songwriting, how they design live shows like Broadway productions, and how they think about AI, fan connection, and the modern music industry. The central theme is how to communicate emotional truth in a way that resonates with millions of people.

How AJR writes songs

• Write from personal reaction, not audience expectation. They follow a comedy principle: if a joke makes them laugh, it will likely land with an audience. Similarly, if a song makes them cry or dance while writing it, that’s their signal it will connect.

  • Example: While writing “A Dog Song” from their dog’s perspective, they found the emotional entry point in the dog’s naive belief that he’s protecting his owners, when in reality they’re protecting him. The image of a dog bringing a stick to a crying human—not understanding why, but wanting to help—made them emotional and became the core of the song.

• Start with character, not concept. Ryan typically begins by building a raw, emotionally honest draft (the “wet clay”), often from a specific character’s point of view. Jack then acts as the editor, shaping it into something that works as a modern song rather than a Broadway number.

  • Example: “World’s Smallest Violin” started as an extremely Broadway-sounding demo with lyrics like “that’s the way it always is and that’s the way it always been.” Jack flagged it as lecturing the audience. They replaced it with the simpler, more direct “oh my god that’s so insane / oh my god that’s such a shame,” which became their biggest hit.

• Embarrassment is the engine of good writing. Their key creative question: “What’s the most embarrassing thing I could say to a random person on the street?” That’s the next song concept they should write.

  • Early in their career they wrote party songs that didn’t connect. When they started writing vulnerable, personal material—like “I’m Ready” (about giving into temptation) or “Joe” (about idolizing a high school classmate and wondering if he’d think they were cool now)—audiences started showing up.
  • The reward of finding an audience through truth is “euphoric” and “addictive,” pushing them to go deeper each time.

• Specificity over generality. They avoid broad, abstract concepts (like “love”) in favor of tiny, concrete vignettes that people recognize from their own lives.

  • Example: “Inertia” is a fan favorite that never explains the concept directly—it just lists specific examples: a friend who keeps saying he’ll quit his bank job but never does, a couple that keeps threatening to break up but stays together for 20 years.
  • They reference a writing principle: don’t write about the brutality of war; write about a child’s burnt sock on the ground.

• The “work mode” state. Ryan describes entering a semi-conscious, months-long emotional state when making an album—less social, hyper-attuned to his own feelings, constantly mining his life, memories, and therapy sessions for material. He describes feeling “naked” and volatile, needing to pivot between emotional states (crying one moment, feeling badass the next) to serve different songs.

• When a song becomes “three-dimensional.” There’s a moment in writing when a song stops feeling like a copy of their previous work and starts teaching them something. The characters develop their own life and start telling the writers what happens next—similar to how novelists describe their characters surprising them.

  • Example: “The Big Goodbye” was rewritten multiple times (as a party song, then a social commentary) before becoming an emotional-plus-badass track. The shift happened when they stopped trying to write “an AJR song” and let the song’s own logic take over.

Musical theater as a foundation

• Musical theater was their first love. Before forming a band, they were putting on Broadway shows in their living room. This influence runs through everything they do.

  • Their album openers often sound like overtures. Their live shows are designed as narrative experiences with Easter eggs, reveals, and emotional arcs—more like a Broadway production than a traditional concert.
  • They love musical theater because it has no limitations on being uncool, and it delivers “pure emotion uncloaked” by concerns about what’s trendy.

• Jack’s role is to pull Ryan’s Broadway instincts into modern music. Ryan’s demos often sound like literal Broadway songs. Jack’s job is to add modern production elements (trap snares, 808s, etc.) and cut anything that feels like it needs set pieces or other characters to be understood.

How they think about live shows

• The tour is the end goal piece of art; the album is the soundtrack. Every song is conceived with the live show in mind. They think about staging, choreography, and visual effects from the earliest writing stages.

  • They design shows with magic illusions, shadow puppets, narrative arcs, and Easter eggs that pay off across the show. Last tour featured a 50-foot animatronic version of Jack tied to an emotional story about their late father.
  • They work without a choreographer—just the two of them brainstorming “what if” scenarios, tapping into childhood loves of magic, puppets, and lightsabers at grand scale.

• Audiences love being wrong. They design moments where the audience thinks they know what’s going to happen, then subvert it. People enjoy the surprise of being tricked more than being right.

• The “making of” is its own art form. They create behind-the-scenes content that shows how songs are made—but as a crafted narrative experience, not just a raw ProTools session. They want audiences to notice details they worked hard on, without removing all mystery.

The role of truth and authenticity

• Truth is subjective and evolves. Their truth in their early 20s (writing “I’m Ready”) is different from their truth in their 30s (writing about their father’s death). They aim to write something they could “defend in front of a jury”—songs where they can say, “This is actually how I was feeling.”

• They can’t defend every song. They have songs they don’t regret but can’t fully defend, like “Thirsty” (a silly 2013-sounding song with yodeling and the hook “thirsty, thirsty Thursday”). Fans have made TikTok trends calling it the worst song ever made. They’re fine with this because they can’t honestly say “this is how I was feeling on Thursday.” In contrast, they could defend “A Dog Song” against any criticism because it’s genuinely how they felt.

• Dealing with haters. Early in their career, criticism hurt. They realized the things people hate about them are the things they love about themselves. They’ve watched unique artists apologize for their first album on their second, then decline in popularity—and they’ve consciously chosen to remain unapologetically themselves.

AI and music

• AI can’t replicate a specific point of view. Ryan argues that AI will always produce a “nebulous middle” of existing artists—a conglomerate without a unique perspective. He believes AI can’t capture why Randy Newman’s voice in “I Will Go Sailing No More” feels believable in a way that another singer performing the same line wouldn’t.

  • When searching for album cover art, they rejected images that looked “too AI”—too perfect, without feeling. They chose an artist who captured how a family reunion feels (mixed emotions) rather than how it looks.

• AI as a tool vs. AI as replacement. They’ve used Kits AI (a voice-cloning tool) in their writing process—Ryan sang a demo, converted it to Jack’s voice, so Jack could hear how it would sound before recording. This saved time without replacing creativity. They draw the line at fans releasing fake Drake songs, which they see as a mess.

• Off-notes as proof of authenticity. Imperfections in music (voice cracks, off-notes) serve as evidence of human emotion. They worry about a dystopia where people add artificial “typos” to AI-generated work to fake authenticity.

• AI can’t predict cultural shifts. They’re confident AI couldn’t have written “Take Me to Church” or predicted the next wave of music, because AI only knows what was popular, not what humans are about to feel.

How culture shapes music

• Context determines what music resonates. They study why certain songs hit at certain times. “Take Me to Church” emerged when SoundCloud rap was dominant—the cultural tide was ready for something different.

  • The recent boom in folk and country music reflects a cultural moment where people are exhausted by smartphones and constant stimulation. They want stripped-down, nostalgic music they can hear through phone speakers while watching influencer content.
  • EDM’s peak (2011–2015) coincided with the iPhone feeling like “a portal to the cosmos.” Now the iPhone feels like an enemy, and people want to “tune out and retreat to the golden age of nostalgia.”

• Bellwethers exist in every field. Certain people (like Kanye West in music, or specific designers and technologists) are consistently a few years ahead of culture. Kanye’s albums were two or three years ahead of where hip-hop was heading—other artists caught up six months later.

Songwriting craft and improvement

• Write a thousand bad songs. Their advice to aspiring writers: write constantly, keep a notebook, and accept that your first 500 songs will be copies of your influences. This is how you build skills and tools you can later deploy in original ways.

  • Example: Jack made a fully Frankie Valley-style song 15 years ago. Now he knows how to implement “a hint of Frankie Valley” into original work—distorted vocals, high falsetto—because he already built that tool through imitation.

• Don’t compete with your last album. They avoid thinking “how do we beat the last overture?” because that kills creativity. Instead, they take left turns—if the last album had an overture, this one won’t. This keeps the work fresh and incomparable.

• The benefit of not being classically trained. Not knowing music theory meant they didn’t know what chords were “correct,” so they took risks—combining yodeling with classical piano and beatboxing, switching time signatures, bending genres. The downside: they sometimes rely on the same chord progressions and have to do “crash courses in music theory” for Broadway-influenced material.

How they listen to music

• Ryan doesn’t listen to much music. He mostly listens to podcasts and old barbershop quartet/Broadway material. He’s more of a sponge for life experiences than a music consumer.

• Jack listens obsessively and scientifically. He goes deep into Spotify radio, finds unknown songs with no streams, and analyzes them—first for feeling, then for production details (snares, hooks). He’s developed the ability to toggle between listening as a fan and listening as a producer.

• The curse of knowledge. Both have lost the ability to simply let music wash over them. Jack gets caught on production details; Ryan (in his own field of writing) can’t turn off awareness of sentence structure and word choice. They see this as the tradeoff of getting good at something—you lose the childlike approach.

Hip-hop and other influences

• Hip-hop inspired their honesty. Early in their career, they were jealous of rappers who could tell deeply personal stories (like Macklemore writing about shoe culture and murder) without being constrained by pop song structure. They wrote a song called “3:30” about this frustration—rappers can say whatever they want, while pop artists have to fit everything into a 3:30 verse-chorus structure.

  • “Netflix Trip” was their breakthrough in matching hip-hop’s personal depth—writing about how a TV show shaped the way they crossed their legs or hugged their mom.

• Faraway influences. Dan Reiner (a 70s-something artist who builds his own guitars and writes from a dog’s perspective), The Mills Brothers (1950s barbershop quartet), Beach Boys, Imagine Dragons, and Broadway shows like Les Misérables (the “One Day More” moment before intermission is their ideal of pure, unadulterated emotion).

Distribution, marketing, and economics

• The industry has fundamentally changed. Pre-2020, they pushed singles to radio and the path was clear. Now, they make music they want and hope something goes viral on TikTok. They’re competing not with other musicians but with Bill Maher, Trump, and every other piece of content on the internet.

• Songs can blow up years later. “World’s Smallest Violin” was a deep cut that wasn’t supposed to be a single—it took two years to go viral on TikTok through an anime art trend. “Bang!” was released in 2018 and got big in 2023. This is increasingly normal (Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” Fleetwood Mac, ABBA).

• The long game with touring. They lost money on their first many tours, investing in elaborate stage effects with the hope that fans would tell friends and the next tour would be bigger. This 15-year strategy has paid off—they now play arenas and amphitheaters.

• Streaming doesn’t pay the bills. Unless you’re Ed Sheeran-level, streaming revenue is minimal. Real money comes from touring, merch, and commercial licensing (they’ve been in Microsoft and Apple commercials—music supervisors associate AJR’s sound with selling tech).

• The cynical reality: A song is an advertisement for the tour, which is an advertisement for merch. TikTok is a commercial for the song. They try not to let this affect their creative process, but it’s the reality of the industry.

Album themes

• Themes emerge during the process. For their album Maybe Man, they started writing songs that pointed in different directions. The titular track crystallized the theme: not knowing who you are as a person—different versions of yourself with friends, partners, family.
  • During the album’s creation, their father got sick and passed away. The final song, “2085,” became about what will matter at the end of life. The album’s arc shifted to reflect what they learned: it’s the small moments with people that matter, not career achievements. Nobody at their father’s bedside talked about his architecture work—they talked about kindness and small conversations.