Dispatch Says Authenticity Is Key to Songwriting Success

Boston-based indie/roots band Dispatch have remained resolutely independent since their debut release, Silent Steeples, came out in 1996. They’ve never signed a conventional record deal, but have amassed a large and passionate following (one Boston concert drew 110,000 fans). For their upcoming eighth album (title TBD), they remain ambitious, releasing it in a series of phases, three songs in each. Phase 1, out on October 23, included the songs “May We All,” “One By One,” and “All This Time.” The final phase is set for release in 2021.

Co-frontmen Chadwick Stokes and Brad Corrigan have writing advice for artists who also wish to be successful while still following an unconventional path. “I would say, especially during these times, be bold with it and don’t hold back,” says Stokes. “Don’t think about the reverberations down the road. Think about what is in your heart. Just try to get it out there.”

To that end, Stokes says, “I personally, with lyrics, will write and write and write – and then it gets distilled. I’ll have six pages filled with lyrics that end up being just half a page [in the final song].”

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But as Corrigan adds, “There is some poetry to it, there’s some balance and rhythm to it.” Working that out, he says, involves “finding the most powerful word that doesn’t give away too much. There are some literal songs that call for a literal lyric, but I think they’re pretty rare.” Being more broad, he says, allows “your audience to bring their meaning to the song – that’s part of the joy of songwriting.”

For his part, Corrigan says he has a different way of approaching lyric writing than Stokes’ stream-of-consciousness method. “When I write, I often have more music and I’m struggling to get the lyrics across,” he says. To get unstuck, “I’ll look at a journal entry and try to find things to pull out of life that become lyrical.” Corrigan says he’s kept journals for more than 20 years. “Every now and then, I’ll go back to a memory in my journal and then pull things from that particular time.”

Whatever way a songwriter tackles lyrics, Stokes cautions that there should be an awareness of one’s own viewpoint that may be influencing the words. “I feel like Brad and I should also say that, being white males, we are also on that evolution of understanding our own privilege and how we write from a certain perspective,” he says. “We’ve had lucky lives in that way. We’ve had a very different experience than so many others.

“And so sometimes with the songwriting I’ve been, ‘Who wants to hear from a white male right now?’” Stokes continues. “It’s shut me down in some cases. It’s an interesting thing, grappling with our own identities and our own historical part in the divides of this country.”

The antidote for this potential pitfall, Corrigan says, is to just remain as true to oneself as possible. “I think the most important thing in songwriting is that you’re authentic and you’re writing from your heart,” he says. “I think we’ve all probably tried sometimes to write something that would resonate with fans, where when you’re done, you feel like that was a bit of an empty process compared to writing where you really were at the time.”