Having Sufjan Stevens produce the album was an inspired choice; he’s an artist with such a singular reputation. How did you connect with him?
I hadn’t known him personally, but knew his music for the past 20 years and have been listening all that time. When I was dreaming of what I wanted these songs to sound like as I was writing them, he was my first choice. I told my manager about it, though I didn’t think we’d be able to pull it off. But I said, “Let’s try!” We arranged a time for us to FaceTime to talk about it. He’s based in the Catskills and I’m based in Los Angeles, so I sent him the super rough demos from my phone that I recorded at home on my piano, and he listened to them and loved the songs and said, “Let’s do it.” So I recorded all the demos with my vocals on there, and he took his time with the songs from the Catskills and dreamt up all of the arrangements. What you hear on the album is all of his amazing ideas coming to life.
How do you usually capture your ideas? Do you use the Voice Memo app on your phone?
I use it all the time when I’m writing songs, all the time. All of these songs from this album started as a Voice Memos.
That’s so common now. I remember the story about Billy Joel on a train thinking of “New York State of Mind,” and he had to hum it to himself until he finally made it to a piano.
Yeah, when I was living in New York I’d be on the subway and would always come up with song ideas there. We didn’t have immediate ways to record them—I guess you could have carried around a tape recorder, but I didn’t.
Are creative ideas, like doing a concept album, coming to you naturally—like on a train—or are you consciously setting aside time to think?
I think in some ways it’s easier to make a concept album. You have a clearer idea of what the end product is and you have more of an assignment. I’ve been writing for Broadway recently, which is more of an assignment, too. You’re trying to serve the story and taking cues from the book writer and everything. But the inspiration came from just being a dad. We had posted an Instagram video of me singing a Fisher-Price Song from the toys my babies played with, and so many followers were like, “John, please make more lullabies. We need them!” I started to think about it and I didn’t want to just cover songs that were already out, I wanted to create something new, because I’m a songwriter and I like to write songs. So I took it on as a challenge to write new lullabies that could become classics. I sat at a piano and started making a list of topics and subjects I wanted to talk about, all things I talk to my kids about and messages to inspire them, comfort them, and encourage them to go to sleep. So those were the thought-starters for the songs, and I’d sit and write. This is the first album I did by myself, with no co-writers.