Rosanne Cash has won 4 Grammy awards and been nominated for 16 of them. She’s been writing music for ~50 years and picked up the craft of songwriting from her father, Johnny Cash. Her thoughts on writing music: 1. “Don’t stop working, just stop worrying.” 2. There’s a mystery at the heart of songwriting, and you don’t want to kill it in service of clarity. 3. Your ability to channel insight from the creative muses into beautiful art is limited by your skills. As a friend once told her: “Refine your skills so you can support your instincts.” 4. Many years ago, Rosanne had a dream where she interacted with a man named Art who said, "We don't respect dilettantes." Rosanne was in the middle of making an album at the time but would sometimes get distracted, but that dream was a wake-up call from her subconscious to start taking her craft more seriously. 5. Don’t write abstractly about big themes like anger and boredom. Get more specific, and write about the concrete and physical details that show these emotions: the door slamming shut (anger), the clock ticking in an empty room (boredom). 6. Writers are people who have to put their thoughts onto paper, lest they keep them internalized and get destroyed by them. 7. What makes songwriting different from other kinds of writing is that you don't always want people to understand what you're saying. Sometimes, a little ambiguity makes the writing more powerful. You can watch the full interview with Rosanne below. Or if you'd rather watch on YouTube or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

Rosanne had a dream where she went to a party. There, she saw a woman who was in deep conversation with a man named Art. When she tried to join, the man turned to her and said: “We don’t respect dilettantes.” Then Art immediately looked away. She was humiliated and shaken by the time she woke up from the dream. It struck Rosanne that she'd been dabbling, which was holding back her work. It was in that moment that she deepened her commitment to songwriting and stopped being a dilettante.