What first got you into songwriting?
I've always been into it, I guess. It feels funny, because I'm in my childhood bedroom right now, and this is where I would write all my songs on Reason and [Apple] Logic. That's how I got into producing and engineering; just doing it with my own songs as a teenager. Then, I went to university, interned at studios, and did the more official sound courses. The old school route: Work at studios, engineer, and work your way up. At a certain point, as much as I love engineering and producing, I think the thing I'm best at is the creative side as opposed to the technical side. In sessions, what I was best at was making the artist feel comfortable being there with their creative ideas. I [would be] engineering, thinking, “This isn't the exact route I want to take.” I had just gotten my first album production credit and I loved that, so I kind of eased in. There was a while where engineering was my day job so that I could be a songwriter. I would take engineering sessions in order to afford having a writing room in London and kept doing my 10,000 hours of writing sessions and production sessions. Now, my engineering background and my songwriting background go perfectly hand in hand, and a lot of the time it's sort of the same process.
Describe the typical songwriting process for you.
It's always different. It depends on what the artist wants. An artist might come in with most of an idea and how they want it to be finished. Sometimes I'm not playing a single instrument; instead I'm helping out on lyrics. Sometimes I'm playing all the instruments, and the artist is doing topline and melody. I try to keep it as artist-led as possible, because at the end of the day it's not the Steph Marziano song, it's theirs. To be honest with you, I don't go in with ideas, because I find that clouds my head. I trust my ability that something will come out, and 99 percent of the time it does.
You're a pro. That’s what I'm hearing.
Yeah, sometimes I don't feel like it, but I think so.
Do you remember when you first realized that you loved songwriting?
I found that band spaces weren't super friendly towards women teenagers in the early 2000s, so I wasn't getting invited to jam with the boys. It was more inward songwriting, then learning to record, then getting that confidence to think, “This is such a cool release!” I can sit with a notebook, write lyrics, play chords, and do the production on my laptop. Whereas loads of guy musicians I know spent all those years jamming with other musicians. My love for it came inwardly as a teenager, and it was only as I got older that I realized I can share this enjoyment with people. Now, being an adult and doing this job, my focus is giving that enjoyment to the artist, whether it's inward or collaborative.
Like midwifing artists through the process.
I've never heard that analogy before, but that's good. Yeah, however they want to do it, I'm there to support them, because no one's going to write a great song if they're hating the experience, not feeling confident, and not feeling themselves. I’m trying to take that feeling I remember as a teenager – of discovering songwriting and feeling, “This is the most fulfilling thing ever” – and trying to give that to as many people as possible.
I've heard you described as being a “fun aunt” in the studio. It seems you fit the audio world definition of being a “good hang.” What do you think makes someone a good hang in the studio?
I love Amy Poehler's podcast Good Hang... I'm obsessed with it, and I've listened to a bunch of episodes where she talks about the world of improv being [applicable] to any industry, because you've got to adapt and “yes, and…” everything – whether you're an artist, whether you're a producer, whether you're anyone, in any job. If I come in saying, “No, this is how we're going to write the song. This is how we're going to produce it,” an artist may say, “Well, no. I had this completely different idea,” and that's not fun when two people are on opposite ends. The artist is under loads of pressure to write a song and have hits and all of those things. If, in the back of my head, I'm thinking, “Okay, I've got to recoup my publishing,” or, “This is how I've got to make a living” – I don't think I've ever written a good song when I'm thinking about that. I try to be in the moment with the artist and make all of us feel like the most confident and the most us version of ourselves.
That probably lends itself to building ongoing collaborations with musicians. Do you have anything that you can think of that you do intentionally to build those collaborations?
