Crash Test Dummies’ Brad Roberts – HuffPost 5.12.10

[Note: This is taken from my interview with Brad Roberts and contains information that might be useful for a new artist.]

Mike Ragogna: What’s the Brad Roberts of “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” versus the Brad Roberts of now?

Brad Roberts: I’m on medication! [laughs] I’m a far more mellow person. I grew up with…I’m diagnosed with a depressive disorder, and it has a lot to do with why I do what I do. And I’m happier older, I enjoy things much simpler. Back then, it was about whether or not I’d written that day, and if I didn’t, my self worth was zero. But now I sit down and I write lyrics and they just pour out of me, partly in forms that are stanzas or writing couplets or various other parameters for writing. Once you’ve worked the form often enough, like the AB/AB/CC/DD rhyme scheme, for example–when you’ve done that long enough, that’s just sort of a second nature thing. The words that are pouring through you come out in that form without it being consciously the case. You’re actually…I don’t want to say channeling because that’s so mystical sounding…but there’s definitely kind of unconscious flooding that spills out into the writing. It’s not just unconscious because it gets filtered by knowledge of poetic structure in stanzas and so forth.