Having a creepy telepathic link to your songwriting partner makes the process so much easier.

Here's how it works. I write a whole bunch of lyrics whenever the urge strikes me. Bee does the same with the music. Sometimes I show him my stuff, but he doesn't try to work around it. He just writes. And I pick the appropriate lyrics for whatever he's written.

Tonight, at practice, we decided to work on something new since I'm kind of sniffly and that tends to fuck with my voice. So, I brought four or five printouts of random, incomplete stuff I've been working on. Bee starts with the riffage he's written, and two notes in I know exactly which of my five sets of lyrics belong to it. Two notes in, I shit you not. And they fit. The most I ever have to do is say "OK, repeat that part four times or something." Four times through the riff and I have a vocal melody. Five times in, I'm ready to sing. This is how it ALWAYS happens. Every time, we write independently, and it all meshes together.

"You guys creep me out. You're not human," says Mark. "Obviously you're aliens."

This is why writing music with anyone else would feel like betrayal. Like cheating on a spouse, or selling a baby on the black market. It's inconceivable to me to write songs with anyone else. Maybe that will change, but I don't see it working this easily with anyone else. And having had it this easy, I can only imagine how frustrating it might be to work with someone else. And I don't even want to go there.