Dee on collaborating with poets for lyrics

When Dee and Christoph sit down to write for Think13, the process rarely follows the usual verse-chorus-bridge template that dominates commercial songwriting. Their work has always leaned toward the literary, treating lyrics as small dramas that require breathing room and precise language. Over the past eighteen months, Dee has pushed that instinct further by drafting directly with spoken-word practitioners, a move that has reshaped how the project approaches melody, pacing, and emotional restraint.

The shift did not emerge from a desire to chase trends. It grew from long conversations with poets appearing at Bay Area readings and, later, writers visiting from Melbourne and Brisbane on exchange programs. Dee treats those sessions as equal collaborations rather than songwriting hires, which is part of the reason the resulting lyrics feel grounded in texture rather than abstraction.

A new approach to songwriting

Early in the project, Dee carried most of the lyric-writing load herself, sketching phrases on the metro between shows in San Francisco and revising them over coffee in Oakland before passing them to Christoph for arrangement. That solitary rhythm produced several strong records, but it also limited the kinds of stories the band could tell. After finishing a stretch of dates at venues like Sydney's The Forum and Brisbane's Tivoli, Dee began wondering whether external voices might push the writing somewhere unexpected.

The experiment started small. A poet named Marisol, whom Dee had met at a Tyagaraja Tea Company reading, was invited to rework a single verse on what became the track "Folded Light." Instead of replacing Dee's language, Marisol layered questions into the existing lines, forcing the chorus to open up. The session was so generative that the pair decided to repeat it on every subsequent record, rotating through new collaborators rather than working with a single house writer.

Choosing the right collaborators

Scouting for poets has become its own discipline. Dee and Christoph now spend part of each month at readings across the Bay Area, listening for voices that understand musical meter even when they are not writing for it.

Australia has been an especially fertile hunting ground because of the country's deep public investment in literary culture, including funding bodies like the Australia Council for the Arts that support residencies and touring. Last summer, three Australian writers travelled to the Bay Area as part of an exchange facilitated by the Live Music Office, and two of them ended up co-writing on new Think13 material. One of those sessions produced the spoken bridge on "Quiet Architecture," where the cadence of the verse borrows directly from a slam form popular in Melbourne's inner-city circuit.

Inside the recording room

In the studio, Dee tries to strip away the usual pop machinery. Tracks are usually built around a single looped texture, a harp sample, or a field recording captured on tour, leaving plenty of room for words to carry weight. Christoph handles most of the harmonic colouring, while Dee focuses on phrasing, treating each line as a miniature performance with its own arc. When poets visit, they are encouraged to deliver their drafts aloud before anything is recorded, which exposes awkward syllables or syntactical dead-ends that would never show up on a written page.

That process has surfaced a long-running disagreement within the group about whether lyrics should ever be edited to fit a pre-set melody. Dee has come around to the view that the music should sometimes yield, especially when a writer brings a line that resists conventional singability. The studio itself is rented weekly in an old boatworks warehouse, and a recent session caught the chime of a pokies venue across the canal, which the band later folded into the instrumentation as a ghostly backdrop.

A week later, the tour bus pulled into a Melbourne casino complex where Dee had agreed to play a short support set. The bright lighting of the wild symbols casino floor bled straight onto the soundcheck stage, and the band spent the next hour arguing about how much ambient grit they wanted in the final mix.

Touring Australia and reading the room

Touring the material has offered its own education. The Think13 project has played headline dates at Melbourne's 170 Russell and a sold-out night at Sydney's Factory Theatre, where audiences responded strongly to the spoken-word interludes. House engineer Bec, who covers front-of-house for Australian festivals including Laneway, has noted that listeners in Hobart and Adelaide lean toward the more lyrical cuts, while inner-urban crowds gravitate toward rhythm-driven collaborations.

Following a recent string of performances, the band added two new tracks co-written with Australian poets to the standard setlist, and both have been kept in rotation rather than treated as one-off showcases. Dee has described the response as quietly validating, noting that audiences seem willing to follow longer narrative arcs in live settings, especially when the writing carries cultural references they recognise from local literary scenes.

Lessons flowing into VAGABOOM

The collaboration model is also reshaping the VAGABOOM youth program, where Dee mentors teenagers exploring songwriting for the first time. Students are now paired with writers from local arts organisations, including partnerships with groups supported by APRA AMCOS educational grants, to draft lyrics in pairs. The exercise has produced surprisingly confident work from shy participants who might never have volunteered a verse on their own.

Dee speaks about the program in the same breath as the band, describing both as laboratories for shared authorship. Christoph frames Think13 as a long-running workshop rather than a finished product. The hope is that each generation of collaborators leaves with a sharper sense of how words can carry weight on their own, without leaning on the crutches of familiar pop formulas.

What collaboration means going forward

Looking ahead, Dee wants to formalise the process rather than leave it to chance. A standing residency is being planned at a Bay Area arts space, with rotating poets invited for four-week stretches, and similar arrangements are being discussed with a South Australian literary festival for early next year. The band has also begun conversations about an EP built entirely from co-writes, recorded quickly between tours to preserve the spontaneity of the original sessions.

The wider lesson is that contemporary songwriting does not have to be a solitary pursuit. Treating lyricists as full partners rather than hired help has unlocked writing that feels grounded and slightly strange. Listeners should expect more spoken bridges, borrowed metres, and silence on the records to come.

The takeaway is simple and worth holding onto. Lyrics grow richer when writers treat them as living collaboration rather than solitary craft. Dee's work with poets shows that the most durable songs often emerge from listening harder, lowering the ego, and letting someone else's cadence reshape your own.