“I’m not good at sitting down and telling myself, ‘OK, I’m going to write a song. Now what is it going to be about?’ I can’t really start like that,” Jack Johnson says of the creative process that ultimately resulted in his eighth studio album, Meet the Moonlight—his first full-length release in five years. “Instead, these little sparks have to come out of nowhere. Then, once I have enough of those sparks, it feels like the right time to sit down and finish them.”

Johnson credits his wife Kim, who is also one of his longtime managers, with assisting in the process. “We’ve been together since we were 18,” he notes, “and she’s always been a little bit like my editor in certain ways, where I’ll show her all the different things and she’ll tell me the version she likes best. She also is really good at helping me get organized because she’ll see that I have all these lyrics, voice memos and four-track recordings that I’ve collected here and there. She’ll say, ‘OK, let’s get everything into one place.’ It’s kind of like making a journal because I have to bring together all these thoughts that I’ve collected over time. That’s also when I realize which ones are related and which ones aren’t—maybe one’s a verse, one’s a chorus and, while I thought they were part of separate songs, they’re actually part of the same song.”