I’m a really big Mutemath fan. If you haven’t listened to their latest album, please do yourself a favor and get on that! In the Rolling Stone interview Mutemath’s Paul Meany on Near-Breakup, New LP ‘Play Dead’ they talk about their creative process on the album:

Mutemath assembled the track list in an unconventional way. Instead of arguing endlessly over what songs to pull from their massive pile of 30 demos, the musicians each hand-picked three and assembled the basic framework themselves before bringing the other back into the process.

”We just trusted each of us to go into our corners and materialize a vision for that particular song and bring it back to the band to finish the puzzle together,” Meany says. “And it was exciting to watch everyone in the band firing on all cylinders. The mantra was just ‘indulge,’ and we trusted each other to do that. And we wouldn’t have been able to do that a few albums ago. If you just get into ‘indulge’ mode, that’s usually the recipe for garbage. Every person in the band should always feel that – someone’s gotta to create some parameters at some point. But I think we’ve worked together long enough now and have developed the trust within that creative space to just say ‘go.’ This was the culmination of all that.”

I tend to think that’s a great way to collaborate on design as well. Go away and do your thing with no constraints, come up for air and get feedback and make changes, rinse and repeat.