How Stephen King helped The Beths’ Liz Stokes write again

Life is all about maintenance and “finding meaning in the maintenance,” says Elizabeth Stokes, lead vocalist and lyricist for The Beths.

It’s not a particularly exhilarating mantra, but it’s one that started resonating with Stokes when an autoimmune disorder began affecting her physical and mental health — and her ability to write songs.

“You can’t fix something like this,” she says. “You can only manage it.”

It’s the life lesson that undergirds the New Zealand band’s latest album, Straight Line Was A Lie. Just like its title suggests, the album’s creation was anything but linear.

It started with The Beths taking a more pragmatic approach to their creative work. They sought guidance from project management books, like How Big Things Get Done, and books on the craft of writing, like Robert Caro’s Working and Stephen King’s On Writing.

“You don’t know, [King] says, what you’re writing the first time around,” says The Beths guitarist Jonathan Pearce. “It’s when you review it the second time and look at it from a distance — that’s when you discover what you were really writing about.”

Stokes followed one of King’s cardinal rules on the subject: Write a lot. She wrote 10 pages every day on a typewriter, without any musical accompaniment.

“It makes you look at stuff you don’t want to look at normally,” she says. “It makes you pull out and examine things that maybe you don’t like to think about.”

By the time the band left for Los Angeles to write songs for their next album, a through line had started to form within the reams of Stokes’ reflections on the past few years of her life.

In this session, Stokes talks about how Graves’ disease upended her creative life and how learning to manage her health ultimately led to some of The Beths’ best work yet. Plus, the band performs songs from Straight Line Was A Lie live in the studio.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.