For Tomberlin, songwriting is emotional and heavy work. It’s not always pleasant. There’s a lot of emotional prodding and digging.The word “processing” came up a lot in my interview with Sarah Beth Tomberlin (aka Tomberlin) when she discussed how she writes songs. She uses songwriting as a way to process the events in her life, much more so than most songwriters have shared with me. But it’s difficult to write songs when things are “pleasant” in her life. “There’s no urgency to the process in that case,” she says. It’s the difficult events that she writes about, and these events require distance before she’s able to process them.