‘Soulmates to Strangers’: The powerful Joan Jett song that came from meeting Laura Jane Grace
Collaboration in the arts can be difficult. While there are plenty of success stories, not every songwriting duo winds up forming The Beatles. There are some duos who bring out the worst in each other rather than the best.
But first, let’s focus on what makes a good songwriting companionship. It really doesn’t matter if artists are pally each other in the studio, because actually it’s those tense conflicts that often bring out the peaks of their creativity. While I know John Lennon and Paul McCartney eventually pushed their relationship to breaking point, even their early work the odd contained creative difference because they were shaped differently by their personal experiences.
The change-up in artistic approaches helped them become one of the greatest songwriting duos in history, and that wasn’t a coincidence at all. It helped when it came to overcoming writer’s block and giving a song added finesse that separates them from the majority of other songwriters.
The reason why The Beatles eventually split up was because of the fact that their differences became too intense. It meant that they were unable to continue writing together because these varying opinions made it impossible for the two to work well together anymore. As such, The Beatles split up, and the two continued their writing careers separately. It was a crying shame to see their partnership come to an end, but this is just one of the many crushing pitfalls that come with creativity.
While some of these creative partnerships are well thought out and planned, some happen spontaneously because two artists are fond of one another. This is what happened with Joan Jett and Laura Jane Grace when they came together to write the song ‘Soulmates to Strangers’. The two had always admired one another from afar, which meant that when Jett was looking for potential collaborators on her 2013 record Unvarnished, it made sense to reach out to Grace.
“I met them when we were doing Warped tour in 2006,” Jett recalled, “My band, the Blackhearts, and I love Against Me! And we have done gigs with them through the years. I always wanted to write with Laura Jane. About a year ago, we did a concert, and we said something about writing together, and before you know it, she had come up with an idea and sent it to me over the internet. We started exchanging ideas and came up with this song.”
The track plays into both artists’ styles perfectly well, as it has a feel which seems to do both of those who worked on it justice. Every second feels planned out, and it doesn’t sound as though either party compromised when putting the song together. This is what ideal collaboration sounds like: two artists with different styles, unifying to make something exceptional.
It wasn’t a hard decision for Laura Jane Grace to choose to write with Jett. As well as being a fan of her work, Jett reached out to support Grace during a time when she was feeling particularly vulnerable. “When I came out publicly as trans, Joan got in touch,” Grace recalled. Maybe the two were always destined to write together, given they were friends as well as artists.
