Dan Wilson of Semisonic, courtesy.

In the late ’90s, Dan Wilson was the frontman for Semisonic. The band went on hiatus in 2001 and, by the mid-’00s, Wilson had primarily become a songwriter for other artists. Since then, his songs have been performed by everyone from Weezer to John Legend, Keith Urban and Taylor Swift. He wrote The Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice” and Adele’s “Someone Like You,” both of which won Grammys.

It’s easy to assume this was the backup plan after Semisonic, but songwriting was his aspiration from the start.

“When I was 11 or 12, I figured out from album credits on my parents LPs that the people who wrote the songs weren’t always the people who sang the songs,” he says. “There was a song called ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ that was on a Carole King album, and that song was a hit on the radio for a man, James Taylor. Once I realized that, I started imagining that I would be a songwriter and that I would write songs for other people. That seemed like the path in life for me.”

During his time with Semisonic, he approached his publisher about partnering with songwriters to learn the ropes. Not only did the publisher oblige but it threw him into the deep end: His second collaboration was with Carole King herself, who helped inspire his passion for the craft. Their song “One True Love” appeared on Semisonic’s third album, All About Chemistry.

But his songwriting success didn’t mean Semisonic was over. After all, the band had just released an EP, You’re Not Alone, in 2020. The problem wasn’t that the band had separated but rather that Wilson wasn’t in a place where he could write Semisonic songs. That problem was solved, albeit inadvertently, by Liam Gallagher of Oasis.

“I had a great meeting with Liam Gallagher about maybe collaborating,” he says. “I played him a bunch of ideas. He was really fun to talk to and inspiring. After he left, I made very quick demos of several ideas and less than a week later I sent five ideas and they quickly got back to me and said, we’re sorry, the album’s done, we forgot,” he says with a laugh.

“Then when I listened to those songs again, those probably aren’t even Liam Gallagher songs, they sound a lot like Semisonic songs. Maybe I just wrote some new ideas for my band,” he adds.

None of those songs actually made it onto the Semisonic EP. But the ones he wrote afterward did.

“But they broke the ice and helped remember how to sound like that,” he says.

He also hadn’t stopped recording in the interim. He’s released four solo albums, most recently 2017’s Re-Covered (of his renditions of songs he wrote for others). Since then he’s switched to releasing singles rather than saving them for collected bodies of work, most recently “Under the Circumstances.”

Part of the rationale behind the switch is, from Wilson’s perspective, realism about how listeners consume music.

“What if you listen to [my album] on your way to work?” he says. “What if you always run out of time to listen after 25 minutes? You may never listen to the seventh song of the record. You might really like it but you just never get there.”

That said, there’s also a personal component. Releasing an entire album requires more work than simply writing and recording the music, which can be a lot.

“I had done the album thing so many times in my life, and the last couple solo records were so all-consuming and life-dominating,” he says. “The last two I made small books with lyrics and drawings. They dominated four or six months, and my manager Jim and I just thought, let’s have a different experience this time and put songs out as I think of them. When it comes time—if it comes time—to make a new body of work, we’ll do that, too. But it’s been nice to have a break from that all-consuming approach.”

Despite the solo work and the new Semisonic material, Dan Wilson is still a songwriter at heart. It’s a craft he’s trying to teach and spread through his Words + Music in 6 Seconds series, a social media project where he gives brief clips of songwriting advice and inspiration.

The most recent extension of the project are the Words + Music in 6 Seconds cards, a deck of 74 cards where each offers advice or encouragement.

“For the last five years I’ve been posting pithy quotes on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, hopefully really helpful things to say to artists about the process, living a creative life, revision, keeping your hopes up, what to focus on, inspiration,” he explains. “A friend of mine told me, ‘Do you want to make a small book out of these quotes? I think songwriters would love that.’ I mentioned the idea to my wife who said, ‘Or, you could make a deck of cards, like a tarot deck.’ And I loved that idea.”

Follow editor Daniel J. Willis at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.