When I’m exhausted with it, you know, when my obsession with the thing becomes diluted and I want to do something else. [Or] having created a sufficient mess… where I can’t add anymore, I need to peel back. And then, of course I am lucky enough to have an editor, to turn a project loose and then we’ll go from there. It’s different for every project. No book that I have written has taught me how to write the next one. I feel like a baby every time I start a new book. Like I’ve never done this before, and I have to figure it out from scratch each time.

For me, nothing’s ever really done. I have to be cut off because I could record infinitely, so usually a record is done when it has to be, with some kind of created deadline. Or if somebody I’m working with says it’s done, that helps, because I’m just so unhinged that I need limitation. You can make a really great record with limitations. Limitations help incubate a specific thing. If you got to do whatever you want for as long as you want, you might not have that kind of magic.

A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer...it reaches a point when it feels like it is literally avoiding me. I have a very physical relationship with the manuscript, almost a corps à corps. Paradoxically, when I finally feel at ease with a manuscript, with its voices, I realize it is finished. I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written.

I keep messing with it until it gets to the mix table. Sometimes you can’t just change the whole song, but maybe I can change a verse in the very last moment or a chord or the introduction to the song, or the song’s order, some fade-ins or fadeouts. It’s a tough process letting go, saying, “This is it. It’s going to be this way. There were multiple choices, but we’ve chosen this one.” But it’s also a relief because it means you stop wondering. You stop thinking about it and you just let the songs find their own way and say goodbye to them and hello at some point because you’re going to start playing them live and it’s a way to actually get to know your song once you finished it. I usually know. It feels like a release to let go of a song.

There’s a first part of observing the thing, or having the idea, but then a huge amount of the next step’s work is: “What do I want to do about it? What form should it take? What am I going to do now do about it having observed it?” That is sometimes a part where it can take a long time to work out. Sometimes I get stuck. Sometimes I change my mind or have to think of very different strategies to figure out what the right one is.