We never enter into new recording projects thinking, “Yeah we’re gonna write something great here!” A lot of the time it’s a feeling like, can we write anything else? Is there anything else to say? You know what I mean? There’ll always be things to say, but if we can’t dress it up right, then it’s game over. It feels like a pretty honest place to start from: What is there to say?

I can’t say there’s a specific place to begin when it comes to creating virtual identities, but it’s important to consider them in the longview. What stays here—in web pages, caches, and hard drives—might be the things that people retain of you in the future ahead. Where scholars might spend years studying the journals and letters of our predecessors, these personal accounts are infinitely more robust. Even if it is a private pursuit, an external drive full of personal exploration can be such a gift to those not here yet.

There’s a lot of different ways. Sometimes, I could write directly to a beat, so somebody could send me a beat, and the beat tells me what to say. If I’m recording a demo, I can lay down the framework and start mumbling out a melody. Sometimes, I could just be walking, stumbling drunk from a bar in Berlin, and then, a melody comes to me and I have to make a voice note. It could also be the poem format, where a concept will come to me, I’ll write it down in my notes, and then, I’ll apply the beat. It depends, but once it comes, I just have to record it, because I’ll forget. I was just going through my voice notes and deleting some of them because I have so many.

I don’t know. How do you start a project?