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

I remember being present when a Jesuit priest in Rome asked Tennessee Williams, “How do you write a play?” and Tennessee said, “Well, I start with a sentence.” Well, I start with a sentence, and that’s how you write a book.

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?

From one particular piece of the sky an unclassifiable signal sometimes recurred and my brain started to say: “You’ve seen something like this before, haven’t you? You’ve seen something like this before from this bit of the sky , haven’t you?” I got out previous recordings from that bit of sky. It often wasn’t there, but when it was, it was keeping its place amongst the stars.

I did think about Woody Allen’s movies with Frances Ha because Woody Allen’s movies were also in black and white and very contemporary. Manhattan and Stardust Memories are not period pictures. Particularly in Manhattan you have the grandeur of the black and white and the Gershwin music sort of playing up against a more intimate storyline in which, when you break it down, is really just people sleeping with each other and trying to figure out their lives. But something about the filmmaking and the approach to it makes it feel almost epic. And, ultimately, the concerns of those people are epic. That movie is a masterpiece.