Obviously, it’s different for everyone. And actually there is a difference for each thing I do. But one way it happens is to just move. [ laughs ] I mean, obviously, you don’t just sort of randomly throw yourself around the room. You move with these ideas and sometimes I find that I’ve already got images in my head that I imagine my body in, or sometimes I have sequences in my head. I think a lot of time I’m listening to what comes next because sometimes the body will tell you that. Often I don’t document it too early in the process because sometimes if you forget stuff it’s worth knowing that the things that you forget maybe weren’t worth keeping. The things that have settled are the things that need to be kept because they seem most urgent. I don’t know. I mean, sometimes it’s about going to the studio and nothing happens for a long time and you just sit there and you’re not feeling it. That’s awful. It’s like when you’re writing and sometimes you go to the coffee shop and you’re like, “So, we’ll just see what happens.” And you end up on Facebook. I think the answer to this is… I really think the answer to this is I don’t know. [ laughs ]

One of the things I worked on with this album was focusing on the lyrics and the melody more so than everything else. A lot of my songs have started with the music and the texture, and then the lyrics and melodies are all framed inside of that. I wanted to do the opposite with this one and have melodies that could stand on their own without the instrumentation. I wanted it to sound just as natural if you were walking in the woods, whistling them as they do with accompaniment. A lot of these songs started with melodies that I would hum into my phone while I was walking somewhere. “Dancing in the Club” and “All Fucked Up” were both written that way.

Concepts can be really freeing in their limitations. I really enjoy when I make rules for myself in my creative practice. Whether that means I’m going to try and write a song without the use of the word “I,” I like having rules in my songs. Even if I don’t follow them exactly, it’s kind of nice to have a very loose guideline. And then when I try to create that universe for myself, I at least can visualize the path that I’m trying to follow.

First I like to do the guitar part, just because I feel like the guitar parts in most of my songs provide the foundation of the song. Then I’d go back and record the drums, and then figure out what other instruments were needed to fill out the song. It’s pretty exhausting being the only person in the studio, especially when it came to the arrangements. It made me miss being in a band with other people, because at least then you could be like, “What do you think? What should go here? Does this sound OK?” Whereas if you’re just by yourself, you’re like, “What do I think?” That was definitely hard because we had to do things quickly and it was easy to lose perspective and get lost in it.