Something is never done. If time and money and deadlines were no object, people would tweak until the cows came home. Ultimately, I would like to think something is done when I master it and I send it off and I’m so stoked about it. I feel like, “Wow, I really brought this one home.” And then I get the same feedback from the artist, that it is just beyond their imagination. Where it comes back to them, and they get excited about the mixes again. Or if there was something they were worried about, and it gets addressed and sounds better than they would’ve thought.

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.

The quote of “unfinished, but complete” was first introduced to my lexicon when I was studying the drawings of Michelangelo. I read about his work, and one of the art historians of the time said his drawings were purposefully left unfinished, but there was a sense of completeness to them. That was the philosophy I used as my religion, which was to create something that appeared unfinished but had a spiritual completeness to it.

It’s always hard to decide when something’s done. To go back to the painting metaphor, maybe deciding something’s done is just letting the canvas dry and stepping away. There is this simple resignation that takes place. The benefit of working with collaborators is you get the take and that’s what you have. So that’s also something that helps push projects to completion. And also, scary deadlines. Scary deadlines are always a great way to finish projects, which is why composing can sometimes be a great antidote to whatever baked-in perfectionism I might have. With artist records, you can take years and you can say this isn’t good enough, but then you have a deadline for a project and they’re like, “We need the stems by Tuesday at midnight,” and you have to do it. Accepting something is good enough is a skill in and of itself.