With a lot of fear and trepidation. It’s totally improvisational because I work with collage, and cut up found warehouse paintings. I’ll sometimes stick a fragment or two on, and just try to figure out where to go from there. I’ve begun to think that I make each piece so differently from the other, and I don’t think that’s the way the art world likes things at this point. I think they like increments of change. While you would know it’s my work, I think I just always liked the challenge of how I’m going to compose. I get myself into a lot of trouble and hot water, and I just have to work on it, and work on it. I think that’s why some of my paintings are so awkward and odd, because I’ve had to deal with mistakes that I’ve made, and tried to correct them in some way.

It’s different every time. The physical or mental acts of composing are always kind of the same. It really involves, for me, turning off the more critical faculties of the brain and reaching a state where things just flow. It takes many days to get into that because normally you’re in this critical mode, this analytical mode where you’re structuring things and putting things in order. To create the material, to create the building blocks, you have to go into another state, which is much more receptive and much more intuitive.

I start with the first sentence. A maddening answer, and, for my own sake, I wish I had a better one. But it’s the only way I know how: one sentence on top of the other, one foot in front of the other. In that way, writing does feel exploratory to me. I never start with a map in my head or even a destination. All I have is a sense that I’m heading in an interesting direction.

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.