For me, nothing’s ever really done. I have to be cut off because I could record infinitely, so usually a record is done when it has to be, with some kind of created deadline. Or if somebody I’m working with says it’s done, that helps, because I’m just so unhinged that I need limitation. You can make a really great record with limitations. Limitations help incubate a specific thing. If you got to do whatever you want for as long as you want, you might not have that kind of magic.

Well, art is never finished, it’s only abandoned, right? That famous quote. A project is done when I feel that I can’t make significant improvements to the story, I’m only going to start taking sideways steps. If I revise it, it doesn’t get better, it just gets different.

It’s so weird. I feel like that’s so tough. You just know, you do. I feel like if I could explain that, I’d probably be better at writing songs or something. If I knew the trick to it, then I would just do it every time and just always land the dismount. I don’t think that every song I write is the song, but it’s part of the practice of staying in your expression and your expressiveness and just trying to find the nerve and hit the nerve well every time. You know when you hit the nerve, it’s like hitting a funny bone or on your knee when they’re doing the reflex thing at the doctor. It’s like you just know when you hit it and you know when you’re not hitting it.

Sometimes it’s about time. When the completion is dictated by some kind of deadline-based condition, then I feel like I know it’s done when there’s the right balance of things in the work. Sometimes that means having to remove a chapter or a figure or a whole set of ideas from the work because there wasn’t enough time and space for all of those things to be treated with equal sensitivity and care, or because keeping every element in the mix would obfuscate or dilute what was at the core of the work. To help me arrive at a state of “doneness” or resolution, I do have a few people that I trust and share my work with. You have to be able to take criticism, ideally from comrades and colleagues whose values are aligned with yours. It’s not just about what it looks like, but trying to understand how a project can help me evolve larger guiding principles.