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.

I was about to answer cheesily, “It starts me,” but it actually does. I search. I put in a lot of time reading, taking notes, writing in that grasping way that feels mostly wrong. Usually it begins with an image and then the voice comes. Once I have the voice, the book presents. Annie Ernaux talked about it as channeling, and I don’t want to over romanticize it, because there’s a lot of bodily discipline that goes into the making. But I do think that, for me, that’s how a first draft feels. It’s like just keeping up with the voice in my head, being true to it, clinically so—like a pact. I love that first draft, because it’s pre-scrutiny, pre-analysis.

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 wrote it because it was so. Because it was the force of my experience that pushed the book out of me, like a baby is pushed out of its mother. The mother doesn’t say, “I’ll push this one out for my friends.” You push the book out because you’ve got to – as you push out the baby.

Also, having a great team around you is so important. People that you can talk to and who work hard as well, and who you trust and you can have fun with—that’s really important.

Probably something else I learned at art school, which is the ability to make something from very little using your own imagination. That’s the building block of my career.

Lack of confidence.

Don’t just do what other people think you should be doing.

Laziness.

Love is everything.