I don’t know. Right now I’m just in the insecurity portion and nothing feels good enough. But I think one way that I can answer this is, if I go back to it and I have a little chuckle with myself, then I feel like it’s good. I still think it’s funny. There are some parts of this new book that I look back at and I feel mortified. There are some parts where I’m like, “Wow, this person really gets me. This me really gets me.” And it feels good. Because even though it’s me, I’m really connecting with it. And hopefully, someone else will feel that way.

Sometimes I know, sometimes I don’t. It depends artistically, or pragmatically, on the steps that I’m taking. “How am I creating this?” Sometimes I set parameters to cut myself off, and I find mixed results. For this album, specifically, I worked closely with Cooper Crain, who co-produced it. Most of the time, I wanted to go five steps further and he said, “No. This is it. It’s done.” I found myself trusting his judgment in that. In hindsight, I think it was important for this album. It would be totally different if I just kept digging and digging. A lot of times, I dig until it’s totally decimated. Really, I’ve just turned something into nothing again. For this album, I utilized Cooper as kind of a guide. It was much more collaborative in that way, where he was like, “This is done.” Or, “Let’s push this further.” He gave me that foresight.

I’m a classic Scorpio obsessive, so I know it’s done once I begin to lament. Once there’s lament, I exit the project. I don’t want to tinker. I want to preserve that aliveness. So when I’ve been sitting with it for a week or so, I’ve done all that I can do, I’ve made all those final micro decisions. Then it’s like I have to hold myself back. I definitely entered a very blue state when I finished Daughter.

Michael Chabon talks about staying with projects that you should abandon. He talks ignoring what he called “the hand of dread,” which would grip his throat every time he sat down to write. He worked on this project for five years and I took that to heart. I’m like, “Don’t ignore the hand of dread. If you know, the project is wrong, walk away or you’re not ready to write the project walk away.” And it doesn’t, at that point, matter whether the publisher thinks it needs to come out or not.