That’s a really good question. I don’t think you ever know; you just have to make a call. Finishing is acknowledging that there’s no further progress to be made at the current juncture. If you sit on a song for 20 years and come back to it with all the wisdom of your life, you could probably write a better song, but objectively, you have to get it out into the world in order to continue to live as an artist. So, there’s a sense of: “well, this is as good as it’s gonna get for me at my level right now.” Sometimes you realize that early, but it can take a long time. I think deadlines were invented by God to make art possible. I don’t think I could finish anything without a deadline, self-imposed or external. With the book, it was just: these people at Penguin, they don’t know me. They have no idea that I can’t do this. I have to do it because otherwise they’ll know that I can’t do it.

I guess it’s by some degree of my own satisfaction. It’s not numeric. For instance, I’m very proud of async , but in the 90s, I was making fake R&B, fake House music, and fake Hip-Hop music. I don’t like that. I’m not happy about it. I wish I could erase that time. Making film music is different. It’s for other people, not yourself. It is still my own music, but it’s for other people. My solo work is entirely for myself, so it’s judged by my own satisfaction and whether I have proceeded enough, if I have pushed myself to another level. That’s how I judge it.

I mean, nothing’s ever done. I don’t think anyone knows when something is really done. There’s just doing it and not doing it. You do it until you don’t want to do it anymore. Then hopefully, someone else will take it over and keep on doing it. Songs are not really from any individual. There are all these lawsuits about plagiarism, Led Zeppelin has been going through that lately. It bums me out. The idea of intellectual property is kind of a trap. It’s just a way to get by, which I guess is fair because most of us are broke.

Songwriting-wise, it’s very easy to tell. Sometimes I’ll write a full song with a chord progression that I like, but it won’t feel like the final thing I have to say about a topic. Like, these aren’t the right words. I haven’t gotten to the [core] of what I want to say—I know it’s there, but I haven’t reached it. I’ll usually take that chord progression and write something else with it. And I’ll just keep writing songs until I get to the bottom, just digging layer after layer after layer, and eventually I’ll get to the truest form of that song, and the truth behind what I was trying to say. When I’ll get there, I don’t know, but I’ll always know when I haven’t.