It’s different for every project for me. Books are a combination of character, plot, and setting. And every book I write, I could point out and say, oh, there was the first idea . Usually they’re growing separately , a couple ideas for the plot, a couple seeds for characters. An idea for a magic system or a governmental structure. Those will be growing independently in my notes file. I know I have a book when these different elements start to meld together in my brain, and change each other in interesting ways. I’ll start to say, all right, these two ideas belong together. Here’s this character who belongs in this plot. Is there a setting that I’ve been developing that also enhances this?

My videos are architecture for sets of ideas. The structure of the video houses those ideas.

When I was this young assistant at the University of Groningen my responsibility was for four beds, or rather the patients in four beds. That was all I had to do. And, one of these patients was a young man, 22 years old, who slowly and miserably died from renal failure. He became blind, he vomited, and it was a miserable death. And I, as a very, very young physician, had to tell his mother, in a black dress and a little white cap like the farmers have, that her only son was going to die. I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. So, I began to think, “If I could just every day remove as much urea as this boy creates, which is about 20 grams, then the boy could live.” Well, he died, but I began to work on that.

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.