Have you ever discovered anything in your music after listening to it over time that you didn’t realize was there? I think this is something that everyone, songwriter or not, can relate to. You go back to a piece of work you thought was about a certain thing, and then much later you realize it’s about something completely different. Part of creativity is the mystery and writing that mystery, but it’s always a little out of focus. As time goes by, new things are revealed, but never the whole picture, which I think is a beautiful thing.

If you toil primarily with the lyrics, how do you think of the music? Is it an accent for them, a cadence or something separate? I just think of it as the appropriate clothing for the lyrics, the right room for the lyrics to sit in. I don’t normally have some twenty-minute soundscape that I whittle down to a one-minute piece.

Nick Cave talks about how he goes to work from nine to five. He sits down and he writes songs, very scheduled and disciplined, then he goes home. I envy that. It sounds awesome, but I don’t have a model like that for how it always is. It’s a hodgepodge. It’s a painful cornucopia of crap. It’s being moved—like I’m this inanimate object that needs to get moved and kicked by these elements that I’m collaborating with. Of course, they won’t kick and move me until I don’t want to be kicked. It comes at the least practical moment—that’s when I write a song, when I don’t have a pen or paper, a guitar or a recording instrument, and I’m stuck in traffic. From there I sail that motherfucker to the ground. It’s a wrestling match, and I avoid it but it keeps on picking a fight with me.

It’s like, what are these songs trying to say? And so I listen and I write down a shitload of stuff, then I edit down the pages. In the case of my better songs, I edit down the pages to just one line. The travails of writing songs for me is to find the essence and extract it into a modicum of potency. Once you start whittling, you realize how much is useless. At least that’s my process, and it’s been my process for a long time now.

Have you ever thought of making only instrumental music and removing the lyrical pressure? I have a couple instrumental songs, but I feel like they’re about the title. What I’m doing is releasing a title and music for that title—a song with one line that I don’t sing. I’ve actually been writing more instrumental stuff because, as I get older, I get dumber and my vocabulary decreases and my mental capacity shrinks. As I get older, everything in me is dwarfed aside from my greed, bitterness and racism. But one thing that has increased is my ability to play the guitar, shockingly. I’ve always said I’m very good at not knowing what the fuck I’m doing, but I am getting better at playing that damn, fucking guitar.

I’m also experimenting with electronic equipment more. I’ve always played keyboards, synthesizers or a couple drum machines, but I’ve never used them for recording—just for the pleasure of making music and loops. For the first time, I’m using them for actually releasing music, so more instrumental music is being made. I have a couple of songs I’m really excited about. This record has nothing to do with those things, but fuck it, why not, let’s make some instrumental music.

Have you ever just released writing? About ten years ago, when I was first starting to make music, I was also submitting poems to different publications. Then a couple years ago, this publishing company asked to do a book of poems and writing, and I’ve been keeping that stuff to myself until I feel like I can collect it all into a cohesive body of work. So that’s on the horizon, but it’s a little daunting because I haven’t kept it organized, so my notebooks are just, you know, 60 percent lyrics and then 40 percent bad poetry. So I have to cull it out from really shitty to just bad.

Is that what you are going to call it, Really Shitty to Just Bad? I’m going to call it New Shit, Same Ass.