On appreciating creative accomplishment

Here we are in our respective pegboard-walled studios.

You have more pegboard than me. I’m jealous. You can get big kits for them. They make all sorts of crazy shit for pegboard walls.

I’ve had those in my hands before, at the store, and felt overwhelmed with possibility and put them back.

I will say the one thing that I’ve struggled with, with my own peg board, is how to set it up. I’m not one of those people who has a vision and then I follow it through. Are you?

No. That’s why I showed you that shelf I made without making any cuts. It was so satisfying, just intuition and chance.

That’s beautiful. It’s also how I make music. I don’t hear the music in my head and then go from there. It’s always been a process of seeing what happens and seeing what wants to come through. I know that that can sound really corny, but I’ve learned to not feel like that’s a bad way [to do it] and that it doesn’t make anyone any less interesting, as a creative person, to not have a plan.

Let me pull up my questions. First of all, how are you?

I’m good. I’m doing my own music videos next week because I will be gone with Perfume Genius for the months leading up to my record. So I’m kind of front-loading a lot of stuff.

Tell me about your collaborations.

It’s always different and that’s what I like about it. The experience of collaboration varies between people because people have such different ways of making art, even in the sense of what we were just talking about. There are people who know what they want to make, and then they make it, and they don’t sleep until it’s exactly the way that it is in their head. For me, sometimes I don’t know what I don’t like until I see something.

[Collaboration] is not just this solo endeavor; something completely new will inherently come from working with someone else. I’m more invested in it because it always goes somewhere that I would never have imagined. I find that to be more enjoyable and interesting, even if ultimately I don’t like the final thing that I make. Also, I think some of the more challenging collaborative projects I’ve been a part of showed me that maybe I do know what I like, even if I can’t explain how to make it or even if I don’t know how to make it myself.

I’ve been producing other people’s music a little bit over the last couple of years. People will come to me usually because they like my music, but my music is very collaborative. It’s such a sum of so many parts. Obviously the lyrics and me singing are just me, and I get a say at the final stages. But when people want me to produce their records, I almost always want to send them a questionnaire: “What do you like about my music? And which part?” I don’t want to just keep making the same record over and over again.

When I’ve worked with other people on their music, it’s really hard not to just make it something that I would want to listen to. That’s not always the goal, so it’s been an interesting challenge to figure out a shared language with people. That comes up in every collaboration: figuring out how to be on the same page and how to understand what you mean when you say, “I like the color blue.” And I’m like, “Which blue do you like? Because there are so many, and this blue is really, really different than this other one emotionally.” Do you ever run into that?

Yeah. I actually just wrote something about that exactly, related to color. I was having a conversation over email with a photographer who was color correcting some images of my paintings. I asked, “Can the red be hotter?” and then I thought, “Whatever that means.”

I was just talking to a friend who said, “I’ve never really had a good experience making a recording until now,” and that got me thinking. I was curious how that affected their perception of what they had made. To me, the most important part, and the reason why I continue to make music as my job—which is a weird thing in and of itself—is the feeling I get from making music. I didn’t start playing guitar to sell hundreds of records or thousands of tickets. That wasn’t what i felt when I first held a guitar in my hand. I try to remember that feeling all the time. It’s obviously hard to hold onto in a world that is obsessed with growth and production.

I took the most time I’ve ever taken with this record that is going to come out in August. It was extremely collaborative and it was very fun. I hadn’t really experienced that kind of fun exploration. I think that that maybe comes with getting older and having done it, and having known that this old sense of loss always happens. Even if everything that I fantasized about happening when I put out a record actually happened, it can still feel like this endless pit of wanting more. I’ve seen a lot of friends revel in the making of the record and not be so obsessed with the outcome. I’m sure if you had this conversation with me after my record came out, it would go differently. But I really am trying to make the experience of making art the most important one, and not what the art does for me after it’s made. Because the most special and sacred time is the making of it. I always learn something. It felt like I fell into writing songs as an accident, a secret accident, you know what I mean? Do you feel that way with making artwork at all? It’s this place you can go.

Yes, absolutely. I’m constantly feeling grateful for my inner world, and that I have this way to process things. I also love the word secret. I think about that a lot when I am in my studio, and what I end up ultimately revealing in the artwork when it leaves. I also think about my time as an artist in seasons.

I deeply have seasons as a musician, too. It’s clear to most people now, who already know who I am and what I do, that I have a lot of different channels. I play in other people’s bands and I write my own songs. I am learning to see some sort of cyclical, seasonal pattern within my own creativity. A couple months before a Hand Habits record comes out, I will want to swing so hard in the other direction and not write lyrical music anymore and just make experimental, improvisational music that’s highly unable to be repeated. Because that was my roots, too—I started playing music in an improvisational setting and exploring soundscapes.

Also: the season of being in the resting and gathering phase. I haven’t written a new song in about a year, maybe. When I was younger, I used to be really afraid of not writing, especially being around some artists who are really prolific and they’re constantly making work, and they’re on their seventh album and I’m on my fourth. But because of what I mentioned, I didn’t come to making songs. It just felt sort of divinely orchestrated… After the periods of time when I’m not writing and I’m not compelled to write, I want to write a song again, but it comes from the desire to do it, rather than feeling like I should be doing it or getting hard on myself for not being productive or something. Somebody wrote me the other day and was like, “Have you made anything cool lately?” And I said no, and I didn’t feel bad saying that, or try to find something I made six years ago. My wish as I get older is that I can learn how to expect the seasons a little bit more, or have more of a relationship of remembering, “Oh, okay, this happens.” It doesn’t mean that spring will never come just because winter’s here. It’s hard to remember, though. Does it ever feel hard to remember for you?

Absolutely. I made and showed dozens of paintings last year, and right now I feel like I’m still awkwardly tiptoeing back into my studio. I am starting to integrate that feeling though, as you said. Do you have a routine around your creative process?

It’s always different. When I didn’t live with a partner, my creative process was different because I didn’t have to include someone else in some way, shape, or form in my creative process. For example, I can’t just start playing loud guitar at 2 AM… I’m not a rigid person with my creative process at all, but I go through periods of having more of a structure, at least more of a morning routine or something. If left to my own devices, my most creative time in the day is the afternoon into the evening, but then what will happen is I won’t eat and then I am crazy by a certain hour and then I crash. So getting away from that is good for my mental health, I think. But definitely I’ve had to renegotiate my relationship to my creative schedule and be okay with not being able to do exactly what I want to do because of the way my house is set up.

What do you do when you feel stuck?

I feel like that’s a good question for right now, because I do feel stuck a little bit. I think I take space and come back to it, which can be very, very challenging for me because I get so hooked on whatever the present target I’m chasing might be, even if I don’t know what the target is. Sometimes when I walk away and then come back to it, I really just scrap it. Or I try to find one thing that I do like about something that might not be working. I try to find the element that I am gravitating towards and distill it just to that… And then if I’m stuck in so much that I can’t start, collaboration can be really generative and can get me unstuck very quickly. That goes for finishing things, too. Sometimes I can just take something as far as I’m able to take it and have the humility to know I’m at the threshold of my ability, or the threshold of what I consider my strengths. Not that I like to think about it in terms of strength or weakness. I don’t really like that dichotomy, or the language around weakness, because sometimes what I’m not good at is actually what makes the song feel human. Even if it’s really uncomfortable for me to interface with that bar, I’ve been there many times and have learned that I’m not making music for me, at the end of the day. I’m not going to listen to my music as much as other people will.

What non-musical things influence your music?

Getting outside gives me a lot of perspective. Music is such an internal experience inside my head, inside my heart, and inside my literal house, or even inside of the computer. I think getting outside of any of those things can be really, really refreshing and inspiring. Also, I find other people and relationships to be really inspiring. I think something that’s been a through-line for me and my work, across all projects, collaborations, anything that I’ve ever worked on. The thing that I find the most interesting is the undefinable space between people and what happens there. The things that you’re not supposed to say to people, or that you’re too afraid to say to them, or the things that you’re too afraid to admit to yourself.

Beautiful. Lastly, what would you say to your younger self or younger artists?

I think telling my younger self: don’t see the forest for the trees. Don’t lose stock or lose sight of the things that you do have and the things that you have accomplished. I don’t like to use language of production, or “goals,” but I think it is important to have goals even if they’re within your own creativity. I think it’s so easy to feel like everybody else has more or is better or has the real way to do it. And definitely for my younger self, you are faking it. You don’t know how to do the thing. But there’s not one way to do art, as we know. Even just five years ago, with the things that I have done and the music that I’ve made and the people that I’ve worked with, I would’ve not really believed you if you told me that this is where I would be headed. It’s easy to lose confidence, and because of that, I think it’s important to remember the small things that you wanted and that you got. Even if it’s like, “I wanted to be able to write a song that has a key change; I wish I could do that,” and then not forgetting when you actually do that.

I recently re-listened to some of the music that I really liked when I was in college and high school and really getting obsessed with guitar. I revisited this Jeff Beck record. It’s so good, and it reminds me of hearing somebody do something on the guitar that was really out, really inspiring and out, for the first time. The record’s called You Had It Coming. A lot of it’s really corny, but it’s nostalgic, and I was just thinking about how you don’t know what’s going to influence your work. I feel like as artists, sometimes it’s hard to see what actually does influence your work. That’s kind of for other people to decide, you know what I mean? But I was listening to this record and thinking, “Wow, there was a time where I would try so hard to play along to some of this music and I just felt like it was so beyond me. And 10 years later, I do play like that sometimes.”