The starting process has changed over time. I go back and forth from knowing exactly where I want to place the central figure and doing that first and committing to her and then building the world around her. But more recently, between the body of work I did last year and what I’m working on now, I’ve started to commit to building up the background layers slowly. Putting a wash down and building up a lot of different transparent layers that have their own energies, and then starting to rip that energy apart to then create a new form or a new structure. That language, in general, is also what this is about. Ripping and expanding, shedding and rebuilding, that push and pull of building the surface so that she has this foundation and that it feels like a more consonant structure. I’m liking that relationship to the work.

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics.  Why did I enjoy it?  I used to play with it.  I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.

I think they’re different. They’re different modalities. When you start an essay, you know you’re going to write an essay. I mean, when I started my essay on “My Night at Maud’s,” it was almost as if I was going to write about myself, not about the film, and I love this mixing of the two.

We never enter into new recording projects thinking, “Yeah we’re gonna write something great here!” A lot of the time it’s a feeling like, can we write anything else? Is there anything else to say? You know what I mean? There’ll always be things to say, but if we can’t dress it up right, then it’s game over. It feels like a pretty honest place to start from: What is there to say?

My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.”

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.