They feel very, very different to finish. With a song, I end up playing it so, so, so much and shifting things while I’m writing so, so much. And then I play it and play it and play it, and through that process, I write it. Over and over and over—almost like when they’re polishing a stone and it’s just being thrown around inside that tumbler. The song rolls over, and it starts out as this very malleable thing. It’s the strangest experience where you start with absolutely arbitrary things—or so you think—and you’re making them up, apparently, but as you go, and through the process of repetition, things become so apparent to you.

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.

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.

For me, nothing’s ever really done. I have to be cut off because I could record infinitely, so usually a record is done when it has to be, with some kind of created deadline. Or if somebody I’m working with says it’s done, that helps, because I’m just so unhinged that I need limitation. You can make a really great record with limitations. Limitations help incubate a specific thing. If you got to do whatever you want for as long as you want, you might not have that kind of magic.

I don’t know. How do you start a project?