It’s so weird. I feel like that’s so tough. You just know, you do. I feel like if I could explain that, I’d probably be better at writing songs or something. If I knew the trick to it, then I would just do it every time and just always land the dismount. I don’t think that every song I write is the song, but it’s part of the practice of staying in your expression and your expressiveness and just trying to find the nerve and hit the nerve well every time. You know when you hit the nerve, it’s like hitting a funny bone or on your knee when they’re doing the reflex thing at the doctor. It’s like you just know when you hit it and you know when you’re not hitting it.

I think I’m more attuned to a popular… I grew up watching MTV and listening to three-minute songs, and I also don’t like concerts that are too long. A concert can be seven hours and not be too long, but sometimes a concert is forty-five minutes and it’s too long, and you’re uncomfortable, like, “It ended fifteen minutes ago, why do you keep making sound?” Or those situations where someone is playing and they’re fading out and you have this feeling of, “Yeah, it’s ending, yes, now, definitely,” and then they start again and you say, “No!” [ Laughs ] For me, moving over an hour or so, it goes into a different territory where I lose my sense of form. And then it becomes more like the chord in space. Installation format is where I would go after an hour.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.

Something is never done. If time and money and deadlines were no object, people would tweak until the cows came home. Ultimately, I would like to think something is done when I master it and I send it off and I’m so stoked about it. I feel like, “Wow, I really brought this one home.” And then I get the same feedback from the artist, that it is just beyond their imagination. Where it comes back to them, and they get excited about the mixes again. Or if there was something they were worried about, and it gets addressed and sounds better than they would’ve thought.

I take a break. I need some distance, and then I start getting edits. Generally they’re pretty macro at the beginning. I work with an editor here in Canada and another at FSG. They’re truly brilliant, and they pose the initial questions, again, on a macro scale. They pose, I mull, and then basically re-enter the work and try to… I keep talking about aliveness, but I realize that’s the central point with this book. It’s like I try to preserve the aliveness while engaging with their queries about what can be built out, what might not be as clear to the reader as it is in my head. All of that very subtle, hyper-intelligent work that editors do, the way they inhabit the work and illuminate it for you—it sounds like an act of mercy which on many levels it is.

I was about to answer cheesily, “It starts me,” but it actually does. I search. I put in a lot of time reading, taking notes, writing in that grasping way that feels mostly wrong. Usually it begins with an image and then the voice comes. Once I have the voice, the book presents. Annie Ernaux talked about it as channeling, and I don’t want to over romanticize it, because there’s a lot of bodily discipline that goes into the making. But I do think that, for me, that’s how a first draft feels. It’s like just keeping up with the voice in my head, being true to it, clinically so—like a pact. I love that first draft, because it’s pre-scrutiny, pre-analysis.