Everyone was thinking initially I was going to start the album with this song. But that doesn't sum up the album. It sums up a moment. It sums up a chapter of the record. It's almost like when that part of the album comes on it's almost like, that's Chapter Three, you know? It was classic David Lynch. People asked if I got David Lynch singing or rapping, and I was like, “No, I got exactly what I needed: a David Lynch story in my world.”

“Actually Virtual,” featuring Shabazz Palaces

Ishmael and me and Thundercat and George, we started this project a little while ago called Woke, and it was before Woke became a meme. After the meme started happening it made me think twice about it. But the Woke thing was actually supposed to be a movie. I wrote a movie with the same name, and it was supposed to star Ishmael. It was about two up-and-coming artists making an album in Detroit. It was more of a surreal interpretation of how the process goes. I was developing the script and we were doing rehearsals and stuff, and at some point I just lost my confidence in the project. But at the same time I thought maybe the music would inspire the visuals again. So he came out for a weekend and we recorded like six or seven songs, and that was one of them. It ended up in the vault for a long time, and I went through the vault one day and I found that and I was like, Ho-ly shit! What the fuck? I dug in and messed with it some more and he was excited about it.

“The Climb,” featuring Thundercat

I've been working with Thundercat forever. And this song is a special one because, to me, it's really one of the songs that sums up the album. Some of the things he sang, it's things I wanted the overall message of the album to be. It's really a song about pushing forward at times when everything feels shitty. We'd been working together forever, we'll keep working together forever. That, I guess, is probably the most organic song of all of them to come together because he's the person who was always sitting next to me.

“9 Carrots,” featuring Toro y Moi

Chaz is one of those people I'd always come into contact with in the festival circuit. We'd been in vans together pulling up to festivals. And we'd be like, “We gotta work together one day.” And I remember working on that track, and I just heard his voice somewhere in there. And I was like, “This is the one.” I hit him up and he got it done really fast. That was near the end of the process, kind of when everything was starting to glue itself together. I had a really good sense of what the album needed at that point. And I needed that sound. I needed his voice, that texture. It's something I wish I could do that he does very well, that trippy falsetto style. I think in terms of our producing and how we put things together, I find a kinship to his structuring and the melodic stuff. They're things I would try to do myself.

“Land of Honey,” featuring Solange

This was one of the older songs. I think that song's like four and a half years old now. And it originally started as a collaboration. We were supposed to work on a song for a documentary. And in the end, Solange didn't like the version of it and she didn't want it to be on the documentary. I didn't get what she didn't like at the time. I was really frustrated. And then I heard it later, and I was like, “Oh, I get it.” It wasn't right, and it shouldn't have come out. But then I kept working on it. We both knew the song had potential, and eventually I got it to a place. I'd been a fan of hers for forever, and she doesn't do features for people. She was like, “You know I don't do this for nobody?” So she definitely gives me hell for it. But it's worth it.

The thing about the placement of that song, though, is the administrative people wanted me to put it at the top of the album, but it didn't work. I think [the ordering] comes from the filmmaking and storytelling side. I like the journey of it. I feel like I'm not a singles artist. I'm not the banger artist who drops a summer anthem in one song. I'm a whole picture kind of a guy. I see it as an opportunity to make another kind of movie. It's like, We have forty minutes, an hour, we can go to all these places. I wanted to end the album on a beautiful note, a pretty note. The last couple of songs are the more personal tracks on the record. And I wanted it to loop so if you listen to it, it starts over. The voice comes around again. Nerdy details. But the lush part of it, I wanted it to have these big, sweeping strings at the end.