August is almost over when I have the nervous breakdown and fly to Fiji. The air is thick and moistured; the album is a disaster - it's all out of my hands.

A girlfriend and I take turns driving a golf cart around the island at reckless speeds; we walk on the beach and pick up coral and mottled pieces of crab shell the colour of toucans. The sky burns as I watch from a fishing boat and shiver with fear. The sophomore slump, or "difficult second album syndrome", is a well-documented idea that somebody's second try after a successful first try is often not as good. I am the type of person who frequently turns to WebMD to diagnose themselves of an illness, and I sit awake on a Fijian internet provider trying to WebMD myself an excuse for not writing a good album. I read about a statistical feature known as regression toward the mean. "In statistics," Wikipedia tells me, "regression toward the mean is the phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on its second measurement." So basically, it's all downhill from here. I close my laptop, and puncture paradise with a scream. To keep to the statistical parlance here, the variable (my first album, Pure Heroine) was, on its first measurement, extreme. Pure Heroine, an album I made when I was 16, cracked open my world before I could legally buy a beer.

Overnight, I started flying everywhere. I heard myself singing in department stores and in toilets, if they had speakers. My idols wanted to talk to me, or more to peel back my neck skin and drink me alive. I couldn't shake the feeling that I had been struck by a great bolt from the divine, that I wasn't worthy, could never contain enough gratitude to settle the score. It had become the kind of statement that defines a life. And it had to be followed up. "Think about it," Jack [Antonoff] says, downing a smoothie in gulps with the lid off, "and you'll see it makes no sense." "Well," I say, "I guess it's more to do with giving people the illusion of safety than safety itself." "Exactly," he says. "I refuse to wear my seatbelt, and when they try to get me to take my headphones off I ignore them until it turns into an argument. There's just no way any of that is helping you if the plane goes down."

He opens up the session, does that fluttering thing with his lip, and pauses.