When you’re writing, what comes first? Song titles, melodies, music? Well it took me a long time to write the album as it’s listed. I was writing a lot since the last record came out, but for some reason, 70% of what I was writing didn’t feel right for me. So if I’m lucky enough to have an experience that really impacts me, it comes with a verse and a melody. From there I ad lib it. But they come together, the melody and the words come together. But it happens rarely for me.

What do you mean? Actually having that happen, where it just sort of comes. I remember with “Carmen,” I was out really late and walking to the tempo of my own rhythm, and then I just started singing, “Carmen, Carmen doesn’t have a problem lying to herself cause her liquor’s top shelf.” And it was an easy cadence. The whole thing just came, and I think I was in a really good place then, so it was like things...it was really easy to channel.

What defines being in a good place? Feeling really happy and just circumstantially like nothing’s going wrong, which becomes more difficult but that’s only my experience. I think a lot of people think the whole thing is really great. Making Brooklyn my home base for the last two and a half weeks has really helped me out, like I’ve actually started thinking conceptually that I have this addition, an addition to this record that could come really easily. That hasn't happened in a long time. Not since I wrote that Paradise addition to Born to Die, which I really loved.

Did you miss Brooklyn? I missed Brooklyn. I missed the people.

How are the people here different? They’re not different. I’m a little different. The vibe is the same. I met some guys from here last week I had never met before, and they were just really easygoing. All artist types—writing during the day and hanging out at bars at night. I miss that, I like that. I haven't really found that in California yet. I relocated there because my record got a little bit bigger, but I didn’t really find a music scene that I was a part of. There was something happening—there was kind of a reemerging Laurel Canyon sound. Jonathan Wilson, Father John Misty, and I really liked those guys. I felt like maybe I had something in common with them and I slipped right into that atmosphere really well.

Let’s talk Ultraviolence. The crop of the photo on the album cover is similar to the crop of your first two album covers. I liked that, I wanted the continuity. I didn’t have that for the album cover at the time and I wanted it to be a continuation of the story. I did like the idea of it being in black and white so that there was, literally and figuratively more to be revealed. Even color-wise.

You wanted a continuation in aesthetic for this album cover, is that something that was important to you musically for Ultraviolence as well? Yeah. Not being misleading in terms of your personal aesthetic, like your psyche coming through design-wise and musically—I like continuity.

You have this way of exacting your creative vision through so many different parts of your art—music videos, lyrics, tone and the melody, style of dress. Are those things that you plan ahead when you think about an album? Is it a concept that grows from one idea? I don’t know. I was in college at Fordham when I was 18. I was living between Brooklyn and New Jersey and I was working with this guy who was more famous than anyone I had met at the time, this producer David Kahne. I had that record—you know they shelved it for two years—and I had all this time to think about what was really important to me and what I actually wanted to do if I had the opportunity to do what I wanted. I knew that I wanted to make life easy for myself in the way that I would always be living in a world I constructed and whatever felt true to me, regardless of however that appeared to other people. That definitely extended to song titles, whether I shot in black and white, hair color, things like that. It’s not really something that I planned ahead. I had a sense that I wanted the world I lived in to be really personalized to what I liked.

When I hear the words “ultra” and “violence,” I think about WorldStarHipHop. What does the phrase mean to you? That’s funny. I feel connected to two emotions—aggression and softness. I like that luxe sound of the word “ultra” and the mean sound of the word “violence” together. I like that two worlds can live in one.

What’s the relationship between violence and love? I like a physical love. I like a hands-on love. [Pauses.] How can I say this without getting into too much trouble? I like a tangible, passionate love. For me, if it isn’t physical, I’m not interested. Everything I do feels so organized: touring, playing a show night after night with a couple months in between to make a record, and being in charge of all of it—mixing, mastering. Sometimes I meet people with a lot of fire and energy. Mentally, maybe we’re not that similar. Telepathically, we’re not on that same wavelength. If there’s a physicality and a chemistry, that ends up winning for me every time because it’s the opposite of what I have every day.

Who’s the last person you met who made you feel like that? Dan Auerbach, for better or for worse.