The last album was about your family. What’s this one about?

Reflecting on life, growing up. It’s always growing up with me. I’m stuck. Maybe it’s because I’m not a good lyricist but I keep it vague. With other music, I’ve always thought that if it’s vague enough that I can layer it onto my life, it’s cool. I try to do that. This is what came out.

The fact that you were open about your family history and your absent father on the last record [This Old Dog], did that become difficult to talk about in the press?

I wasn’t trying to say, “Fuck my dad, bastard!” But instead of being able to have the guts to go, “What’s up, dude? You’re dying,” I was like, “Maybe we can figure this out?”

And did you?

We have, in a way. I don’t have a lot of emotional outlets like that. It’s always been music. Now it’s on a scale where there’s a lot of people reading your diary. Kinda weird.

There’s something calming about the literal nature in which you write. I think people are drawn to your music because it lets them pull back and see some objectivity in small observations.

It’s cutting the noise out. The noise is important, though. I don’t have a problem with it. There are problems in the world that I have a problem with, but the way that the internet is… I tend to be in my little hovel and I’m not on social media any more.

Was there a breaking point?

I hadn’t used it since last summer. All I had was Instagram. I got rid of Facebook and Twitter a long time ago. You realise, just from sitting there, scrolling, not talking, seeing pictures of people I haven’t seen in years... that it gives you this false sense of, “I’m in touch with people!” They don’t care. You delete it and people are like, “Why did you delete your Instagram?” That is enough proof for me that it’s a problem. But I’m not here to preach about the internet.

Well, let’s talk about the album announcement and the reaction from Mitski’s fans. Did you anticipate that?

No. For some reason, I felt like Mitski would be chill with it, which she was. I talked to her for a while – we were texting yesterday. She had the same outlook. I was like, “It’s so crazy that it’s a similar title.” I don’t show anybody my record ’til I hand it in. By that time, I just said: “This is the title; this will be the first single.”

I didn’t know that one of her singles was ‘Nobody’ ’til two days ago. My manager told me and I thought, ‘Whoa, weird.’ Even if I had known, I don’t think I would’ve changed it. I didn’t think people were gonna run with it that far. It’s ridiculous. It’s just music. Mitski’s song and my song sound eons different. Most of the people talking about it didn’t even listen to my song. With music today, [it seems] a lot of it isn’t about music.

Did you feel as though the knives were out?

Sure... and I think a lot of people wanna dig the knife into me. Which is fine. It’s funny – there isn’t really a narrative with my new record. There’s no card to play. They found one, you know? I’m not trying to troll Mitski. I didn’t know who Mitski was! I’m bad at keeping up with music. I only listen to The Beatles and video-game music from when I was a kid. Sorry.

The upshot of all this is that Be the Cowboy is a great record that you’re now aware of.

I heard a lot of it yesterday. It’s really cool and I think we might even cover one of the songs because it would be fun and we could try to make sense of the situation. She seems really cool. Maybe I get to have a new friend or someone I can see at a festival and go, “Wassup?!”