Is your writing process serious or fun?

What is fun for me to do with language is deadly serious for me as well. I tend to start with melody and chords, which take a while to resolve into calcified arrangements. Basic melody, basic chords—those are born from some feeling or narrative idea or both. I have the prompt for the lyrics before I have the lyrics.

Some songs, I work with placeholder lyrics for months until I find the exact wording. With certain songs, there are requirements that the lyrics have to fit. For “Leaving the City,” on Divers, the choruses have three different patterns that are interlacing. Those lyrics are somewhat simple, but they took me a really long time. They had to tell a story, but they had to incorporate these syntactic parameters. There was a straight-up chart I drew. I had to have certain rhymes that were there because they emphasized the downbeat of a contrary meter that was overlaid on the primary dominant meter of the song. Then there were contrapuntal syllabic emphases. Then there were the basic rhymes at the end of each line, which were anchor rhymes. And I needed that to happen in a way that said what we wanted to say.

That sounds like a lot of work. Is the sheer labor of your music part of why people search for so much meaning within it?

People know I put a lot into it. And if I leave 8,000 bread crumbs around my door, I can’t blame anyone for knocking on it.

Does heavy interpretation do a disservice to the music?

I love that there are people who listen at that level. It helps slightly soften the blow of the existential horror—it’s an incredibly creatively validating thing. But there’s not a wrong or a right way. I’m not comfortable with the idea that anyone needs to “get” the songs to get the songs. I don’t want to clomp all over that with my heavy-booted definitive statement on what it was supposed to be.

What did you want to say on Divers?

If I could say it all the way, I wouldn’t have bothered making a record. I will say that there’s a thematic core of the album—every song on the record is asking some version of the same question.

The whole record is personal, but a lot of what is most personal is conveyed through pure fiction or, sometimes, even science fiction—literally sci-fi. With “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” I’m contrasting this British Isles sea shanty with a narrative in which I’m talking about colonizing alternate iterations of the terrestrial position in the multiverse. Colonizing time sideways, front and back, traveling in four directions through time. The subject matter is some of the heaviest and occasionally saddest I’ve ever explored. It’s linked to mortality and the idea of getting older. Time runs through every single song. But it was also the most fun to make. There’s no way to know someone except to know them.

Has building this entire aesthetic universe been a form of escapism from the modern world for you?

It’s not that contrarian. It hasn’t been that much work to not be on Twitter or Instagram. All you have to do is not do it. I’m not wearing a burlap sack, walking in the wilderness, talking to animals. I’m in the world. I just do everything real slow, and I don’t have enough hours in the day to do that stuff and still get anything done. It would’ve taken me ten years instead of five to get this album done.