What’s it about? A boy from Sweden who moves to America with his brother to start a new life, and they get separated on a ferry. He goes around the world and ends up in California. So, in the book, he’s trying to make his way back to New York. This is in the early settlement days, so he’s learning English and being taken advantage of because he’s an immigrant. The way it’s written, though, is so fluid and beautiful—it’s like watching an intellectual Western or something. It doesn’t win you over for the first 20 pages, but it turns out to be so good.

But also, Diaz isn’t Swedish. And I don’t think he’s ever even been to California. That’s amazing to me. I read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and it blew me away. It’s an account of a man who’s gay and struggling, and I thought, This was written by a woman? Crazy!

A former poetry grad professor of mine writes these persona poems, which are all from the voice and perspective of old women. And he does it so well. You’d never in a million years guess they were written by a man. Maybe these writers lived before, and were once those people, you know?

I wouldn’t doubt that for a second. Your own writing is narrative, and the stories you’re telling take many forms; including videos, where you’re tasked with visualizing your own musical narratives. Do you already have a vision for a story before you ever sit down to write it? I don’t really have a process. I’ll sit down, and if I have nothing in mind, I’ll often play piano first. It’s more forgiving if I don’t write words to it, so I’ll start there. If something’s more immediate, I’ll usually pick up the guitar, and will sometimes then change what I wrote to piano or add a key part.

If I’ve written a nice melody but don’t have the words yet, I’ll try to think about things that have been on my mind, or things I feel I might know about, and I try to fill it in. Other times, it happens all at once. I’ll write the first draft of something, and then five minutes later it’s completely different, and then in another five minutes it’s different again, and then it’s finished. That’s the best, because you feel like you’re so aware of yourself and that one thing you really wanted to write.

I don’t really visualize anything, though, until I get into playing it, and feeling out how I want it to sound. I think about how I’m going to use my voice to best suit those words or phrases, and then I’ll record different versions of it. Sometimes they’ll be slower, sometimes they’ll be in a different key. I’ve been experimenting a lot with keys lately, because I’ve noticed that I like my lower register for some things and my higher register for others. When you do all of that, it takes a minute to get to a place that suits the song.

When I was making videos for My Woman, I was in a really inspired state, and I think it was because I was overworking myself. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that position, where you feel like you should take a break, but all the engines are on and you know that this is the time to do it?