If the 21st century has a reigning neurosis, it's isolation. We'll do anything to bat away the creeping sense of dread triggered by technology—but of course, to soothe ourselves, we turn to more technology. It's hard to imagine a better musical embodiment of that paradox—of our simultaneous hunger for and fear of high-stakes connection—than 28-year-old British singer, DJ, and producer James Blake. Since his full-length debut in 2011, Blake has recorded with a bucket list of visionaries (Frank Ocean, Brian Eno, RZA, Bon Iver, Chance the Rapper, Vince Staples, Rick Rubin, Beyoncé…), but his articulation of contemporary anxiety feels entirely his own. He uses his fractured falsetto, a laptop, and a mess of keyboards to create spectral, yearning songs that don't resolve in any traditional sense but instead revel in ambiguity and disconnection. They are stuttering and unmoored. This is what living feels like now, Blake's work suggests. This is the new loneliness.

And yet the man himself has never been happier.

We meet in the corner booth of a Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood; it's the kind of joint where the nacho cheese is made of cashews and the chorizo is fashioned from tempeh. Arriving early, I stare blankly at the menu and try to figure out what “coconut bacon” is. And then, at the appointed hour, he appears: gangly (six feet six), with messy auburn hair and an easy, lopsided smile. He is wearing round mirrored sunglasses and a navy blue shirt with mustard yellow piping, and carrying a blazer. He looks less like a DJ and more like a runway model on his way to the library.

Blake picked this spot because he's vegetarian, but he's self-aware enough to mock the West Coast almond-milk vibes—“you cannot get regular milk here, Amanda”—and he scrunches up his face each time he catches himself saying the word “journey,” as if the moony, New Agey–ness of it all is just too much for an Englishman to bear. Raised in London, the only child of a musician father (his dad, James Litherland, played guitar in a jazzy prog-rock band called Colosseum), Blake followed his girlfriend, an actor and writer, here to the sun-kissed land of valet parking. He's as bemused as anyone by the disconnect between L.A. bliss and the bleakness of his songs. But the thing is, Los Angeles works for him. “I love it here,” he tells me. “I feel a collaborative energy.” (That face again.) “I am the luckiest person that I know. I find it hard to calm my restlessness. This city helped me get there.”

He's also in the midst of a very L.A. process of re-invention. Five days ago, he tells me, he deleted almost everything off his phone. “I found myself checking it far too much and feeling like it mattered,” he says. Lately he's trying to not even use computers when recording, which is almost impossible to imagine if you've ever heard a James Blake song.

But somehow it makes sense, this stripping away. Because his music has always been bracingly minimalist: rhythm and blues scraped clean of all the blues (and a lot of the rhythm). And this minimalism in a time of maximalism is, at least in part, why Blake has become the collaborator of choice for so many pop acts aspiring to high art. He knows the new ways before most of us have figured out the old ones.

When Beyoncé wanted melancholy atmospherics on “Pray You Catch Me,” the opening track on Lemonade, she called Blake. When the HBO series The Leftovers—the apocalyptic drama starring Justin Theroux—needed a goose-bumpy trailer for its first season, it licensed Blake's single “Retrograde” (72 million Spotify streams and counting). Frank Ocean can't be bothered to attend the Grammys and hasn't played a concert in three years, but he lent his vocals to a skeletal piano-and-drums track called “Always” for Blake's latest album—and when you hear their voices entangle, it feels like getting thwacked on the back of the head, hard: Everything goes white.

Zane Lowe, the creative director at Apple Music's global radio station, told me he's rarely encountered “a musician who sounds as comfortable with adventure and open to ideas from the very start as James. Every time James runs the risk of fitting into a musical landscape, he takes a turn. It's really everybody else that's catching up to him. I don't see a lot of anyone else in James, but I see a lot of James in everyone else.”

While we eat our quesadillas, Blake recounts a story about driving through London, listening to BBC Radio 4, and hearing a man—a Spanish solo-guitar player, a “beautiful, complex, stunning” player—tell the deejay his chief inspiration was the sun. “I burst out laughing in the car,” Blake says. “I'm sitting there, with all my anxieties and all my insecurities and all my technology surrounding me, and my search for the next creative unlocking, and all these problems—and this guy is telling me that this amazing music he's been making for 25 years is coming from the sun. And I'm thinking, What the fuck am I doing?”

Blake doesn't quite know how his new state of mind might affect his music. He's working every day, distraction-free, and is committed to reconnecting with his instincts, both as a songwriter and as a human. “I don't believe an artist needs to be depressed,” he tells me. “I think the reason we, as musicians and writers, arrive at creating is because, for most of our lives, we've been unable to say exactly how we feel about people. And it's easier to get it out in music and writing. But to keep yourself in a certain place for creative means—it's bullshit. If it were true that being happier leads to less creativity, I would rather be happier. Being happier is being happier.”

Amanda Petrusich is the author of three books on music, including, most recently, Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78-rpm Records.