Then, I’ll take the recordings out to our summer log cabin and sit around for hours listening to them, taking notes. I translate them—I guess that would be the best way to describe it—doing my best to hear what it sounds like I’m saying. Once I’ve transcribed and translated the mumble tracks into words, I look at what I’ve got. The lyrics at that stage are often pretty meaningless and nonsensical—though sometimes they’re not, which is kind of crazy. The second step after translating is to add one more round of editing and shaping so that the final product has some coherency. Usually, there has to be an image in my mind that guides me through the song—some narrative, even when it’s impressionistic or fractured. For me, that visual connection is important—I have to be able to see something to remember it.

I don’t think this is an unprecedented process. Keith Richards has done that on demos for years, and Mick Jagger’s translated his mumbling. I think it’s a pretty common approach. And it works because our brains are wired to make sense of things. If you listen to a mumble, your brain really wants to hear words. You listen to one line at a time, over and over again—well, a lot faster than you think. It’s hard to stop hearing the words. For me, I often get the feeling “That’s obviously what I’m singing there”—which is strange, and wonderful, because no words were intended at all.

I think I’m attached to this process, too, because it keeps me attached to the song in its early state, the way it was before I’d thought it through and figured out what it was. I don’t trust myself to make conscious choices. I trust myself to make stuff and respond to things that I can feel and intuit, but I don’t really trust when the ego gets involved. This way of working means I get to preserve that felt, wordless melody until the very end—and when I do write lyrics, they’re a way of listening and responding to the song, instead of imposing a vision on it. It keeps the observing ego out of the way as much as possible.

For the same reason, those early demo takes can have such magic: They’re closer to the subconscious. That’s why I like to include elements of early recordings on the finished records when I can. Almost every song on Sukierae has the original element somewhere in there. A lot of my iPhone acoustic demos became the basic tracks we overdubbed to, and they’re still there in the finished record. (That’s why we listed the iPhone as an instrument in the track notes.) The song “I’ll Sing It” includes a cassette recording from a Being There-era demo of that song. Stuff lies around forever, and for this record it was fun to make some use of it.

It’s a totally different process working with an ensemble. Wilco is a six-piece band, and its members have varying degrees of interest in the finishing touches. As a collective, we always gravitates towards something much more fully realized—and that’s the pleasure of it. Working on my own, I always hope to abandon something before I feel like I’ve made all of the choices that could be made. If I commit too much to one approach, I mourn all the choices that weren’t made when I get to that point. I think that’s one way Sukierae would have been different if it had been recorded by Wilco. I can still hear possible overdubs on every track, I can still hear things I could have done, and that’s the most enjoyable part for me. It’s the same thing I love about Daniel Johnston’s music—all that unrealized potential.