LEWIS: “Easy to criticize”—do you mean vulnerable?

SMITH: There’s nobody more vulnerable right now than me. I was in rehab, and I left AMA—”against medical advice.” They check off your risk level when you leave: “not at risk, at risk, highly at risk, extremely at risk.” They checked “extremely at risk” for me. That’s where this album is coming from. I feel like I am extremely vulnerable and extremely at risk. I wanted the album to be extremely at risk in its own way.

LEWIS: What you’ve gone through in the last few years is very present on Is the Is Are. Music journalists are going to keep asking you questions about that—drugs, being arrested. Do you feel distant enough from that period to safely relive it by talking about this album in the press and performing its songs every night?

SMITH: I’m not distant from it at all. I’m very much reliving it every day. I left treatment a year and a half ago, and I’ve had more relapses and episodes than I could even count. This record is still very, very much where I’m at. There are a million things out there every single day that trigger me—songs, smells, even the season that we’re in, fall. Something about the air. I left rehab in January and relapsed within hours of getting home. I just remember the smell of the air. I’ll never ever forget that for the rest of my life. So I don’t think making my record about it is putting me in any worse situation. It’s everywhere; it’s inevitable; it’s just something I have to live with. One of the 12 steps is to admit that you’re powerless, but I think that’s bullshit. I think it’s important to empower yourself by facing the stuff that triggers you.

LEWIS: Do you ever think about going back to treatment?

SMITH: No.

LEWIS: The day you announced the record, you put out a second new song, “Bent (Roi’s Song).” Why that one?

SMITH: That’s one of the most important songs on the record to me. It’s about me and a friend going through the same thing at the same time, and not seeing each other for a while, but then bumping into each other at different stages of recovery. It was really intense. I thought I was going to lose this person—I really did—for months and months. He’s a person who I introduced to drugs and extremely dangerous drug combinations. I would not have been surprised at any moment if he was dead. I had just been through what he was going through, and I am still incredibly shocked that I’m alive. I still at times think, “Wow, this is what it’s like to be dead? It’s exactly like being alive.” I don’t know how I did it. I came so close so many times. I’m just so happy that he did make it out. When I was in the studio making this song, he was still out on the street. It really killed me. I could barely sing the words. A psychic told me, “If you don’t get clean, this friend is going to die.” She gave me his initials and everything. So I moved to L.A. and told my friend that I was sober, even though I wasn’t. Months later, after the record was finished, he told me that he went to treatment. Now he’s nine months sober. When I hear the song now, it makes me so happy, because all of those struggles are in the past.