“The songs are all together on an album and they’re out there,” he says. “I feel like they’re all cohesive, but I don’t necessarily know what makes them cohesive. That’s the hard part when you have a bunch of songs. When you have 35 songs, some of them are too happy-sounding or something. There was one song I really liked but it was so poppy and happy, and we felt like it didn’t fit. It’s not a bad song, and maybe it will come out sometime, but it didn’t fit this time. A lot of our records are all over the place and that works for us.” But if you ask Brock to explain the correlation between the album’s 15 tracks, he will not. The singer isn’t interested in ruining any conception the audience has about the music. Brock isn’t exactly being difficult in his refusal, but unlike many musicians, he’s aware, by this point, how much he will say about his own songs.

“That ruins a record for me, frankly,” he replies. “That’s a standard rule I stick to after the Pixies ruined the song ‘Debaser’ for me. I found out it was just about some old film and, basically, they’re just singing about what happens in the movie. I still love them, but now, when I listen to that song, all of my imagery was taken from me and replaced with footage from a film I’ve seen a little bit of. I like to think that the things I’m writing songs about and their plots are great, but I don’t want to fuck it up for other people. Listening to music is something that really is personal. People get to put themselves in it and invest themselves. Music is some- thing you put yourself into and personalize, somewhat. That’s my long-winded reason for why I’m not going to give you an answer.”

Brock isn’t completely shut off from revealing the creative process behind the songs. He admits a deep interest in the natural world and the environment, and he spent three years of the album process beekeeping. He forages and hunts for mushrooms, and refers to himself as “on the team of shitty monsters” when it comes to man’s relationship with the animal world. So when Brock sings, “Mankind’s behaving like some serial killers” on “Coyotes,” the second track to emerge from Strangers To Ourselves, there is a sort of revelation contained in the lyric.

It’s also not that Brock won’t inspect his songs for continuity, but he does seem disinterested in any sort of typical artist self-reflection. “What have you created and why?” isn’t the type of question he’ll be responding to thoroughly any time soon. When queried about his voice, with its distinctive growl, he refuses to think about it. “For all I know, I still sound like I did when I was eight,” he says simply. “I’ve been stuck in this vessel the whole fucking time. The changes seem really gradual. I have no perspective on that.”