Hi, Annie. Congratulations, we voted Masseduction the Guardian’s album of the year!

Thank you. That’s so awesome. I found out a couple of days ago, via an email that had a lot of exclamation marks in it. I’m psyched!

You’re in esteemed company – Beyoncé won last year.

Oh my God. Me and Bey? [Pauses] Me and Bey.

How do you feel about this album now you’ve lived in the work for a while? Have the songs taken on new dynamics, new meanings?

Yeah, they have a whole other life now. I get to see some of the ramifications and effects of the songs in real time, on an audience, so they mean even more to me.

Masseducation concerns itself with power, in various iterations – personal, political, sexual. What led you to focus on that as a theme?

Well, I’m interested in how we define power: who has it; what it looks like; what it looks like for me. I think I’ve come to the idea that I get to define what power looks like for me, and on me. It’s very liberating. I’m not the political side of power – I’m not a community organiser, that’s not my particular skillset. But what I do have is the power to tell stories. And stories get to shape and influence how people walk through the world; they can help people feel less alone, and more understood. I think I’ve gotten better at that connection with each album.

Your influence as a guitar player on indie rockers is discernible, too. Was the new sound palette on this album a way of accelerating past people biting your style?

No. I’ve never once heard someone else’s music and gone: “Oh, they’re trying to rip me off!”

You don’t hear your influence on other guitarists?

No. Not even a little bit [laughs]. I only really knew two things when [Clark and producer Jack Antonoff] started the album: I knew I wanted to use pedal steel, because it reminds me of Texas and breaks my heart; and I knew I wanted to use programmed drums because I have spent so much of my life wishing that acoustic drums sounded different. As far as touchstones, I was thinking about Nine Inch Nails and Throbbing Gristle.

Watch the video for New York

For this tour, Fear the Future, you have opted to play solo, swapping your usual band for backing tracks and big-screen visuals. Why?

I wanted to do something bold, something that I’d never done; a challenge. I wanted to see if I, alone on a stage, could entertain thousands of people for an hour and a half.

Is it a format you’ll stick with?

No, I’ll be breaking out the band in 2018.

Tell me a secret about the album, something you haven’t mentioned before.

Ages ago, I played in a Ted Talk house band with Wendy [Melvoin] and Lisa [Coleman] from Prince and the Revolution. So I kept up a friendly text exchange with Wendy. I asked her how she was and what she was doing, and she said she was well and that they were working on an album of “slow discos”, and I was like “… and thank you”. So I took the title for Slow Disco from a Wendy Melvoin text message.

You have said that the recent tabloid scrutiny you have encountered hasn’t changed you. But I’m guessing what you have observed of that world – the “flim-flam”, as you dubbed it – influenced the album in some way. The celebrity gossip industry runs on a kind of mass seduction, right?

I mean, consumer culture is a many-tentacled beast. You’re selling magazines, or cola, or ideology, and they’re all kind of the same thing.

Propaganda is also a kind of mass seduction too, as we’re seeing from the rise of the far right in the US and Europe. Fear the Future, indeed.

Hate-mongering is seduction of the weak brain. Being a racist is so stupid. It’s not only morally wrong, its also idiotic. It’s intellectually foul.

You have described Masseduction as “the deepest, boldest work” you have done to date. What does that mean for album six? The portable recording rig you posted on Instagram implies you are already working on new music …

I’m always thinking of the next thing. That’s something I learned from [collaborator] David Byrne: never ever look back. It’s always about the future. The joy for me comes when I’m making the thing, or thinking of new things to create. That’s what I like doing best. That’s my happiest place.