I was going to ask if you thought that was part of it.

It gives everyone a different lecture. Just the fact that I affirmed something a bit more ambivalent, everyone is like, is she transitioning? Is she a dude? Actually, it's just me working a different way to be feminine. It's just a haircut.

I think the second album addresses subjects like sexuality more bluntly. I'm not giving any clear answers about identity, and it's deliberate, and it's infuriating people. In the “5 Dollar” video, for example, with the sexual vocabulary, and the bondage, and the exposure of the body, there is a backlash to that that is visceral. It feels like queer militarism 101, but when you're working on a different way to be sexualized and a different way to exist, you are made to feel like it's obscene more easily than artists who are exposing their personal lives or even their bodies way more. How come it's obscene when it’s coming from me? It's interesting. Some journalists have said Chris is "violent" as a record. It seems like it's violent to YOU, but to me it feels like I'm empowered through the record.

Do you find it difficult to be authentic to yourself while also, presumably, wanting to continue to be successful?

Not really, because first, I don't know how to be successful. (Laughs.) Honestly. Maybe I will never reciprocate what happened with the first album. I have a relationship with writing that is really intimate, and brutally honest, but it's because before writing pop songs I was writing, and am still writing constantly, in journals, short stories, poems. I have this relationship to writing that is an everyday unveiling. But at the same time, I'm in love with what the pop song is, so most of my references for the second record were immediate, catchy pop productions like Cameo, or Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, or Michael Jackson's "Dangerous." And it's about how to mix this relationship I have as a writer that says "I," with this more immediately tasty pop landscape. I kind of don't think it's natural for me to work around that. So it's like, I'm going to do a production inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, but I'm going to talk really simply about feeling depressed.

Actually I'm reading a lot of English writers. For example, I just got a Maggie Nelson —

I love her. Sorry. Is it The Argonauts?

Actually, I started with Bluets. My heart! I don't think she's translated in French yet, so I discovered her in English, and reading people like that in English makes me work my English writing even more. I think I almost cried when I read it, because it felt like discovering the writing I could particularly use then. The way she constructs a really intimate and personal writing with something so full of memories of culture and philosophy, it's gorgeous.

Because you mention Bluets I’m going to take a leap and guess that means this album is heavily influenced by heartbreak.

Yeah, there were heartbreaks. Several, actually. "She says, with delight in her eyes, as if she were trying to prove that she's human,” (she narrates.) No, but I'm saying that because I used to be quite afraid of living things before. But interesting things happen with heartbreak. So it's both painful and kind of slightly ecstatic, to me. The sounds are more rough, but there is also warmth because I'm in a way satisfied. Even if it's failing, I tried.

I put myself in impossible love stories on that record. I was deliberately intrigued and attracted to people who could not possibly love me for the whole me, usually meaning young, macho men. Because the concept of who I am is disruptive to them. They're like, "I'm confused. Attracted but confused." And I'm doing nothing to help them in being un-confused. I think I was just attracted by this extreme authority of who they were, because they were also giving me stories of conflict in themselves, about their own identity. But then the next day they were ashamed, so I was back to feeling super powerful, and super ashamed as well. It's this back and forth, on this second record, of trying to live all your desires, even those that could wound you. Sometimes you feel like utter shit, but you're brave enough to experiment with what you want to experiment with.