Pitchfork: You've said that you had the album cover visualized before you had the songs written. What else did you know about it at first? Did you know it would be 10 tracks long?

Earl Sweatshirt: Oh yeah! First off, you don't get paid over 13 songs, so niggas that be giving y'all more than 13 songs are very generous. Chew on that for a second and then look at a Prince album, or any classic, classic albums like Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, any classic Michael Jackson album. They’re all eight, nine, maybe 10 tracks—‘cause nobody got time for that shit, my nigga!

Pitchfork: Do you think classic albums say more with less?

ES: Definitely. I'm obsessed with proverbs because, to me, flexing is being able to say the most with the least amount of words. You know your words mean a lot if you can say something that would be cliche coming out of someone else's mouth, because people know you’re saying it and you're legitimate and you've been through some shit. That's what my whole shit is. And all the old heads that I look up to are like that. André [3000], Jay Elec—these are all niggas that have spent time doing less and less as they get older, and that's what I'm on. It's about exclusivity. You don't get too much. True mastery is being able to come with your own proverbs.

Pitchfork: It's interesting to hear you say that, because one of the themes I hear in your music is miscommunication.

ES: Miscommunication is the number one cause of all problems; communication is your bridge to other people. Without it, there's nothing. So when it's damaged, you have to solve all these problems it creates. What you hear on this record is rampant problem-solving.

There’s a lot of me figuring shit out in the moment. On “Faucet”, for example, I touch on me and my mom, post-Samoa. First there was just this initial bliss of me coming home. But after that went away, the reality that it's still real life set in. A lot of it is about finding balance with both of my parents, going from one extreme to another, holding on too tight after I was pushing them away.

I looked up one day and I had been touring and I hadn't been with my fucking family at all. On Mother's Day, my mom texted me something about, like, the 12 millionth thing that I missed at her house. I was hella sad, because me and my mom are at the point now that she's not about to call me and fucking yell at me. I convinced her that I'm grown, so she's treating me like I'm grown. If I don't show up, it's just that she's sad and hurt.

Pitchfork: You talk to her a lot in your music. Did you ever sit her down and play that track for her?

ES: I haven't even showed her the whole shit. When she comes over, she’s just overhearing stuff that I’m playing from my room, so she'll just catch pieces of it and be like, "Oh, this sounds good." But convincing her that I'm grown—it wasn't music that did that. It was the way I started addressing her and how I started handling my life. It sounds crazy, but you get to a point where, at least on my side of things and with the adults that are around me, there's a human moral truth that they all relate to. So when I got to the point that I was speaking with that, then the relationship with my mom was different.