Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

• Portuguese Translation
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• Spanish Translation

You can feel a lot of motion and energy. And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos. I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record. Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider’, ‘Welcome to My Island’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.

The album’s medium is feeling. It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.

— via Apple Music

Some songs are experiments in lateral spiralling—writing something that had no verses and no courses, just pure flow, where I enter the song and I’m just vibing—while others, such as “Blood and Butter,” are about spiralling upward. The upward spiral is maybe the closest thing we can experience to heaven, a kind of heaven on Earth which we feel in moments of total selflessness and falling in love. They’re really the moments where you feel yourself turning into something else.

–via The Guardian

It has a dual meaning. One, it can be read as being about the ‘you'. We all know that feeling of falling in love, of wanting to obsessively learn from and become that person. But on the other hand, maybe desire is the thing you want to turn into itself.

–via Rolling Stone

It could mean being in love and wanting to fuse with someone, or the deep, manic hunger that comes with being obsessed with someone. But it could also mean wanting to become desire itself, which is really the force that guides us through our lives. The moments of sincerity, the moments of abstraction on the album, it’s all contained in that phrase.

–via Vogue

It wasn’t until a year and a half later that I started really thinking about what the fuck it means. It could mean I want to turn into desire itself, that force of will that moves us all through the world. It could also mean I want to turn into the object of my desire, which is kind of an insane thing to say to someone: you love them so much you want to become them. And then the third meaning is quite physical: I want to be held by you. I felt like those three contradictory meanings really worked with the tenderness and stupidity and profundity that’s all happening in parallel on this album.

–via The Times

I wanted to turn the volume up on this feeling of overflowing and overabundance. Maybe even a bit more mania. I definitely hope there’s humor in there, even if it’s just a sonic switch-up that catches you off guard – or makes you scream.

–via Vogue

It is a very maximalist album. I wanted it to feel very soulful and alive. This Obama era of imagined stability is actually very unnatural. This state of migration and stress and mortality – and this mysterious relationship with the virus and weird superstitions and pseudoscience and stuff that comes out of it – is all so universal and has been the backdrop for so much art-making throughout all existence. I felt very connected to that.

–via The Guardian

I start by collecting lots and lots of images that feel related to the music, over the course of a year or more, and then start to find threads that run throughout. It’s always a surprise at first, and goes through many iterations. In the case of this album it’s still evolving! Sometimes it feels unrelated to the music at first, but then there’s some kind of “Aha” moment. By the time I go to make the first piece of visual material on an album, I usually have quite precise collections of graphics, scenes, motifs, symbols on hand, as well as what I call an “album key”—a set of notes about each song that list all the visual elements I associate with each one. I end up referring back to the album key a lot, and evolving it too.

—via Discord AMA

In some ways, it had to do with the fact that I didn’t get very many focused chances to work on this record while touring. Each song ended up feeling like its own world rather than part of a bigger thing. I got quite obsessed with all these different worlds — the psychedelic, stoned, mythological world of “Billions,” the sexy, pagan folk universe of “Blood and Butter,” or the really stoic, classical, mournful world of songs like “Hopedrunk Everlasting.” I had so much time to sit, listen and think about these songs on the road, when I wasn’t actually able to work on them. When you’re working faster, you don’t really have time to go into it and develop them within your own imagination.

—via People