You can build up expectations for a song before you record it, and then it's like nothing's good enough in the studio.

Sometimes I just think we're not meant to fly halfway around the world in a day. That some kind of mutation is going to happen.

Sometimes I think I don't have much choice in the matter. It's just what happens, and I'm following my instincts the whole time.

There's songs that could either be taken as a conversation between two people, like "The Privateers," or "Why," from a much earlier record. Or "Glass Figurine." That's my version of a relationship song.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

In New York, I'm playing in a church, solo, doing instrumental stuff. There's talk of doing more, like, installation-type things with some of the specimen horns I've played through. Just filling a room in a museum with these horn-speaker sculptures and then making loops that run all day, and you walk around the room and sort of mix the sound by where you stand. That's all way in the future, but that kind of stuff is a different way of thinking about performing.

The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, and that doesn't sound like a real collaboration.