“This was the last song I made for the record. Writing, like healing, isn't linear. A lot of these songs started out with other verses and other structures. Halfway through I'd realize one song held three equally good ideas, or three equally bad ones, so I'd keep a verse from here, a verse from there.

I had a trio of drafts I'd never paid much attention to, imagined as ballads. They were all about that feeling of God, how I wanted to be loved, which has been sung a thousand times. When the record was done, I looked at it and saw that all the love on it lives in the small things. The trivial, the mundane. A spoon. A photo on somebody's fridge of a woman with flour on her neck, and you can't even tell if it was a happy day or a sad one, or if that's just a cousin. You look at other couples and build a fantasy: that one's happy. Will I ever have that again? And you may already have been exactly that for somebody else, from the outside. We keep feeding on each other like that.

That's why I call this first part a journey of self-understanding. In Accident you compare, you inflate, you fall into that hunger to have and to possess, until you find out the person was trash, and then you live through the aftermath of the abuse. Inside all of that there's still the private universe two people build. It's the subtlest part, and it lives in those delicate little things. What everyone is after, in the end, is the ordinary. Wedding cake that's far too sweet. Mornings that repeat. Somebody's Tuesday, somebody's nothing special. Tuesday is the day I was born, which is why it keeps coming back across the trilogy, and why Nevermind opens on a Tuesday morning. The bridge has the line that hurts me most: I don't think I'm hard to love, I think I've just been easy to leave.

For a long time I thought being unforgettable was protection. If I was interesting enough, beautiful enough, intense enough, maybe nobody would leave. Then I realized the real luxury is being boring to somebody for years. I don't need to be the best story at dinner. I want somebody to know the stupid thing I hate about myself on a Tuesday and still make coffee on Wednesday.

The house from the second track is made of these small things. Home is feeling at home with someone because you share your own narrative.

The order matters here. Accident carries the duality of what happened in Inches. Ride Back Home was written on that night out with my old friend. The first little verse of What The Fuck Do I Know? was born that same night: the ride home, and facing reality. Then my friend and I got back to my place, where he was staying, and talked until 6 a.m. He had never dated anyone. I had always been in long relationships. I was telling him how hard it is to not know whether you want that again, whether you're even capable of it, whether you can build and tear down those castles one more time. I told him that sometimes not knowing is better. Ignorance is bliss. Sometimes it's better never to have had a story than to have one that marks your life in other ways.

Those four songs tell the story of that one day, two people with different perspectives on the same thing. Both of us wanted the luck of a quiet love. A love that soothes you, that feels like home, more than a structure. Today he's in a relationship, and I'm still living with the trail that one left behind.

I made this song when I looked back at those three drafts about wanting someone special and realized none of them wanted someone special at all. What settled out of that conversation, almost two years later, is wanting the ordinary. He knew he could be whatever someone wanted, and he had been, and still nobody seemed to stay. The people who stayed with me made me want to leave, or took me away from myself. We wanted the same thing and couldn't see it then. Maybe one day we'll look at this song and hear something else in it.

Trivia 1: the three drafts were written in a period when I was looking at love the way the series Modern Love does. Each one had a different perspective, and all of them found love in the mundane. I folded all three into this song. At first I told my friend it was for him. It did start from his perspective, because those were things he had brought me. The real plot twist was realizing that even after living through relationships, when I left one, and sometimes even inside one, I felt exactly like him. You can feel wanted by someone. Being truly loved is the comfort of someone who is beside you all the way, fully, and that's what we keep looking for in people who later disappear. Shared or alone, loneliness is still loneliness.

Trivia 2 (and he doesn't even know this one): his favorite film is Interstellar, and one of the very first versions of this song was built on a sample of the film's final track. It sounded terrible. I never showed it to him, because I was afraid he'd love it for sentimental reasons and I'd be stuck carrying that version forever. So I went somewhere close to Hooverphonic, my favorite band, shaped to the sound I wanted for this record: electronic pop with a timeless, nineties quality. Pure pop that sounds of its time and still travels, without leaning on nostalgia. Easy listening in the best sense. It's a quiet song today, and when you hear it, it comforts you. That's what I wanted from these songs: the comfort we keep looking for in another person, which sometimes lives in a song that makes you feel the way the nineties felt. Comfort that arrives whatever year you press play.”