Most of these songs were written in rooms with no one else in them. Not because solitude is the point, but because it's the only condition under which I can hear the second thing.
The first thing always shows up loud. It's the line that arrives complete, the melody that's already a song before you've finished noticing it. It's not the right thing. It's just the first thing. If you write it down too quickly — if you don't make it sit there in the room with you for a while — you end up with something that looks like a song from across the street but turns out, up close, to be a sketch of one you've already heard a thousand times before.
The second thing comes from waiting. From the slow accumulation of small noises. The radiator. The hum of a window. Your own breath audible because there's nothing competing with it. The second thing is what was already in the room, asking only for enough silence to be heard.
I used to think empty rooms were the absence of something. They aren't. They're the form attention takes when it's not given anywhere else to land. The room holds it. And then, eventually, the room hands it back.