West seems less about songwriting and more about performance than many of your previous records. It's really stripped down and raw, and some of the tunes don't have a lot of parts. I wanted to use songwriting as a basic structure but then put all this other stuff around it. That's why I think Hal Willner was the right choice to produce this record; that's what he's been doing with the other projects that he's been working on. He brought in [jazz guitarist] Bill Frisell. He knew who to bring in to get that kind of sound.

Did the two of you talk about what you were after? A little bit. Mostly it was instinctive. We just kind of went song by song and tried different things. We let everybody do their thing. That's pretty much always the way I've done records, but the thing that was different this time was that I had an actual producer producing the songs as opposed to my just going in and laying them down. I've never worked with a real producer before. Everybody I've worked with before has done some producing, but they've all been musicians-slash-producers: Gurf Morlix and Steve Earle and Charlie Sexton and Bo Ramsey.

Were you comfortable letting someone else share in the decision-making process? Yeah, because I like the fact that Hal wanted to go in and experiment and kind of tinker around. That's usually what I've been accused of doing that drives everybody else crazy. Finally, I had somebody who was into that too.