It sounds like the kind of album you can make only after you’ve made a bunch of other ones. There’s something very confident about it. I know exactly what you mean. I think I really grew into this album. If there was anything that I said before Hal and I went in, it was that I wanted to make a mature yet hip album — a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more produced. The record of his that really kind of made sense to me in terms of that was Marianne Faithfull’s Strange Weather. I listened to that and just went, “Okay, he’ll get it.”

Do you think West might appeal to listeners who aren’t really aware of your old stuff or even of country music in general? I hope so. I don’t really ever think about that much, but it’s funny: I got a lot of criticism for Essence (2001) and for World without Tears (2003) because I was trying to do some different stuff. And people really had a hard time accepting it after Car Wheels. I think it took a couple of albums to get to the place I am at now, where people are finally just accepting what I’m trying to do instead of comparing it with everything before.