Sometimes the best motivator for making music in an era when albums are decreasingly commercially viable is simply to provoke, to stretch yourself, to prove that everyone has you wrong. As I plan my third full-length record, I catch myself thinking this more often than ever before, and while sometimes I wince at my own hubris (as if anyone cares enough to have me wrong or right!), overall I think that this sort of attitude is a positive one, in any artform. I want to make a record that weirds people out a bit, that expresses things that my previous work has not. I think I will be able to do that, maybe even relatively quickly. My biggest hope is that my new record will be something that no one could ever refer to as a “singer-songwriter” record, not because I think there’s anything particularly wrong about singer-songwriters, but because I want to make something that is adamantly not confessional, even anti-confessional. There will be new levels of abrasiveness and new levels of quiet beauty. My second biggest hope is that I can either find a cohesive sound, something which eludes me except in the late hours when I am thinking far too much about these things, or that I can totally shun the idea of stylistic consistency in the way that bands like His Name Is Alive do with such passion. Those are completely disparate paths, and I don’t think I will ever be able to make my mind up. I’ll just have to record the thing and see what comes of it. All I know is that I am ready. If nothing goes wrong, expect another album in less than a year, and expect it to only vaguely sound like the same person.