“My mom says that once you have your first baby, you feel so much love for it that you can’t imagine you could ever love anything else that much; that there’s no way you could possibly feel more love. But then you have another child, and the love just keeps growing; it’s exponential. My mom is a very sweet woman, by the way. But, actually, with [Strange Mercy], I had talked about it before like how I imagine it feels to have kids; I don’t have any kids at this juncture. But, I saw that parallel: the first one you’re super-precious about it, you make sure it has bows in its hair, that they’re perfectly groomed when they head out the door to go to school. But, by your third kid, you’re just like: ‘Do whatever you want. Wear those gym shorts and that Hard Rock Café t-shirt to school, I don’t care! You don’t want to shower? Fine, jump in the swimming pool. You don’t need a curfew.’ All those kind of feelings, that’s what I had with this record. I just wanted to let it be whatever it wanted to be, and that was fine. I wasn’t trying to dress this one up, wasn’t wiping its nose all that much.”
