“It feels weird to have been able to finish a record,” he admits, down the phone from a friend’s Paris living room. “I’m glad I did though. I really found it challenging, but that’s not for everybody. For some reason it was hard for me… It wasn’t hard to write [songs], but to finish them was tough.”
Taylor won’t be drawn on what might have inspired the eclectic sounds of Dreams Come True; it’s recognisably related both to Lewis’s lugubriously airy record as Twin Shadow, Forget, and Taylor’s work with Grizzly Bear, but falls naturally into no particular genre. “I didn’t set out to make a rock record, or a dance record, or an R&B record. It would just be boring to me to do that,” he shrugs. “There was no plan, no initial song ideas. We just set everything up and started making sounds, and sounds became songs. And that’s it.”
As Taylor recalls, he and Lewis wrote around three-quarters of the record in just a week and a half. “I’d never really written my own music before, so I was kind of confused about it. And what it was supposed to be, and what I was supposed to do with it. It was a really weird, surprised sort of thing. Like, ‘Is this what it sounds like when I make my own music?’ I dunno. It was really confusing.” But that natural style is something that works well for Taylor – he claims to be the opposite of the classic perfectionist, despite his track record with following things through. “I think anything I’ve ever liked or been really happy with – I’m much happier with less effort required. I don’t feel like keeping on coming back to something is a good thing to do. I try and avoid that sort of behaviour. So a lot of the instrumental elements on this record were just laid down and never edited again – most things, really. Not even so much mixing happened – I mixed the whole thing in a week.”
Taylor’s distinctive sound has kept him in demand as a producer in recent years, but he confesses that constantly working on other people’s music gave him a desire to be his own boss for once. “It was definitely something I needed to do,” he says. “I felt a little drained from… I dunno, I hadn’t really stopped working for the last seven years or something. I’d come off tour and then immediately start working on someone else’s record [Taylor’s name can be found in the liner notes of artists like TV On The Radio, The Morning Benders and Dirty Projectors], then go back on tour, then work on another record when I came home. So I haven’t had any down time. And I felt like I really needed to check-in with myself and see how I was doing, and just have some selfish time.”
