After this album release and tour, you mentioned that you are paring down the Swans into a more intimate version. What feelings are you having now that it is near the end of "full band" Swans? I’m excited at the prospect of being completely naked, wandering blind and dazed through a crowd of ravenous lepers attacking me from all sides. I work best when I’m most vulnerable and unsure. Uncertainty has been a driving force behind the music of Swans for a long while now, due to the improvisatory nature of the music in a live setting. But the soundscapes we enable are in actuality created by a greater entity that reaches into us and plays us and leads us into regions we could never have individually or collectively imagined. It’s often been an ecstatic experience to be inside these tsunamis of sound we somehow generate, but it has eaten away at my strength and stamina to the extent that I’m forced to acknowledge I have one more tour of this left in me to endure and that to continue would not only be personally destructive but inauthentic. I really don’t have a choice but to simplify things.

What caused the decision to pare down the group? At my age I feel that it’s necessary to be humble before God. I’ve shouted up at heaven long enough. It’s time to prostrate myself. I’m hollowed out, physically and spiritually, and I hope that whatever sound I make will resonate within the empty chamber I provide and sing like the endlessly sustaining overtones of a bell.

"The Healers" is a very interesting song for a number of reasons. First of all, it's pretty rare that we see men write a song from the perspective of a mother. Was this perspective something you had considered before writing the song… Or did it just spring out of your brain? I read once that children are sent down from the stars, that they’re emissaries from a celestial paradise. It’s a beautiful thought. At times they are angels. But it’s also true that they can be screaming, needing and violent beasts. Similarly, the selfless and nurturing mother is a cliché that happens to be true, but it holds within itself its own contradiction and opposite, like all things. I’m always most interested in the friction between a glorious assumption and its hidden nemesis.

Also, "Healers" deals with creation and destruction- at the same time Swans is morphing from one version into another. Is there a direct relation between the song lyrics and the Swans' upcoming shift? Absolutely not. I don’t feel that I, or Swans, are inherently worthy of being the subject matter of a song. I’m a lot of things that some people might find execrable, but I’m not vain.

Usually, bands write songs, record them, and then debut them to a live audience. Here it is the opposite- the studio versions are the "last" versions of the songs presented. In doing so, do you think that audience reaction shaped the songs, and if so, does that mean the album is sort of a band/audience communal work? I find that idea creepy. I wouldn’t want an audience to have any influence on the music whatsoever, no. That would be like composing music by poll, which would of course flatten everything out, like Spotify or something. We form a nucleus, tightly huddled together on an anvil. When the hammer strikes us music results. In any event, the pieces we perform live grow and metastasize over the course of a tour. We’re searching for something like God in the sound. In the case of the album, Birthing, these songs had reached a heightened state and we recorded them mid tour. The material was in the active process of self-destructing when we recorded the live album, Live Rope on the final show of the tour. After that it is pointless to continue with that particular music. People can listen to it on a record, but we’re done with it. It would be a sham to continue with it.

This album is something like 110 minutes long. Was the writing/recording a massive undertaking? That is, was the album difficult to create? Or is the length due to flowing creativity? Here’s how the songs evolve: Alone in my room, I pick up my old and beaten and broken contraption made of wood and wires and I thrum the thing, waiting for resonance. When eventually a sound evokes meaning I search for another sound, and before long I have a collection of chords. Through repetition, an invisible, shimmering mist of sound eventually envelops me completely, and before long I notice a portal opening and I walk through it and I suddenly find myself in an unfamiliar room, similar to a prison cell without windows. I scratch words onto the wall of this cell, and those words become the lyrics to a song. Excited at this discovery, I gather my friends and collaborators in a rehearsal space and together we unfold billowing waves of sound that grow outwards, well beyond my initial childish discoveries. We’re led through the vaulting archways of cathedrals where dancing fractal shards of light sing down to us from above. We’re ushered through tunnels of sound into new chambers connected endlessly, one to another, where the echoes stretch out and reverberate infinitely. We breathe in and exhale, breathe in and exhale the magical dust that is the intangible substance of these echoes, and we’re transformed from within. We find ourselves in a vast underground cavern and we no longer know ourselves, who we are or where we’ve been, and the song is then finished and forgotten.

"The Tower" rules. The soaring guitar in the middle reminds me of Bowie's "Heroes" and I love how you contrast this conquering figure with kittens and pink bubbles at the end. What does the song represent to you? A few years ago, I was lying under the covers in my bed late at night, doing something a man my age has no business doing, when an unfortunate vision assaulted me. It was the (now current) U.S. President engaged in a 3-way sex act with Roy Cohn (long time right wing fixer) and Richard Nixon. Their flesh was corpulent and foul as they explored each other’s folds and secret places. The President spewed, and his issue was sentient and traveled out above the world, surveying the chaos and destruction below. In the end, the President is a giant, malefic monster, a Cyclops, our worst fears and hatreds personified, standing above us all, swinging his sword down upon us, exacting cruel and idiotic justice and revenge upon his enemies – everyone in the world.

When you create music and art, is it "fun" for you? Or maybe you do it more as a "rewarding" experience as opposed to a fun one? Before I was fortunate enough to figure out how to sustain myself by making music I worked, for decades, a seemingly never-ending series of soul-crushing and physically debilitating jobs. As difficult as it’s sometimes been to continue with the music, its true reward is that it brings me to life in the most intense and purest way possible and I’m always thankful to have been afforded that privilege.

What's making you happy right now? What is causing you distress? I’m terrified of happiness per se and I don’t see it as a desirable goal. The search is everything… Maybe it’s delusional, but I think that we humans are often worthwhile, even holy in certain ways, and it’s appalling to see us ceding our autonomy and souls to media and technology that are intent on enslaving and ultimately erasing us. We invite the devil in and willingly allow our brains to be eaten