What were the first tracks you brought to him?

All of them. The only track we wrote together was “Coma Chameleon”, which is pretty much a Beck song. He wrote the lyrics, I kind of wrote the melody. I would go into his little music room and just start smacking drums and playing pianos, and his engineer would be cutting shit as I was doing it. I started making a lot of crazy loops, and it sounded horrible, but amazing. All of a sudden we had the riff, and that’s a Beck song for you. He just gets raw material, jumps on it, loops it up, takes another thing.

What is your songwriting process like?

It’s always different. [With] all the songs, this time around, I just laid a quick bare track down — anything that would get the ball rolling: beat-box, a drum machine. Literally like no thinking. And then obviously the lyrics [had] a lot to do with me having new love in my life. The album is a lot more personal than I’ve ever dared to be before. I’d gotten into this habit of maybe trying to generalize in lyrics. [Compass] is me kind of baring all, completely exposed. Looking in the mirror in a different way, like, “Do you hate that about yourself or is that okay? What’s wrong with sharing that?” If you’re not going to give [then] what’s the point? I’d started to, not water it down, but think about the end result and craft the song to fit something I wanted to project, and it all got a bit contrived in a way. So this album, I stopped contriving anything.

I wanted to talk about the guests on the album — not only Feist — but how did you wind up working with James Gadson?

We had Record Club booked at Sunset Sound, where they recorded “Exile on Main Street” [and] “Purple Rain.” A legendary place. And in walks James Gadson, who I’d been watching play with Bill Withers on the road. He’s just the coolest drummer you could imagine. The sweetest, warmest, most talented — just how you wanna be when you get older… Of all the production help that Beck put into the album, I think putting me together with Gadson was a really pivotal moment, having that extra pressure all of a sudden. Feist was in town already, and I had worked with her on The Reminder, doing backing vocals on a bunch of the songs. She’s amazing… She just wanted to muck in and get her hands dirty musically. So she was there, Nikka Costa, and then Pat Sansone from Wilco. Pat’s amazing. He flew in the parts via e-mail, and so did Gonzo [Gonzalez]. Pat would just send me this impeccably-recorded stuff from the Wilco loft: bass parts, wurlitzer, mallets.  He’d just nail this absolutely beautiful shit. Sometimes I had to erode it, ‘cuz it was too good. It sounded like pristine Steve Reich shit. Counterpoint.