David Lang

There's always this post-experience depression.

And the bigger the piece and the bigger the triumph, the deeper the hole.

I always go into these things thinking that the definition of success would be to come out and not have everyone think that I'm incompetent.

That's the way to set the bar low.

I want to set the bar low because there's so many things that can go wrong, you know.

And my music repeats a lot.

So if you make a mistake, it could be like, there's 10 minutes of this mistake.

And when you say a mistake, what would that actually be or sound like?

And would we know?

I'm not sure you would know, but I would know.

If I orchestrated a chord wrong or if I...

ask someone to do something that I ended up not liking.

And it's really easy to make those mistakes.

They're, you know, like a thousand little tiny detail things.

And they really can affect how the piece feels to me.

Maybe not to anybody else because the piece didn't exist before.

Nobody knows what it could have been.

But I have a little checklist in my head of all the things that I might have done wrong.

What was on that checklist?

There's that movement that we talked about last time, the woolen coat, which I really wanted to make sure that it sounded as emotional and as full to everybody else as it did to me singing it at home in my studio.