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ZL: What I love about your relationship with Shawn [Mendes] is that on paper it feels like a sort of, more of somebody who is uniquely inspired by you that you would then try to nurture and guide, but I know you actually have a deep friendship and there's a "bro" down there.
JM: He's remarkable. He's remarkable. That's all there is to it. I mean, he'll send me stuff he's working on and I'll send him stuff I'm working on. We don't really sugar coat it for each other. Sometimes we go, "cool." Sometimes we go, "now that's one!"
He's so honest, man. He really—you know who he reminds me of? He reminds me of George Harrison. In the sense that his spirit is immovable. In that it's his, and it's honest. And that's very George Harrison, to me. Like I remember seeing George Harrison on the Dick Cavett Show. Obviously not when it aired. And he's not pushed around by the excitement around him.
ZL: Have you ever experienced writer's block and if so what's your definition of it?
JM: That's a good question, okay here we go. Here we go!
ZL: Let's go.
JM: Writer's block is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn't love the writer. Or when the listener doesn't love the player and so writer's block is not a failure to write it is a failure to catch this feedback loop of enjoying what you're seeing and wanting to contribute more to it right so writer's block for me doesn't happen as often as it does for other people because I know when I'm ready to sit down and go for it so you know when you are connected to that conduit in a meaningful way and you know when it's cloudy and best and also I don't really make records unless I've caught a new mission statement for what the music should be what the message should be and once I catch that then it's a little bit easier to write so the reason my records are. So different sort of thematically is because I just have to wait until I catch a new field script idea. You know, I'm beginning to look at what I do more like a film director. Not to be artsy fartsy.
ZL: It's okay man! I think the idea of being conceptual is misunderstood and often maligned within the creative—
JM: That's right that's right well because now you're asking me for the first time yeah to articulate verbally yeah the way I've gone at it in my head yeah this is the very first time I've ever put into words what the process of making Sob Rock was and and for this one it was.
I thought about it this morning because even I was starting to have to practice putting these thoughts into words I think I got more out of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood than I ever expected to get out in terms of it being an achievement, an aesthetic achievement. And I thought a lot about being a director on this record. Having tenure having what the kids call clout if I'm working on a movie or a record then people might want to know what that idea is and might trust that whatever that idea is is worth watching or listening to to keep the metaphor running I'm with it so to me it's like sitting down to write a movie oh I have an idea for a movie I don't hear about movie writers getting writer's block I just hear about them picking different projects
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JM: Whenever I want to write a big song I can't. A big song, meaning spatial. I want to write about outer space. I want to write about the huge glacially large space inside of the heart when it misses and this and that. And that's when I get writer's block, because I try to put basically a song to fill the entire galaxy. And I've never gotten a song that way. But if I write a song about something the size of a glass of water and I do it right I notice a week later it's got the universe in it.
ZL: That's beautifully put.
JM: So I'd rather have the universe in a glass of water than try to make a glass of water fit in the universe. And that's why I stay home a lot instead of go to dinners because everyone's trying to fill the universe up with one glass of water and I go, Listen we would have a better time if we picked a microscopically small detail and worked that for an hour and a half or two hours.
ZL: I love that.