Wren Adeyemi on Silence, Doubt, and the Half-Step Down

We spoke over two long afternoons. What follows has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

On the new record

I stopped trying to fill every second. The hardest thing I learned was that a song can end before you are ready, and that is often exactly when it should.

That instinct — to subtract rather than add — runs through everything in the conversation, and through the work itself.