Porter Robinson has a hard time letting himself feel fulfilled. He’s spoken at length about how he struggled creatively in the years following his beloved 2014 album Worlds, grappling with himself over whether he’d ever make a statement worth sharing again. It’s the current that drives his sophomore album Nurture, a collection of experimental pop songs that sounds at once joyous, frayed, otherworldly, and intimate, with Robinson confessing to a bruised ego and shattered self-confidence, wondering if he can press on.

Of course, he did, and he does, which is part of what made the record so moving — its very existence is a rebuke to the self-doubt contained in it, proof that there’s power in persevering. But it also ends on a complicated note, with the uneasy beauty of “Trying to Feel Alive.” Over an instrumental that stutters to life with the stumbling grace of a newborn fawn, he meditates on the strange feeling of finally accomplishing your goals. “You climbed a mountain, are you satisfied?” he sings. “You stand at the top / You already wanna do this one more time.”

This line looms heavy as Robinson ponders what’s next a year on from Nurture, an album that unquestionably supplanted Worlds as a document of his prodigious talents as an arranger and songwriter, capable of wringing heart-wrenching emotion from whatever sounds grab his ear at a given moment. It’s a document of immense emotional maturity and a knack for making a version of pop music that feels lonely and desperate — but nevertheless alive.

So now there are new questions to answer. For example: How do you follow a record that lays bare just how hard it is to make a record? Robinson’s answer is to keep going, keep trying new things. Right now that means preparing for his first-ever show with a full band, at his festival Second Sky — which takes place on October 29 in Oakland. As we talk, he’s in Nashville, midway through a week of rehearsals that are supposed to last for eight hours a day but have been stretching even longer. Each day he’s refining, reworking, and shaping the tracks from Nurture into new forms. It’s hard work, but Robinson is bursting with optimism about a newly communal approach he can bring to his songs. These new arrangements, he says, are a way of putting the focus on the songs, but they also represent a new challenge and opportunity — another mountain to climb.

As he prepares to head into another day of rehearsals, the bustle of the production bleeds in through the call, drum kits clatter, and doors slam. The space is buzzing with potential energy and so is Robinson, who describes the long days as “transcendent.” Big questions loom about what’s next, but for now, he’s eager to keep moving forward. “I'm waking up every morning with a smile on my face, so excited to come in and play music with other people,” he says. “It's something I've never done in my entire life.”

THE FADER: What prompted the decision to work with a band for the first time?

Porter Robinson: I wanted to figure out how to update my show because the thing I've done in the past was remixing my discography. I did it with the Worlds show and then again with the “Shelter” show with Madeon, and then I did it again with Nurture. I totaled up the amount of edits I’ve made for various versions of the Nurture live show and it was over two hours of stuff.

While that's cool, I knew I had to update the show again this year for Second Sky, and I just felt like I hit a wall. It wasn't new enough. I went to see a lot of live music this year, and the stuff that resonated with me were the shows where the songs were at the forefront. Where it was about the music more than anything else, where you could close your eyes and have an equally good experience because of the sense of vulnerability and intimacy and risk and everything that comes along with a true live performance.

You're in eight-hour rehearsals every day this week. What is the emotional experience of sitting down and working for eight hours straight, especially collaborating with a bunch of different people at once?

It's transcendent and really fun. It feels weird to give a wholly positive answer, but it's the truth. It's something I've never done in my entire life. I've never played at the same time as another person before. Eight hours is our goal, but we've been going past that, unfortunately. But it flies by because it feels so meaningful and so purposeful. With Nurture, I wanted to feel unmasked in front of everybody. I wanted to feel like I was putting myself on the line and, and being as honest as possible and being really willing to look uncool, to make mistakes, and to do something that not everyone would like. And I think this is just another step in that direction, where there are more points of failure, but there's more potential for like this beautiful transcendent thing that humans can make through art when, when there's risk involved.

I would watch videos of my show back and one thing that I felt created sometimes a bit of distance and didn't feel right to me was the amount of filtering that I was doing to my voice. I'm getting rid of a lot of those effects in a lot of places. Sometimes I’m having to alter the arrangements of the songs or having to alter the key of the songs to be able to sing them wholeheartedly. But it feels so good. It feels like the thing I was trying to do the whole time. That's how I'm feeling about this band version of the show. It feels like the thing I was trying to do the whole time.

The vocal processing is also pulled back in your newest song “Everything Goes On.” Can you talk through the process of wanting to put your voice out there more?

[On Nurture], the vocal processing expressed a few things for me. It was sometimes a way of expressing an inner voice. Sometimes it was a way of showcasing the most scared parts of myself. And sometimes it was a way of kind of being an angel or a devil on my shoulder. And then there were other times where it was a bit of a security blanket. It was a way of not having to risk the rejection of really trying to sing.

With “Everything Goes On,” I was singing about some really difficult stuff that someone I love was going through in a really major way. And I just felt like I had to say it with my chest. I had to put it all on the line. And the other thing is that I've just been practicing and singing all the time and just trying to improve at it. I felt like it was time.

I think that makes sense. If live music is like this communal experience where you’re connecting with other people, trying to be as human as possible makes sense.

I guess I just found that when I was going to see shows this year, it wasn't the big-production shows that I remembered as much as the shows were the songs were at the forefront. I would hear a song that I didn't know and it would be all I could think about. I was like writing down lyrics on my phone. Like, what is this?

I just love songs so much, man. Songs are like these little treasures, these little pockets of emotional memory that have a way of situating themselves into people's lives in this mystical way. They have profound power. For this show, I want the songs to be in front of me.

How has your relationship to the songs and feelings on Nurture changed as you've been performing them over the last year? It’s a record about fears of creative death and stagnation, and now you’re reinventing these songs as you go.

One aspect of all this is that, as I plan for these shows and as I create these new versions, I still have those peaks and valleys of like, “I cannot come up with anything. I've re-edited this song 10 times before, how on Earth can I find a new angle to look at this through?” And the thing that made that click was the idea of really performing everything live and performing it with a band. I think sometimes my perception of the songs that I play does get distorted the more I play them live. Sometimes in good ways, but sometimes in bad ways. Like, I had been cutting this song called “Trying to Feel Alive,” which is the last song on the record. I had not been playing it at festivals for reasons that I think were not the best.

When you're standing in a crowd and you're looking at a stage with lights and video and an artist performing up there, it looks so robust and full and it looks like this immersive world. But when you're standing on stage and you're looking at a crowd, you feel fucking naked. You feel so exposed, and you feel most comfortable when you see the crowd do something like jump or put their hands up. And for songs that are softer or that put people in their heads or in their hearts a little bit more, it's hard to tell when it's connecting.

So what made you feel like “Trying to Feel Alive” was worth sharing again?

After playing Nurture at all these festivals and playing the album so much, I just went back and re-listened to the album, to try to reconnect with what the meanings that I wanted to convey were, and how those meanings ought to be spread out throughout the tracklist of the show. What feelings do I want people to leave with beyond “I had a good time?”

I feel like such a fool for cutting “Trying to Feel Alive” for as long as I did. It makes me feel like nothing else. It's this reflection on all of the motifs of the album, about trying to satisfy yourself through achievement and trying to derive some meaning through this constant climbing of mountains that we do. When I wrote “Trying to Feel Alive,” I was struggling the entire time, and also not feeling that much better than I did before. Like, “I have this whole album done, and yet I'm still not deeply satisfied in the way that I thought I would be. So, what's the point of all this?” It was really scary for me to consider the possibility that for this whole album, I'm telling people, “If you achieve your dreams and if you make the thing you wanna make, and if you express yourself fully through creativity, that's the path forward.” And then I've done it for like the third time in my life and I'm still somehow not learning this lesson that I'm not gonna be satisfied.

The thesis of that song is basically that like, “of course you're not gonna be fucking satisfied.” You wouldn't want to be. Even though it's painful, I love climbing these mountains and I want to find new ones to climb. And it's not about being satisfied or proving yourself or thinking that you did it or thinking that you're finally good now. I really, really thought that if I released an album that got positive critical reviews, that I was gonna feel better about myself. I really thought that.

And that's just not reality. It's also a bad reason to do stuff. I love the struggle. I love having to fight to prove myself again and again and again. It's painful, but that's the human experience — this really beautiful, meaningful, worthwhile journey to just fucking try as hard as you can.

As you look into the expanse of what's next, what’s the feeling that’s pushing you forward?

Well, it's the same thing that has always been, which is that I keep living life and I keep getting new perspectives and meeting new people and hearing new albums and watching new movies and things like that. And realizing that there's beauty in places that I didn't see before and needing badly to express a piece of that. The essence of what I'm trying to do with music is write this love letter to life and to living. And the amazing thing about living for me has been that it doesn't run out. Life is abundant. I'm trying to express this in the least esoteric way that I can. So that's why I'm slowing down here. Cause I don't want to say this in a way that's like alienating or sounds like I'm on mushrooms.

There's so much of everything to be experienced. That's the thing that drives me. Just by living, I continually run into new things that I think are amazing and worth expressing. And then I’ve just got to express those things. I have no choice but to try to find a way.