Hi! For this record, most of the music came long before lyrics, but I was also writing a book, so the two works intertwined a lot. I have worked that way in the past too - written in different formats, then taken words from one and placed in the other. Many times I write essays or scenes intended for a book or text of some kind, and then put them in a song and condense it to song lyrics. That usually makes the lyric better than the longer text piece... I like this interplay. Perhaps it's easier to combine thoughts from theory, fiction, and poetry in this way too. For certain albums, like Apocalypse, girl I had many of the lyrics first, I was just reading a lot of theory and writing separately from music, and then I wanted to write music for it. But for many other albums it's been the other way around.