Cass McCombs is a wanderer. He’s described himself in the past as a nomad, and reviews of his early albums almost all mention him sleeping in cars, on couches, and at campsites across the United States. Before releasing his debut album a little over two decades ago, he worked dozens of odd jobs — projectionist, demolition worker, painter — and it’s difficult to say whether or for how long he’s had a fixed address in the years since. There was a period in New York and some time spent in Baltimore, intermittent stays in California, where he was born, and a spell in London. Details are difficult to pin down, mostly because McCombs has no interest in discussing them.

He has often been portrayed as aloof with the press, rather unfairly. I’ve interviewed him around his last two albums, 2019’s Tip of the Sphere and 2022’s Heartmind, and he’s spoken without hesitation about music, grief, and the Bhagavad Gita. McCombs says he just doesn’t want to weigh his music down with needless biography. In one early interview, he said he was grateful that we know little about the great writers and thinkers of antiquity: “their art is powerful because they're mysterious.” Since then, he has written about fringe characters and obscure histories, giving equal weight to religious texts and everyday America, improvising and unmooring himself from linear ideas about songwriting and performance. He has become American pop music’s greatest living mystic.

In that context, it is a little strange to hear Seed Cake On Leap Year, a collection of previously unreleased songs from McCombs’s early years. Released in October by Domino Records alongside reissues of his first two full-length records, Seed Cake on Leap Year comprises 10 songs McCombs recorded at the turn of the millennium. There is no mystery about where, when, or how these songs were recorded. This all happened between 1999 and 2000, inside Jason Quever’s apartment at 924 Fulton Street in San Francisco. McCombs played into Quever’s Tascam 388 mixer.

Why release this music now, then? “There's no reason,” McCombs said over a broken phone line a few days before the record came out in October. “I don't know why we're releasing it. Every time I would talk with Jason though, over the years, we would bring up these old songs that nobody's ever heard except us. It felt like it could be something, finally.”

Listening to Seed Cake on Leap Year feels a little like eavesdropping. Many of the songs are raw and embryonic, half of them set to a clash of hard-strummed acoustic guitars, improvised percussion, and a droning accordion. On those songs — particularly “Anchor Child,” “Gum Tree,” and the classically down-and-out “Wasted Again” — McCombs sounds nothing like the tenor-shaman of later years. His voice is often sharp and bony, struggling to be heard above the clatter at his back. Sonically, they have more in common with the wild-eyed psychedelic folk of Elephant 6 than anything McCombs would go on to record. Other songs have a faded grandeur that’s perhaps more recognizable at first. Here McCombs sounds softer, his voice a little more hypnotic. “If I Was a Stranger” is a sweet ballad led by a box piano, and the swooning “Baby,” with its girl-group backing vocals, has a wooziness to it that McCombs would run with two years later on A.

McCombs remembers giving very little thought to his lyrics in this era, describing them as “just sounds” to fit the melodies that might occasionally, almost accidentally, produce some meaning. But the stream-of-conscious nature of the lyrics reveals even more about McCombs’s poetic instincts. He was clearly drawn to many of the same big questions he tried to answer in the coming years, even if the meaning is a little obscure. “Gum Tree” has the seed of a Zen-like regard for nature that McCombs would refine over the years, and both “If I Was a Stranger” and “You’re So Satanic” have religious undertones that reemerge on future albums. On “Always in Transit,” he sings explicitly about nomadism and its ill effects: “My mind is a junkyard / Pathways covered in bone / Always in transit / Never at home.”

Moments like these have kept me coming back to Seed Cake on Leap Year in the past few months. These songs reach forwards, not backwards. They are messy and imperfect, but they are true and honest. Rather than tethering McCombs’s music to some heavy biographical ballast, they offer a glimpse of an artist at the beginning of a journey. Or, as McCombs wrote in an email last month: “Flaws are just artifacts of the miracle explosion that is life.”

This conversation mostly took place over the phone, but McCombs expanded on some of the questions over email. The transcript has been edited for concision, and McCombs’s written answers — which mostly have little in common with answers from the spoken interview — have been broken out in italics for clarity.

What do you remember about listening back to the songs that make up Seed Cake on Leap Year for the first time?

More than anything, it brought back a feeling. I don't really remember a lot of those days, but I have a feeling of being young. More than anything it was emotional, more than specific shapes. It was more of an orb — a throbbing, amoebic force — than it was anything tangible.

What emotions did it conjure? What did the orb look and feel like?

I didn't have any clue what I was doing. I had no expectations. I had next to zero ambition. Nothing really seemed possible, including even finishing the songs — much less it ever being released or heard by anybody. It reminded me that we make music essentially for ourselves. All people do. Just to see if we can express one thing; see if you can extract it from your imagination. It really struck me that I was troubled back then, and I think I might still be like that. That's what it brought up, is what a lost person I was at the time.

I'm not sure if you would still consider yourself a lost person now.

I have my days.

There is a rawness to these songs, a sense of things being unvarnished. Does it feel at all uncomfortable releasing that music to the world?

It's very revealing. It was scary to even open up that Pandora's Box. But I've made a lot of different styles of music — improvisational music and then songs — and even songs, I've changed my approach to songwriting over the years. There are lots of different ways to approach it. That's why I feel very lucky, because I've had this opportunity to really explore and change — explore my imagination and not really get stuck on one thing.

just yesterday, a thelemite told me we are living in the aon of the child, and that makes a lot of sense. I always like characters to be a little immature and unreliable, so nothing we made in that spirit could be embarrassing. The rawer and more careless the better, then and now.

San Francisco at that time seemed like a fertile place creatively. What do you remember about the community around your music at the time?

In hindsight, it was fertile. I don't think we really realized it at the time, we just felt so young and didn't know anything. But now we all realize that it was special and supportive. We were all making different kinds of music. We were all doing our own unique thing. That was encouraged: to do something different. So you'd get shows where there would be noise musicians and experimental artists. There was more of an ethos than anything aesthetic.

every artist or band does their own thing and it imparted on me to search myself to do something starkly different too. if your music sounded too much like someone else, they made fun of you. it was a sort of failed revolution, the ethos and our actions obliterated from memory, but that's ok, it's stronger this way. i'm hopelessly unsentimental but it should be said some of our soldiers have died but the ideal they lived is still burning. the search never ends.

Do you think you've carried that ethos with you since?

In some ways. I'm a little skeptical of business, wary of it, and protective of my creativity.

What do you think are the key differences between the artist and human that you hear on Seed Cake on Leap Year and the songwriter that you hear on recent albums?

Well, probably a lot. The first thing that comes to mind is that I never thought about people reading my lyrics. Now I pretty much write the words first. I have to feel good about the lyrics before anything. Back then, the words were just sounds. Every once in a while something might have meaning, but mostly it's just music.

You've said more than once that you consider yourself lucky to have been able to explore and to be protective of your creativity. Do you really think it's luck? Do you think there's another part to it? Is there something that another person could replicate or borrow?

Well, I don't know what other people can learn from me. I don't know where songs come from. There's no formula. But what I appreciate is the time to be open to whatever comes in. I give myself a lot of time to do that. Sometimes I'm climbing up the walls. Sometimes it's really just sitting around waiting for nothing, just wasting time. But time is the freest thing that I can think of.