In 1978, a young art director with almost no racing experience talked his way into a 550-horsepower Can-Am car. Paul Pfanner on the lifelong pattern that day set off, why stepping outside your lane draws the people you're meant to find,

Last week Paul Pfanner argued the barrier to making anything had fallen away. So he wrote and produced an album in a week to test it, and came back with the harder question waiting on the other side: what part of the work, and what part of him, is still real.