On showing up with genuine curiosity

What was your initial vision of being a professional writer?

I don’t think I knew a professional writer until I got to college. My parents were both public [school] teachers. They were not musicians, not even particularly musical people. My mom was invested in visual art, painting, and sculpture. That was around me more than music. I grew up in a small town in the Hudson Valley. The thought of being a professional writer seemed insane and hilarious. It wasn’t a thought I had until I got to college and realized I had an aptitude for it.

School was a net positive for you?

I’m still a person who craves and benefits from institutional validation. Having someone say, “Hey, you’re pretty good at this.”I teach now too, I’m a writer in residence at NYU Gallatin. I have that thought in my mind all the time. Someone saying, “Hey, keep going.” How seismic that can be. Just that one bit of affirmation or validation that gives you the courage and the balls to keep at it.

Has teaching impacted your own work?

Teaching is humbling, energizing and exhausting. I’ve liked the challenge of teaching writing because it’s forced me to articulate a process and practice that can be ephemeral. I interview musicians all the time who speak about songwriting as this kind of divine channeling. Where they’re just an antenna and the signal comes in. It sounds lofty and pretentious for a music critic to say, but creative writing of any kind can feel that way, too.

I don’t totally know where it comes from. I just know I’m typing as fast as I can when it happens. But teaching, you can’t stand in the front of a classroom and say, “Hey, just be a big antenna.” You can, but that won’t get you through a whole semester. Learning to be precise and specific about craft. These are the tools in your toolbox, the choices you can make, the ways you can put a sentence, paragraph, and story together. These are real things we can learn and talk about, hone and practice. It’s fun to hang around with a bunch of incredibly smart 20-year-olds and say, “Tell me what’s cool. What’s interesting to you? What resonates with you?” I feel incredibly lucky to have that advantage.

Do you address the reality of the current music journalism landscape?

I could never stand there and promise there’s any sort of return on investment in a criticism class. I justify it by thinking—learning that skill, the work of translating an ineffable experience, the listening experience, translating that into a coherent, legible idea or set of ideas—that’s useful. This thing happened, you felt this, you’ve heard this song, now you’re going to write four sentences about what that was like and what it meant. But man, it’s a very grim landscape for anybody wanting to start out in media. You want to be realistic while also not discouraging anyone. You want to be honest.

How do you prepare for an interview? Can you over prepare?

You want to show up with genuine curiosity about who they are and what their work means. If you over researched, you can back yourself into a corner, feeling like there’s not anything left to know. You’ll get a pre-established narrative in your mind about who this person is and how they think about what they do. There’s no room there for them to show up and be a different person. You want to leave room for both. Being genuinely curious and letting a person tell you who they are. Not showing up thinking, “Well, I’ve already figured it out because I read 40,000 words on this person last night.”

What’s your approach for live, on-stage interviews?

Interviewing people on stage is something I’m relatively new at being comfortable with. There’s something I like about moving words around on my screen. I get to have the story make sense the way that I want it to. Interviewing someone live is a bit wild, you’re not driving the car by yourself. The hardest part is really learning to listen. If your nerves get in the way, you’re sort of like, “Fuck, I’m on this stage. I’m not used to this. All these people are looking at me. I’m on the stage with this person who’s very practiced at being on stage. I probably look like a buffoon.” You get in your own head and they’re talking and answering your question and you’re not listening, because you’re like, “Oh, my god. Do I have something on my face? Did I make a weird noise? What’s going on?”

What strategies do you use to make your subjects feel comfortable?

The dynamic can sometimes resemble therapist-patient. It’s a bit like an endless first date. An unusual, singular social dynamic that has taken me a long time to get comfortable with. I used to show up and think, “I’m going to be professional. I’m going to have my list of questions, I’m going to read through them, boom, boom, boom. I’m here to do a job.” I’ve let that go almost entirely. I will prepare a bunch of questions, but try as hard as I can to not take them out of my bag.

Also, trying to volunteer a little bit about myself. In the past I thought this was an embarrassing thing for a critic to do. Now I think it’s useful and necessary. To chip away at the interrogation aspect. I don’t particularly want to talk about myself, but it helps put someone at ease if you ask a question and then volunteer a little snippet, “Oh, well, this is when that happened to me. It’s sort of how I felt. How did it feel for you?” It makes it feel less blatantly transactional, a little more like a normal conversation.

Are there key indicators that an interview has gone well?

I’m always a little surprised when I get the transcript back. Sometimes I’ll be like, “Amanda, you idiot. Why didn’t you ask this very obvious follow-up question?” Other times I’ll hear myself respond to someone and think, “I’m so glad I asked that” I go into that blackout state. That happens anytime you’re connecting with someone. It’s like when you’re on a good date and the chemistry is right, you’re finishing each other’s sentences. You have a shared set of references, you’re suggesting something and the other person is like, “Yeah, totally.”

There’s an energy that can be quite palpable. The opposite is also true. When you’re like, “Wow, this person and I have different ideas about life and art.” Their art specifically. The tension can be interesting. I’m someone who doesn’t necessarily believe that artists are always the best stewards or explainers of their own work. This is going to sound lofty, but sometimes I think critics can do a better job of it. The fun thing about being the writer is you get to go home, look at these bits of conversation and put it together in a way that makes sense, where both of you are represented in a true and honest way.

How has the role of the critic changed in recent years?

Receiving and consuming art, letting yourself be changed by art is such a messy, human process. Criticism is inherently an intellectual exercise, a cerebral activity. When I was coming up, it was more antagonistic. There was this sense of objective authority threaded into the critic’s voice. There less of a tolerance for that now. Part of that has gone away with the idea of critics being purely gatekeepers of information. Now you can learn everything about a band in five minutes. That’s a good change. It makes criticism more complicated and exciting when it hinges less upon some grand qualitative judgment of good or bad. This place where criticism is moving, where it’s occupying this stranger, more fraught, fruitful, middle ground, it’s a good thing. Looking at different ways of writing about music that aren’t so plainly judgmental while making sure judgment is a small piece of it. That needs to remain in the mix a bit.

Criticism is getting broader and bigger. Less male and less aggressive. All these things that were true when I was a younger critic 20 years ago, they’ve faded a bit. I was thinking earlier today that we had this moment in criticism where suddenly the job opened up to different backgrounds, people with different voices and points of view. It seems like that happened at the exact moment the whole industry sort of tanked. I’s so fucked that the minute the job started being possible for women and people of color was also right when you stopped being able to make a decent living at it.

Is there still room for negative criticism?

It’s a fragile moment for critics in that way. We’ve seen a precipitous decline in pans and negative criticism. There’s a lot of trepidation. Some of it may be justified. About fan armies and people screaming at you on Twitter and who is entitled or qualified to write about what, you have to stay in your lane. Or is staying in your lane in fact sort of racist and fucked up. Can you only write about music that is made by people like you because that’s your experience and what you understand? Or is that too narrow, exclusive and insane? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. It’s good we’re asking them. The panicked response is to pull back. You don’t want to say anything too bold because you don’t want to lose your job.

How important is it to write about something you don’t immediately ‘get’?

I did a piece a couple of years ago on Metallica. It was a long profile. They’re not a band that entered my cultural lexicon until recently. I was so curious about them because it was not my thing. I didn’t immediately understand why it was great, why people loved it.

That’s a great tool when you’re reporting because you’re in this guileless state of wonder. I remember going to see them play in Vegas with 80,000 people. Everyone’s going fucking nuts. People are stoked. I’m looking around being like, “Wow, what is this actualizing for these people?” That’s a fun place to report from. You’re free of your own taste and judgment. You’re just there to figure it out. I like that more and more. When I was younger, I was less inclined to write about things that I didn’t understand. Now I’m sort of like, let me at it.

I’d imagine writing obituaries to also be a challenge.

Obituaries are weirdly a big part of the job of being a pop music critic at The New Yorker. You have to do them very quickly, which maybe is a blessing because you don’t get to dwell too long. We don’t pre-write. That seems ghastly, although a lot of publications do that. They’re spontaneous, written in that raw, tender moment where you’ve just found out this person whose work meant a lot to you or to the world is no longer among us. I write them fast and in a weird, foggy state of…grief seems like an overreach, but I think it’s grief. When someone dies and their music was a big part of you, who you are and how you came to understand yourself, I think you do grieve them.

I try not to get bogged down in the broad view and instead zoom the camera in on a couple little things this person did or made that were extraordinary. Stay with the details. That’s advice I give my students a lot. It can be paralyzing when you’re writing about a song or a record. “Where do I start? How do I get into this thing?” Just one thing. One lyric, sound, melody, or bit of rhythm.

Describe it, think about it. Start small. From there, maybe you get a bit bigger, maybe you don’t. I’ve written obituaries of people where I’ve briefly glossed over their whole biography and then it’s two paragraphs on a weird obscure performance or B-side. Giving yourself permission to do that, to follow the thing that intrigues you the most. Free yourself of the burden of writing something comprehensive.

What else helps the “getting started” process?

I’m going to say this at the risk of making a lot of writers want to punch me in the face, but I just love writing. That part of it has never felt as much like a struggle. There are other parts of this job that are hard, but writing is the best part of my day. When I don’t do it, I feel discombobulated, sad, mentally and emotionally disorganized. Writing is a sense-making process for me. I don’t know what I think about anything until I start to write it down. There are moments where there’s just no gas in the tank. Where you’re sick of yourself, the thing you’re writing about, or the job.

Begin anywhere. You don’t have to start at the beginning. You don’t have to write in a legible, coherent, chronological way. I rarely do. I free myself of the idea that I have to write my first sentence first. I never, ever do that. I also don’t write my last sentence last. It’s very disorganized until the end where it’s all sort of put together. I love the work of chiseling a line. I’m a line nerd, I get a particular rhythm in my head for how I want a sentence to be balanced and what I want it to communicate. I love that work of cracking away until it has the topography and shape I want. I find it more fun and satisfying than anything else in the world.

Has your relationship with receiving feedback changed over time?

Every writer gets that email back from an editor after they’ve submitted a big piece. If it has even anything in it that’s like, we’ve got to work on this, you’re so close, you’re like, fuck that. You’re pissed. When I was younger, I was defensive. Then you open the email again an hour later and you’re like, “Oh my god, they’re right. They’re saving me from embarrassing myself.” That’s always how that journey ends. You start defensive and angry and end in a place of gratitude.

Do you have writing rituals?

I’m an aesthetically charged person and also fussy about objects and space. I know writers who are great minimalists and just want an empty room. I don’t want that. I want talismans and totems all around that remind me of meaning or significance. I admire writers who are like, fuck it, and can work anywhere. I need all my nonsense, my little doodads and favorite pens.