The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll.
The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before.
When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.
A whole bunch of months passed and I didn't hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age.
A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.
It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.
