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Edelman’s collaborators spoke of his supreme skill as an interviewer, how he builds rapport with his subjects, prodding them to reveal shockingly honest feelings about their lives. His method is simple but profound: preparation and duration. He inhales every document he can, synthesizes all he learns, prepares pages of questions and then, when he is in the room with an interview subject — often for many hours at a time — sets the notes aside. He knows so much about the people he is speaking to that he disarms them, producing obscure episodes from their pasts that intrigue them. He is “offering them a real space to talk about their experience. To really roam around and find the right words,” Rosenberg told me. “You see people thinking on camera,” and their buried memories begin to surface.

"Preparation and duration" generally the wisest tactics for accomplishing anything

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I thought about whether seeing these images amounted to a desecration. Does the whole world need to know about the very private, ugly torments of this genius? But then I registered the dominant sensation the film produced, which was awe. Whatever chaos was unfolding in the corners of Paisley Park, in public Prince alchemized it into singing that was majestic and generative and leapt over walls. The film shows, more movingly and convincingly than almost anything I’ve seen, how life can illuminate art, and yet how separate the two things really are. The bruises and mess of experience are transfigured by the artist into something coherent and whole: a perfect offering.

From Sasha Weiss's epic story on the Prince documentary the world maybe never see

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Two pictures I took when I was in high school. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings opening for Bright Eyes at Town Hall during the Cassadega residency in May 2007. Gillian and Conor that night

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A painful experience is just an experience. That’s where the real sort of growth and transcendence happens. Maybe you wish it wasn’t, but why even wish? I mean, do you not want the spectrum of life? I think you do.

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Both Rawlings and Welch talk of a moment that decided their partnership, a month or two after leaving Berklee and moving to Nashville in 1992. They were sitting in Rawlings’s kitchen. Knowing they had a shared interest in duets, they started noodling around on their guitars and singing the classic “Long Black Veil.” They instantly sensed the bones of something good, potential they honed until it was fully realized. Rawlings tells me, “If you have the same North Star as someone, and if you’re trying to walk in the same direction, something will click.”

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Garner’s prose is a singular mixture of intimacy and distance. Indeed, we often learn about her characters by how quickly they characterize or mischaracterize each other. Sometimes the sense of choral consciousness produced by this swiftly circulating point of view reminds me of a radically pared-down Virginia Woolf. [...] Garner, like the skilled musician, knows how to leave a silence, how to keep domains of privacy and mystery intact. In “The Children’s Bach,” there are no false resolutions. The efficiency and precision of Garner’s descriptions (Philip, for instance, falls “into strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg”) allows her to accomplish in a sentence what for other writers would require pages of exposition, ruining the effect. And the speed at which decisions unfold—watch Athena’s life beautifully unravel (or are we watching it finally begin?) in the first six paragraphs of her trip to Sydney—reminds us how plot is inseparable from a writer’s prosody, the rhythm of events. When the sentences are as finely tuned as Garner’s, music as much as character is fate.

Ben Lerner on Helen Garner's "The Children's Bach" the best novel I've read in many months

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I love the lyric, "Do you still have that one tattoo? / That's how it works / Of course you do," which seems simple on the surface but to me feels like a nice example of literary compression in songwriting. How long have you known this person, to remember their old tattoo? What impression did the tattoo make, how did it shape your idea of them? How dizzied are you in the moment, forgetting its permanence? History, ink, awkward enthusiasm, memory, it brings up a lot (like this band for me).

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Katie playing Can't Do Much acoustic in 2018, cry

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Thought about this in Memphis. So beautiful

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Pregaming for Houston next week

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Rodrigo said she’s “always loved rock music, and always wanted to find a way that I could make it feel like me, and make it feel feminine and still telling a story and having something to say that’s vulnerable and intimate.” She beamed, her eyes bright under light winged makeup, talking about how artists she admires are “using rock music, but they’re not trying to recreate a version of rock music that guys make.”

O.R. on feminizing rock

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Hard to overstate my love for the new Hurray for the Riff Raff album "The Past Is Still Alive" and in the spirit of the title phrase I've been in a HFTRR YouTube-archive rabbit hole that I hope never ends

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Laurie Anderson skewering the concept of "experts" on late nite TV in 2010. When I saw her at BAM in October she added a line about the so-called "experts" who condone bombing hospitals.