Interviews

The interview pages here are a deliberate hybrid. Some are reconstructed from a real conversation that took place at a soundcheck, in a kitchen, in a green room, or on a phone call. Some are reported context pieces that frame what an artist had been doing in the months around the meeting. None of them invent quotes that the artist did not give.

That distinction matters because the site has been online long enough for some of those original recordings to no longer exist in clean form. Where a tape survives, the page can quote it. Where it doesn't, the page is upfront about working from notes, memory, and corroborating press from the same period.

How the interview series got organised

The archive reads in two threads.

Mixin' with is the older format. It paired a short interview with a small playlist that captured the artist's listening world at the time. The series spans Ladyhawk, Hoots and Hellmouth, Akron/Family, Best Coast, Nouvelle Vague, the Fruit Bats, and Brian Whelan, among others. The conversations stayed loose because the playlists carried half the weight.

Interviewin' is the longer-form thread. It tends to focus on artists with a particular project to discuss. Ronee Blakley on Robert Altman's Nashville, Paul Lacques of I See Hawks in L.A., and Nick Etwell of the Filthy Six are the strongest entries, and the ones that come up most often in citations from outside the site.

There is also a stand-alone marquee piece that does not fit either format: the much-cited world's most awkward interview with Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes from 2009.

What you will find on an interview page

Most pages follow a similar shape:

• a short introduction that places the artist and the conversation in time
• a section of reconstructed exchanges, marked clearly so the reader can tell quote from paraphrase
• a contextual middle that fills in the records, tour, or project the conversation was orbiting
• a closing thought, sometimes a recommendation, sometimes a small criticism

This is editorial writing about a conversation. It is not a press release, and it is not a fanzine spread.

A first list to read

Here is a representative cut for new readers.

• The world's most awkward interview with Robin Pecknold
• Interviewin' Ronee Blakley on Robert Altman's Nashville and more
• Mixin' with the Fruit Bats
• Mixin' with Hoots and Hellmouth
• Mixin' with Best Coast
• Mixin' with Akron/Family
• Interviewin' Paul Lacques of I See Hawks in L.A.
• Interviewin' Nick Etwell of the Filthy Six
• Mixin' with Brian Whelan
• Mixin' with Ladyhawk
• Mixin' with Nouvelle Vague

A note on tone

The strongest interviews on the site are the ones where the artist clearly trusted the room. That tends to come through most in the smaller ones - a slow conversation in a kitchen with a tour-tired band, or a green-room aside that ran longer than expected. It comes through less in the more formal pieces. The series tries to preserve that quality where it exists rather than smoothing it over.

The pages also try to resist the most common failure mode of long-running music interviews on the web: the interviewer talking about the interviewer. Where the writing intrudes, it is to give the reader context they would not have, not to perform.

Where to go next

If you want to follow a thread out of this room, the Mixtapes index collects the listening essays that often pair with the conversations here. The Movie Lounge holds the longer film and documentary pieces, including the Ronee Blakley follow-up reading of Nashville. The Picture Book collects single-image essays that sometimes carry an interview's argument better than a transcript could.

The interview series is still active. New conversations are added when they are worth writing up rather than on a publishing schedule.