Sasha Frere-Jones

RM

I want to start out by talking about the relationship between, on the one hand, writing music criticism and, on the other, working as a professional musician—or, maybe “professional” is a slightly misleading word, seeing as nobody really seems to make a consistent living off touring anymore. There’s often a looseness to descriptive prose in most music criticism that wouldn’t hold in most other venues, which in previous interviews you’ve suggested may be due in part to the relative lack of cross-pollination between those who make music and those who write about it as a vocation. Does your work as a musician inform the sense of responsibility you feel towards writing music criticism? Do you feel a greater obligation towards factual accuracy as a result?

SFJ

I stopped playing with Ui in 2003 and got the New Yorker gig in January of 2004. Ui did one reunion show at the 2010 Primavera Festival and I did a remix of Pylon’s “Yo-Yo” under the name Calvinist in 2011 but, other than that, I didn’t play or record during the eleven years I was staff at The New Yorker.

In terms of process, there are very few similarities between playing and writing. The parts of myself that I use to write and the parts I use to play music are very distinct. One is almost entirely physical (the larger brain of the body) and one is located somewhere in the psychic fog of the brain. Both are channeling the spirit, and that is a crucial similarity. Having said that, my familiarity with the process of playing and recording music had a lot to do with my thinking I could or should write about music.

The first time music writing appealed to me was in the mid-’80s. I noticed that people were talking about rap in a way that felt ahistorical and weirdly inaccurate. I say it was weird because it had just happened and critics were already getting facts wrong. There was an article that came out that said something to the effect of, “Because of Rakim and Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane, people started rapping across the bar line.” And I thought, “Sure, all three of those guys are great rappers, and yes, they all do similar things with rhythm, but Rakim hit the stores and radio first.” I was buying these records and heard it happen in real time. Maybe Rakim did know someone who was doing the same thing—I wouldn’t know unless I asked him—but in terms of the records that came out, Rakim was the first with that style to hit the market.

Also, when people say things like, “Rap actually started in 1973,” it can soften the usefulness of history itself. Rap started when “Rapper’s Delight” came out, because no more than thirty people thought they should spend time rapping until a rap record came out and people said “Oh, man I love this rap music on this rap record.” It became a socially connected music when a bunch of people who did not know each other could use it as a form and find each other to do just that. To back up—whenever that Rakim and Kool G Rap article came out, I had the idea that somebody should probably try to correct those mistakes when they happen, right away. It’s like training a dog. You wait too long and the dog has no idea what input they are getting or why. Just like people!

I was nineteen  or twenty when I had that thought about Rakim. It was 1986. I sent an entry, entirely uninvited, to the Village Voice that year. I wanted to be a part of the annual “Pazz & Jop” poll, and I thought I could just send my list to them and get into the magazine. (I still have that entry—it was very derivative of music writing, mostly Greg Tate’s. Doug Simmons wrote back, “No, thank you.” He was very polite. This was all done by physical letter mail.) The comments section of the Pazz and Jop poll was like Twitter—it was way ahead of its time. People would send in long essays and comments and the editors would chop them up into these fragments and make these chains that went on for pages. It was so great to read, much better than the final rankings themselves. Anyway, that was the only time I thought about writing music criticism, until I met Ann Marlowe in 1994.

When I was a kid, my focus was on becoming a playwright and being in theater. I don’t think I’ve stressed this enough, maybe because it didn’t really sink in until now. Everything I wanted to do was contained in those three years of doing theater really seriously at St. Ann’s. My theater mentors were Nancy Fales-Garrett and Tazewell Thompson, and my writing teacher was Joe Flaherty. The play I wrote as a junior, We Three Kings, won the Young Playwrights Festival, or was one of like ten winners. (It was a kind of violent riff on American Buffalo. Times were violent!) I was actually the lower tier—I only got a staged reading at The Public, not a full production. But these experiences formed me. I got to work with amazing actors at that reading—Željko Ivanek and John Pankow were in it. When I was still at St. Ann’s, the following year, I had Josh Hamilton in my second play. I was privileged beyond reason to have these opportunities. Taz put us in The Firebugs, by Max Frisch. I wasn’t an arsonist, I was just one of the fireman chorus members. The whole play was done in black and white and we were costumed as kind of a surreal Village People. That theater department is the key to everything I do. This all happened before I got to college.

When I got to Brown, the theater community wasn’t as rich as what I’d found at St. Ann’s. Or maybe it was! But I went to one weird audition and bailed. I sometimes bail without warning, which is both a blessing and a curse. I kind of like starting from scratch. I ended up making a film and starting my first serious band, Dolores, when I was nineteen. Being in a band worked better than film and from that point on, that’s what I did. It didn’t occur to me to write again. I just made music until 1994, and then I met Ann Marlowe and started writing for Pretty Decorating. (She published five issues total and I was in all of them.) I started writing more. I needed money and I needed to gig, so I kept different day jobs.

In 2004, the New Yorker thing happened, which became something of an obelisk in my life. To a lot of people, that’s the only thing they see. That’s the only thing I’ver done, according to them. I’m almost ten years away from that gig and I still get called “New Yorker music critic.” I’m grateful that I got the job—very. Believe me, I get it. It’s not lost on me how rare it is to be able to pay the bills by writing and get an audience, but it was also primarily a way to pay the bills. I can’t say with any confidence that criticism is my calling but then I’m not sure what is. I’m glad I get to think about these divisions at all.

I think of my life in terms of being an artist who ended up doing other things for work and got some recognition for that work and learned new ways of writing and researching. That makes me immensely happy and grateful. I’m going overboard on gratitude because I’ve lost a lot of people and a lot of time and a lot of stuff. I take great joy in my situation here, above the dirt.

The memoir was a way to elevate the process, to get back to what I have always been trying to do. Maybe it fuses all the practices, like music plus writing, but as writing? That’s poetry, I guess. Ariana Reines said this felt like a long poem, like Frank O’Hara but not gay. Truly write that in stone! And from her? I’m dead.

I feel about Earlier the way I do about records I’ve put out. What I mean is, well. We’re mixing the second Body Meπa record right now and when that’s done and out in the world, I won’t be bothered by what people think. I don’t mean that in an aggro way—these pieces of work, like the book or other records, come from a spiritual place and take a long time to make. There has been enough time to sit with it and make it exactly what it should be.

The Sakamoto piece that just came out on The New Yorker website is a good example of what happens to that kind of work on the journalistic timeline. I was editing a version of that piece for almost a year. Before the writing itself, there was another year of prep work. But then—pow! I suddenly had to deal with all the fact-checking in less than eight hours because it was being posted the next day. Months of silence and then you hear the starter pistol! It’s a frustrating way to work on a complex piece. These are the material constraints placed on journalism. It’s disheartening to work on something that is based on reflection and storytelling and poetry which all of a sudden falls down this chute and ends up mangled by this breaking news protocol! Go go go. I hate it. I am often very grateful for the training and tools I got from journalists who taught me but were completely disgusted by the business they work in.

When you make an album or a book, usually you are not being asked to make something to spec. If you say to your label, “Hey, we need another month, we don’t know what’s going on yet,” they’ll usually say OK, unless you’re Dua Lipa and the label needs the record in the stores immediately. In the case of working with Semiotext(e) on Earlier, I wrote the book for the mother of my children, Deborah, and then let it sit for a year. Then I rewrote it because I could see what had worked and what hadn’t.

Having time to sit with something changes your relationship to the end result, especially after it rumbles into the world. At that point, the reviews can be revealing, even when they’re critical or big mad. It’s a different situation when I’m on a train scribbling on the side of a takeout bag and trying to get a review up in time. When pieces are long, people think, “Oh man, you must have had so much time to do that,” it’s like sure, maybe, but then a month ago somebody higher up that I didn’t even get to talk to objected to all of these different things, so everything you’re reading was hastily rewritten last week, when it was allegedly going up, but then it didn’t.

I was talking to an editor that I quite like recently, because we were working on a piece and parts had gotten moved around. I felt like the piece was fine and there wasn’t anything wrong with the ideas. But I said to this editor, “I feel like I’m writing for a TV show that I like,” because the work wasn’t what I originally wrote and it didn’t represent how I think or the rhythm I imagined, even though it was, in general, a perfectly OK piece. In moments like that, the writer is part of a larger team that’s going to bring you a piece about Lou Reed or Ryuichi Sakamoto or whoever, with their framing and your ingredients. Not a bad day job, mind you, but different than telling the deepest truth you can find.

I would like to spend more of my limited time on earth doing things differently. Earlier has only been out for a week and it’s already been such a satisfying experience. I feel so blessed that people are connecting with it. People can hand books to each other, physically, which is beautiful.

When you’re working in a journalistic framework, you’re going to be making the donuts and you may like the donuts but you did not design the donuts. The publication may let you put a few sprinkles on the donut of the month, but they are selling the donuts that they have advertised to the world. They have a financial relationship to their owners and the subscribers. The writers just come in to make the donuts. I can flatter myself and say, “Oh my lord, nobody has ever made a donut like that before.” The fact remains that it’s their donut and feelings of agency are probably an illusion.

It took me a long time to realize that I could be writing independently, even though I had lived that way as a musician since I was a teenager. A wall existed between the writing and music, very much propped up by the demands of my landlords. Semiotext(e) takes their cues one hundred percent from the writer—they don’t get in your way. Why did it take me so long to realize I could write for such people? Fear, financial insecurity, obvious stuff. There’s this thing my wife says, which gets to the idea in many fewer words: “Some things you do for the meal, some things you do for the reel.” There are things you do for money and things you do for your spiritual needs. When it comes to that second category, I have no resentments. I don’t care if only two people buy my book or if nobody gives my record a high rating on Discogs. I’m just thrilled that it’s made it into the world. That was a really long answer to your initial question.

RM

No, no, it’s all really great. There are so many things I want to get to in what you’ve just said. Your point about the varied durations and timelines undergirding these different processes is really interesting. When you’re putting out a record, unless you’re someone like Taylor Swift and have the market power to tell a pressing plant, “Freeze everything else you’re doing, we’re pressing a couple hundred thousand copies of this vinyl right now and want it out next month,” you’re essentially at the whim of what is an unavoidably, torturously long waiting game. By the time there are physical copies made and the record is out in the world, it’s usually been a year or two since you’ve approved the final mixes. There’s been time for the material to settle internally—even though the general public is just hearing the record for the first time, you’ve had a year or more to revisit it and pick things apart. Or, to maybe put it a different way, you’re allowed the grace of a substantial amount of time to parse apart your own relationship to the material before it goes out into the world and is subjected to the evaluation of others. There’s a sort of truism I often return to about music, which is this idea that people tend to love music in a more directly personal, or robustly individual way than they do most other forms of art—something about the medium frees up a certain space for a hyper-individual form of love. Love songs aren’t just love songs in the abstract, for instance, they’re specific songs that someone associates with listening to over and over again while crushing on a specific person—it’s not just a love song, it’s their love song. What does the emotional headspace of making music, or even the emotional headspace of writing your first book, look like for you? How does this time to breathe, or this feeling that you aren’t being forced to instrumentalize the work to fit the tastes of another, change the way that the process feels?

SFJ

I have to make music and I have to write a book like Earlier. I don’t have to write criticism at all. Up until 2003, I hadn’t really thought of myself as anything other than an artist. When I started working full-time as a critic, it forced me to work and see things more quickly, and that was good training. There’s something healthy about being involved in public conversation, and that sets criticism aside from the other work rooted entirely in the self. The conversation that plays out in criticism is essentially a public conversation about our relationship to each other. This, in turn, demands that you think about why you’re writing. That’s not a bad question to answer every few months.

Most people, unless they’re rich, aren’t able to kick back and write a book when they’re twenty years old. You have to get a job. If you’re interested in writing, which takes quite a good deal of time to do, you’d like to get paid for the time you put in. It’s almost impossible. I mean, we can talk about all of the editors and writers in New York City who don’t actually have to work for a living, but that’s another topic. Understandably, people who have a way of expressing themselves end up on professional assembly lines. But at a certain point those people may realize they have agency. They have developed skills and networks, and they can get off the line. It isn’t easy but it may be the most necessary step. I am possibly projecting! [Laughs.]

The tricky part about that assembly line work is that the writer can begin to nod off and serve the worst needs of the worst masters. Here is an anodyne example. I had to take Anna Wintour’s name out of a blog post for The New Yorker. This was maybe 2014. Wintour had just become the overall editorial head for Condé Nast. You can fact check the details, I might be getting the timeline wrong, but the general point is correct. I went to do a piece on the punk show at the Met. I had a good time writing the piece, which mentioned her by name. The editor took it out. I wasn’t even saying anything qualitative. I was simply positing that she, as a person, exists and was there and is powerful, because she is, right? It had no bearing on the content of the piece but they got nervous and removed it. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something banal and obvious like, “Fashion is something that people like Anna Wintour are concerned with.” There are a hundred conversations like that that happen at the level of words and sentences and inflection and tone. I mean, look at what’s happening in publishing right now. Am I going to lose a book contract because I have that on my wall? [Motions towards a Palestinian flag hanging in the background]. It sounds insane, but it’s apparently not out of the question. Obviously, I’m fancy and white, so they’re probably not going to come for me, but what if one of the donors up the food chain gets mad?

The idea of solidarity is important here and it’s not always apparent how to enact it. Art is not initially about solidarity, because it’s just coming out of you—it’s just you and your expression of your consciousness. When Albert Ayler or Nina Simone or Doja Cat makes music, that’s their consciousness coming directly out of their body. The solidarity comes into play when the art goes into the world and choices need to be made. Journalism is different—it is always going into the world, it is always a group activity. That’s where solidarity presents itself—immediately in the act of making the work exist.

The question comes to the front in these moments: Why write something in public for other people to read? Do you want to sell people stuff or do you want to help people learn from each other? I’m very interested in the latter and not at all interested in the former. If I’m attempting this project of “social writing,” or whatever you want to call it, then I have to keep an eye on how exactly I’m doing it. Am I honoring the people I’m writing about and honoring the ideas I’m trying to communicate? How many compromises am I making?

RM

I’m interested in your point about cultivating tone, or developing a writerly voice—most particularly, perhaps, as it relates to these different sorts of commercial anxieties that trickle down the food chain. There’s a passage I was really drawn to in Earlier, where you talk about your time working as a copywriter at Columbia House in the mid ’90s and how that style of writing was, in some sense, a practice in aping the tone of professional music critics and repackaging it in a nakedly commercial context. Could you talk a bit about what the idea of a “critical voice” means to you? The type of authoritativeness that readers often expect from criticism at times feels perhaps a little at odds with—or at least exists in complicated relation to—the type of “social” writing you’re describing, yeah?

SFJ

My job at Columbia House was interesting because there was a certain intentionality to the job, which was centered around trying to figure out what people on the receiving end think about. We would basically be given a bunch of records to sell to people. Every now and then I could maybe ask like, “Hey, can we put the new Tricky record at the front of the catalog?” or something. I would try to write something funny or try not to make it sound dumb. I think the people who get those catalogs are smart enough to understand that they’ve signed up for a record club and that what they’re reading isn’t journalism. I don’t know, maybe some of them really did think that we had gone through all of the records in the world and chose the best ones. Either way, it felt like a fairly mild crime. I didn’t personally care if we sold any records, although I did try to make sure that I didn’t get into a place where things felt wrong.

I haven’t regularly read the music press since the ’90s. Around the time I was in college, I started to become aware of this entire larger ecosystem of ideas and culture, and it became increasingly easy to find records that I liked in an organic way. I read music criticism as a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, but that was just because I was trying to find the names of records. Sometimes I would agree with someone like Bob Christgau, for instance, and other times I wouldn’t. I never understood the whole rating game though—that’s always felt crazy to me. I think it’s a little impossible for a younger person to imagine what all of this was like, pre-web. At that time, having a physical copy of a book that had the names of hundreds of records and lists of different things was valuable. There was this weird British book that Paul Gambaccini edited called Critic's Choice: Top 200 Albums that came out in the late ’70s that included contributions from Greil Marcus and a bunch of other writers. They all gave their lists of their top ten records of all time. It was the first time I’d ever seen a bunch of these names. I was like, “Huh, there’s this band called Can and they’ve got a picture of a can of okra on their record cover—what’s up with that?” So, I ended up buying a copy of Ege Bamyasi just because I liked the name and thought the cover was so weird. I had no idea that it was this important record or landmark in music history or anything like that.

This brings me to what I wanted to say about record stores. There are all of these great record stores that sell online. The biggest one for me is Boomkat in Manchester but then there’s also All Night Flight and World of Echo, and places like Aquarius in San Francisco, who started sending out these amazing email roundups in the ’90s. I love the write-ups all of these places do. They’re fantastic writers and have reliable taste. All of this comes in via email lists or web listings you see at the point of purchase.

These are people trying to sell you records, so that aspect is transparent from the jump. In some ways, that makes the writing much less fraught than at a place like, say, Pitchfork. And that’s not to criticize Pitchfork, but it is important to understand that it’s much more difficult in a context like that to actually achieve in writing the level of objectivity or freedom from influence that you’re ostensibly pretending to have. I’ve never written for a commercial publication that was free of external influence. It doesn’t exist. You always have advertisers and other people pushing different agendas at magazines. What’s weird about that dynamic is that, as a writer, you still have to convincingly pretend that what you’re doing is objective and not motivated by commercial interests.

In record stores, the dynamic is reversed. Even though it’s happening in a more nakedly commercial space, it’s easier to trust the writing that comes out of those stores. You know that they sell records they don’t believe in that much and you know from the outset that not every record in that store is music the staff cares about. But, they aren’t going to push the records they don’t like. The stuff that they put in their newsletters is the stuff they care about. They don’t have to worry what you think about it, or what the label thinks about it. They’re still selling all the records regardless of whether they write about them or not, so nobody is going to complain. Record labels will never pressure the stores as hard as they pressure the publications. When the commerce is put to the front and the relationship is made crystal clear, it has a way of freeing the writers up to say what they actually think. They don’t have to worry about the records they don’t like, because they can just put them on the shelf and then forget that they ever existed in the first place, even if it’s something hugely popular. Like, John Peel would play Half Man Half Biscuit and these happy hardcore jungle records that he loved and then he’d be like, “Here’s the 97th session I’ve done with The Fall.” He would play big bands sometimes. He liked Pulp and would play their new singles. But you could always tell the difference between the songs he liked and the songs he felt so-so about. If he never, ever played a band, that’s how you knew he didn’t like them. Over time, you’d come to the conclusion, “Ok, this guy just absolutely does not like Oasis at all.” Being a radio DJ is inherently promotional, running a record store is inherently promotional. In a way, it’s easier to trust people who have admitted upfront that they’re trying to sell you on something.

On the other hand, with magazines, there’s this strange attitude of like, “I wore a mask to the restaurant and nobody knows who I am here, this is all coming purely from an unbiased position” or, “My authority says that there has never been an album like this before.” In reality, it may turn out that the editor’s best friend was like, “I love this band, you’ve gotta write about them.” The dynamic may be infinitely more compromised than a record store, and you will never ever know.

I feel really bad for a lot of the people who do big box criticism today. It’s gotten so much worse. You have these huge online fan armies who are ready to pin all of these accusations on you just because you happen to be a somewhat public figure. Like, earlier this year Lana Del Rey accused me of saying something that actually came from somebody else’s review. I had someone else’s work attributed to my name, which is a pain in the ass. Interview magazine was cool about printing a correction, right in the middle of the interview. [Laughs.]

There’s a new landscape unfolding where critics are now forced to deal with extremely vocal artists who, for the most part, don’t want to hear anything said about them other than proclamations of how great they are, and who have this whole stand-in army of hyper-online fans who are ready to mobilize to their defense. (We did this first draft of this interview before the Beyhive came for Angelica Jade Bastién and her fantastic piece about Renaissance, which would have been welcomed without beef as recently as maybe ten years ago. The stans were not happy.)

RM

Sure, it’s like the time delay that existed between a magazine issue coming out and a letter to the editor appearing in the following issue has collapsed, not to mention the total evaporation of any sort of editorial control over which letters do or don’t make it onto the page in the first place.

SFJ

Obviously, there’s no critic who commands the same amount of cultural power as Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, so it’s never a symmetrical fight. Considering the fact that the majority of critics aren’t making that much money, it does not generally seem worth it to get into it with all of these mega stars and their volunteer armies.

But the overall landscape changing is not entirely bad, at all. If you’re on X, formerly known as Twitter, or in the comment sections of Reddit, you see some smart and hilarious people who have the freedom to make interesting points about a massive record by The 1975 or BTS from a position of anonymity. They aren’t incurring the same risk of having some BTS fan burn their house down, which a Pitchfork writer does at least have to think about. Music writing exists in these different, semi-professional registers now—it’s not the same as it used to be, but it’s also not like everyone is living in some terrified and docile state. I can bemoan the fact that I can’t pay my rent with one grand essay anymore, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s better to have this widely dispersed hail of discussion.

The problem, obviously, is when things get throttled by the internet cops, who can be infinitely worse than magazine editors. There’s a Palestinian restaurant on the corner that has been fighting this ongoing issue. Google is taking down all of their positive reviews and leaving up all of these incredibly nasty reviews filed by people in Tel Aviv who have never been to the restaurant. That’s someone’s livelihood, you know? The stakes around something like that are much higher than, say, Doja Cat fans chasing someone off of social media for not liking her new single. But this is all happening in the same heavily surveilled digital trench. The more it’s surveilled, the more it’s monetized; the more it’s monetized, the more terrifying it all gets. And yet the internet is where the freest, most soulful writing has been, for at least a decade, maybe longer. That lack of gatekeeping is still massively important. I like a world where there are dozens of people like Moodybins and Margeaux on TikTok. That is much better, to me, than one or two fancypants critics standing at the gate. A popular art form deserves a popular criticism, in the real and many senses of those words.

RM

I want to track back to a moment ago when you brought up the point about how the more nakedly commercial a space is, the freer—perhaps paradoxically—it is from the tastemaking mandates of commercial interests. I’ve always found that to be a particularly convincing—albeit perhaps defensively convincing—argument for the continued relevance of brick-and-mortar spaces like bookstores and record stores. I worked at a bookstore for a number of years, and the most enjoyable part of the job was always getting to pick a new book for the staff recommendation wall once a week. In what was otherwise a pretty uninspiring, minimum wage retail job, moments like that felt like a way to not only actually interact with the physical books themselves in a way that felt personally meaningful—in a way that returned them from being just one amongst thousands of non-differentiated commodities we were moving through the store week to week—but also to link that sort of, say, “diet” de-commodification to a person to person interaction with whoever ended up purchasing the book off the wall. Sure, it’s another book that’s available for sale, but it’s also the book I care to see someone else reading—someone else buys it not because they’ve heard it was good in the New Yorker or from their book club, but rather because they know that it’s something I care about people reading. Maybe it’s all woo-woo and amounts to rather little—there are definitely at least as many bad books as there are good books that get that sort of recommendation treatment, in my opinion at least—but I’ve always felt that there’s a sort of limited space within those interactions to free up the spirit of books, to reinflate them into something more than just a blank commodity algorithmically pushed towards one or another audience on the basis of a predetermined notion of collective taste.

SFJ

Think about how much you trust those little write ups, those little cards you’ll see hanging off the shelves of your local bookstore. I usually see them and think, “This person reacted honestly to this material. Nobody stood between them and the writing of this index card.” When I used to write for Spin, which used a grading system, I would get frustrated by seeing grades inflated or deflated. A record that I gave a five might get turned into a six, or an eight might get lowered to a seven, which would leave me feeling like, “Wait, I absolutely loved that record, why did you say I thought it was a seven?”

RM

I can’t even imagine how many meetings had to take place ahead of something like Pitchfork deciding to give that Fiona Apple record the first ten out of ten rating in the past decade or so. Those sorts of determinations feel so divorced from the material itself, but it’s also not like they’re totally superfluous to the way it enters into the broader culture—they have pretty tangible financial implications. Such a massive part of the narrative around that record, for instance, had to do with the sheer fact that it got the “score” that it did—the debate immediately shifts from, “What do I think about this record?” to, “Do I think it deserves that score? Do I think it stands up to Marquee Moon, or insert other ‘ten’ record here?” That record probably wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big without that review. But obviously, at the same time, at the risk of sounding too “Woah dude” about it, what does “ten” even mean, right?

SFJ

I hope that we move past this scoring and aggregating era. There’s no human logic to it. If you’re incredibly sad, you’re probably not going to put on Slayer’s Reign in Blood but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good record—that doesn’t mean it gets docked a couple points as a work of art, right? Those sorts of conversations are great fun to watch play out amongst friends, but that doesn’t mean they should be committed to paper. I was just talking with my son this morning over breakfast about whether In on the Kill Taker or Repeater was the better Fugazi record, and it was a fun excuse to goof off and get into it with each other, but if I went and wrote an essay about how one was obviously better than the other in some sort of quantifiable, authoritative sense, that would amount to some type of critical fascism in my eyes.

RM

Right, those sort of frameworks for talking about art are best suited for like, dive bar chitchat—in that context though, they’re great!

SFJ

[Laughs.] Totally—if you want to have a couple drinks at the bar and argue about Jadakiss, man, invite me down there, I’ll have my seltzer and we can yell, it’ll be great. But, there’s no reason to think that that represents anything other than several isolated opinions leaning into each other. The worst part about this type of thinking is that it blocks out so much meaningful discussion. We’ve established that Blood on the Tracks is a great record, sure. We don’t need to re-rank it, or rank it at all. The fact that people will click on that list is a terrible justification for its existence. Wading through this material is such an awful way to spend the few minutes we have on this earth.

RM

I want to talk a bit about your relationship to reading. You mentioned that you don’t read much music criticism—which I feel is often also the case for most other musicians I talk to. What did your relationship to reading look like prior to becoming a full-time writer? Who were you reading? Did that relationship change as your writing life became a more prominent fixture?

SFJ

I read less now, oddly, because I read so many books for reviews. I am mostly always reading for work. I’ve simply never read much criticism, compared to other stuff. I’m usually reading some kind of reporting, or maybe a novel, or maybe poetry. This past few months, I’ve been re-reading and reading John Berger almost every day, or books about Palestine. Avi Shlaim and Rashid Khalidi for life.

RM

I hope this isn’t too jarring of a transition, but we really should get into your new book, Earlier, a bit more directly.

SFJ

I did write a book.

RM

[Laughs.] You wrote a good book! I was struck by the way you approached working with memory and temporality. The book is organized in a non-linear fashion: it’s a stream-of-consciousness style collection of all of these little epigrams and elliptical chunks, each of which is dated to a particular year in your life. A lot of the titles and dates seem to almost be playing with the reader, or drawing out these secondary layers of implied meaning—I’m thinking, for instance, of choosing to situate the section titled “Optimism” all the way back in 1973, or titling the section that covers you starting the job at Columbia House in 1995 “The Last Easy Job (1994).” It’s not really a question of unreliable narration though, yeah? I mean, you do acknowledge the unreliability of your own recollections—I loved the passage where you warn the reader, “This memory is firmly situated on the ‘what the fuck even happened’ end of the spectrum,” or something to that effect. The point I’m trying to drive at though is that, rather than simply weaving in a sense of unreliable narration, you almost seem to be asking the reader if unreliable narration is even an interesting or worthwhile lens to approach the work through. How did you go about working through and organizing your own memories?

SFJ

There were bits and pieces I started writing for the book as far back as 2010 or 2011, almost none of which are in the final version. I picked some and rewrote them, but the final book you’ve read was rewritten almost entirely from scratch. The process of finishing the first version of the book started as a specific assignment that I gave myself. I wrote it for Deborah Holmes, the mother of my children, so that she could read a copy of it before she passed. I had to get a finished version in production so that I could hand Deborah a copy while she was still with us. I showed it to a couple of friends, and one of them made note of the fact that I wrote everything in the present tense, and that I didn’t really add much in the way of meta-commentary. She said something to the effect of, “I like that you don’t add in any thoughts or details that you couldn’t have known in the moment.” That’s really the ethos with which I tried to approach each memory. Of course, there are a couple exceptions here and there, but for the most part I wanted to keep everything in the present tense because that’s how we experience having memories. If I’m remembering a moment from the past, I’m having the memory right now, in the present. You can’t experience in the past tense. Memories are like tapes. You play the tape, which means you’re hearing the tape now. We tape these memories in our head, and then we start to alter them—they slowly get transformed by these repeated dubbings that go on in our heads. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. If anything, I think that slow transformation is how we know that memory works in the first place.

Memory is just a process in the same way that writing or recording is. I wanted each one to be true to the consciousness moment, true to what I knew at the time. I wanted to avoid adding any fake wisdoms or conclusions. Everything had to feel accurate to how I remember it feeling in the moment—if that meant the chunk had to take the form of a weird AOL chat or whatever else, then that’s what I would do. It was a good assignment to give myself. It’s like, the total opposite of any sort of assignment a magazine editor will ever give you. That’s what’s so great about art. It’s primarily about our consciousness and how we experience the world. It needs to be honest—I was more interested in being honest to how I experienced the moment than I was in being accurate. I think that’s the case for a lot of the big writers who deal with memoir. Obviously, there’s Proust, and then there’s also Michel Leiris, who means a lot more to me personally—I mean, not that it’s a war or anything, I love them both. They slow things down in this really incredible way. It’s slower than sixteen RPM—it’s like, two RPM. Especially with Leiris, you’ll have like, pages and pages and pages soaking up a single moment in time. I didn’t take that exact route, mostly because I needed to sketch a whole life. I borrowed a bit of this idea of intentionality from Joe Brainard; I wanted to make sure the reader wouldn’t feel nervous or weirded out by this intense flow of fragments, so I got out ahead of it and made a point early on to very quickly say, “Hey, this is a book about an entire life, let me run through everything from zero to today as quickly as possible so you know what you’re dealing with.” Establishing that framework early on allowed me to go back to different moments in time in this more episodic fashion without it feeling too jarring or confusing.

RM

Did you draw upon any past journals or personal records during the writing process, or was that sort of method not of interest to you?

SFJ

Other than what was in that original 2011 document, no. Part of the assignment was “What actually comes to mind? What is in there now?” I didn’t want to write a Wiki about myself—I wanted to write something that has that odd cohesion that good art has. All of the pieces must be there, for some reason, even if you don’t know why. It forms a world of behavior and consciousness that is not like another world.

RM

Throughout the book, there seems to be this recurrent tension between, on the one hand, the capital-p Proper name or history of a thing—whether that thing is an artist, a genre, a person, or a defined sense of self—and then, on the other hand, the much more nebulous and ambiguous way in which these things exist and play out over a durational stretch of time.

SFJ

Yes.

RM

It feels as if you’re plotting out this middle ground between the solid names of things and then the cadence with which they’re actually experienced in real time. There’s a bunch of moments that come to mind, but I’m thinking, for instance, of when you talk about sobriety—there’s a distinction between literally becoming sober, or the moment where you make the active decision to stop drinking, and then this other feeling of “being sober,” which accrues over time in a much more piecemeal fashion. You don’t realize that you’ve come to understand yourself as “sober” until well after that understanding has silently cemented itself in the back of your consciousness. Or, to take another example, for months “Banned in D.C.” or “Pay to Cum” or “The Regulator” by Bad Brains—I can’t remember which track exactly you talk about right now, so my apologies—doesn’t exist in your brain as this canonical piece of punk history by the Bad Brains, it’s just some bizarre blast of sound that you encounter unexpectedly on the radio. It’s hard to access that feeling in retrospect, to understand how it felt before all of these added references and proper histories coagulate and shift your POV. To get back to your point of accuracy versus honesty, how did you go about trying to distance yourself from all this excess built up knowledge, how do you get yourself to the core of the experience in the moment? Were there any particular processes you used to try to prevent yourself from leaning back on “sage wisdom”?

SFJ

We’re all bound by the particular things we’re interested in and the particular things we do in life. We’re always finding these causal links. The hardest thing to do, in some ways, would be to write down, “Hey, I had this feeling and this set of ideas when I was twenty-two and I was wrong to have them, I’ve completely abandoned that way of thinking now.” We all have this common impulse when it comes to memories to tie them to how we are now. But what if they have nothing to do with how we are now? What if they were isolated and glitchy? What if a certain feeling or action wasn’t part of a continuous, causal thread, but rather just a byproduct of being under-slept, or scared, or high, or simply not paying attention, which then led us to making a terrible decision or having a terrible opinion? We tend to forget those sorts of background details—we tend to only remember the decision or opinion itself. It’s very hard to capture things in memory that clearly feel like outliers, like examples of an old way of thinking that you’ve left behind. I wish I could get a printout from god that clearly laid out what I was thinking and feeling in a given moment, what my motivations were, attractive or otherwise.

I fact-checked some of the stuff in the book because I had certain details wrong. Sometimes they’d be more wrong than others. But, in some ways, you have to cut your losses and think, “Ok, this is my memory of what happened.” A typical kind of resentment that often comes up in memoirs is that you remember a certain insulting or unpleasant interaction with someone, something that’s always stuck with you and made you think “Fuck that guy,” and then you write it down and put it out and that person might be very hurt and say to you, “Wait a minute, we were always cool, we used to hang out every day.” And you’re like, “Oh, I completely forgot that.” And then they might be like, “I didn’t know you were so upset about x, y, and z.” And then you have to apologize, and on and on.  But like, both things are ultimately true, right? It’s not like I didn’t have that resentment. But that resentment is a self-contained, interior thing—it has little bearing on the truth of that person or your interactions with them outside of the way that you’ve internalized a certain feeling about them. I ultimately decided to take a bunch of resentments out of the book for that reason. I wasn’t comfortable being able to say that I was clearly justified for feeling the way that I did. The only one that I kept in was the story about Prince secretly surveilling me and kicking me out of his show for drinking a beer, because it was so unpleasant and weird. I felt comfortable saying that he shouldn’t have done that. I suppose I played a part in it by breaking his rules and ordering a beer, but I still felt justified in thinking that what he did was profoundly uncool.

It's so hard to adjudicate when writing a memoir. You’re the only person with access to the tapes. Even if you had other friends who were there, friends who you can ask, “Hey, did this actually happen like that?” they ultimately can’t tell you how it felt to you in the moment, nor can they really help you determine what direction to go down. I think part of the whole Leiris and Proust instinct to slow things down comes out of a place of wanting to capture all of the different viewpoints—it’s an attempt to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a singular rendition of an event. How do you add as many viewpoints as possible to make it the most accurate rendition possible? We generally save these very thumbnail-like versions of events. We don’t remember a huge amount of detail. What you end up with are these whittled down wise-cracking anecdotes about a thing, which then become the actual memory. It’s a social thing, yeah? It’s like dive-bar talk, like you said earlier. Memories so often become these exchangeable things, where you share one wacky story, and then someone else fires back with another—“Oh, you think you’ve got a great one? Here’s one of my favorites.” When you finally meet somebody else who was there, they’re often like, “Woah, woah, my friend, that’s not what actually happened.” They’ll recount the event in great detail and it all comes rushing back and you’re forced into this realization of like, “Oh my god, that’s true—I really did throw that glass across the room, I was the one who actually started the fight.” You conveniently forget so much. Most examples aren’t that dramatic, obviously!

RM

[Laughs.]

SFJ

I tried to save myself, in a way, by keeping all of the fragments in the book so short. There’s not a big footprint, they don’t leave behind a whole lot of contestable surface area. The chances of me getting something egregiously wrong are smaller that way. The longer the memory goes on, the more likely it is to get you in trouble. I started writing a novel a little bit before the memoir. One of the things that’s so great about writing a novel is that you don’t have to fact-check anything, it’s all just impressions that try to drive at a type of emotional truth. It’s really astounding how easily these mortal resentments and furies arise out of memory. Like, hypothetically, you might sit down to interview a band and ask them, “How did you come up with this song?” And then one of them says, “Well, I wrote all the parts, and then we went into the studio and recorded it.” But then the other two bandmates say, “What? You didn’t write that song!” And then they never talk to each other again. The truth is probably somewhere between those points. Or, I don’t know, maybe one of the guys is completely out to lunch and made a minor mistake, but it’s a minor mistake that effectively ruins a friendship.

RM

There are two different truths happening, right? There’s a sort of collective narrative consensus that forms around this sort of diet-objective notion of “what happened,” and then there’s the interior experience and emotionality of the experience that we each hold—they’re competing truths that can’t be squared, yet they both exert some sort of semi-legitimate claim over the “truth” of a moment. It’s a negotiation, it’s both self-validating and de-subjectifying at the same time. One moment in the book where I really felt that was the way that you worked through cultural references. You throw out all of these different songs and records and clubs as narrative anchors, but you don’t really explicate or explain them to the reader. You’re either already familiar with a certain song, or the history of somewhere like Danceteria, or you aren’t. I mean, you could easily go and look any of these references up, they aren’t that esoteric, but even that process feels like a sort of supplemental action that is somewhat divorced from the actual reading process itself—it’s an individually contingent action that each reader either does or doesn’t have to perform, it’s not universal to the reading experience itself. When I was reading Earlier, there were certain moments where I had no idea what song you were referring to, but then there were others where I knew the reference, which seemed to so clearly establish the emotional and cultural context of the scene without requiring you to spell it out for me. For instance, you mention that Deborah loved “Fools Gold” by The Stone Roses, which immediately plunged me into that sort of “Madchester,” rock-meets-rave, Second Summer of Love headspace. At the same time, there’s something so intensely personal, to the point of feeling almost arbitrary from a reader’s perspective, about the particular references you choose—for instance, if it were my memoir, I probably would’ve picked “I Am the Resurrection” instead of “Fools Gold,” for no other reason that that’s the song from that record that carries significant personal meaning for me. There’s a give and take, yeah? These references are not exclusively personal, they communicate something more than pure individual emotion, but they’re also not these fixed totems that communicate any sort of singular, universally shared sense of feeling. How did you approach working with references throughout the book? What drove you towards certain cultural touchstones at the potential expense of others?

SFJ

I didn’t try too hard to spell out the significance of each reference for the reader. As you said, you can easily find any of the songs I talk about on the web. I didn’t want anything to sound like a Wikipedia entry—I wanted to avoid going down the rabbit hole of like, “So, kids, Danceteria was this really cool club in New York City in the ’80s,” you know? If anything, I wanted to tell the reader what Danceteria felt like, because that’s a much harder form of information to communicate. You can read all the history around it that you want, but that doesn’t really help you understand the feeling of being there. Something I wrote about a bit in the book, but maybe not as much as I should have, was how incredibly important and different those sorts of clubs felt, especially compared to today. Lucy Sante is probably the best writer on the topic. It cannot be understated how important it was at that age to have these places to go dancing that were big, and that were cheap, and where you could hang out all night and into the morning. You went to the club because you wanted to dance—dancing is something I hope to write more about somewhere down the line. You were able to socialize in this really profound way. Once that moment was over, it was over for the rest of fucking time and I’ve never seen it come back. Granted, I don’t know every club in the world—hell, I don’t even know every club in New York City—so maybe I shouldn’t opine quite so strongly. But there wasn’t anything that felt like that ten years later, much less forty years later or whatever it is now. It was an entire world built around these massive spaces where people would go simply to dance. Maybe I should have spent more time explaining exactly what those clubs meant at that moment.

When it came to the songs though, I figured people could find them pretty easily if they were interested. It’s funny that you bring up “Fools Gold,” which mattered so much to Deborah and I. My friend Hua Hsu really loves all of that Manchester stuff, he’s written a lot about those guys. But my engagement with that stuff was extremely scattershot. For instance, I love that Stone Roses song, and I pretty much like the band, but I barely know the Happy Mondays, and I don’t know if I’ve ever listened to Primal Scream, for no good reason.

RM

Oh woah, crazy—Primal Scream and Happy Mondays are my favorite of the bunch.

SFJ

I really don’t know anything about them. If someone sees the reference to “Fools Gold,” they might reasonably think that I’m really into Manchester dance stuff. But no man, it’s literally just that one song. Sorry to be like this about it, but, you know, I’m from New York. We had dance music, we didn’t need English people’s weird translation of it. Which, granted, I now find those records much more interesting—I’ll hear one come on and think, “Oh, wow, that’s a kind of crazy way to interpret house music.” But at the time, in a very snooty way, I did not want to hear any of that stuff. My mindset was very much like, I don’t need your dishwater version of what I’m listening to in real time in the club. Get outta here! But “Fools Gold” happens to be this magically weird, slightly James Brown, dreamy-loopy thing that doesn’t really feel like any other song to me. I had this gold 12’ vinyl that had “Fools Gold” on one side, and then this very short song called “What the World Is Waiting For” on the other, which is a really beautiful, great guitar pop tune. That was all I needed from The Stone Roses, those two songs were magical. I would listen to their other stuff and think it was fine, but it didn’t do anything. The La’s were the one band from that era that I thought was completely astonishing. But they weren’t the one that really caught on. It was all those other records, and then also, you know, Oasis and all of the Britpop that came shortly after.

I didn’t need to make any of that clear to the reader. I just mentioned the one song—if I wanted to make the book more useful on a music criticism level, maybe I would have slowed things down. But that’s for a different book, I suppose. I wanted Earlier to be about the rush of memory and the ways we clip things off and move from one thought to the next—I needed to strike this rhythm between all of the sections that felt like it matched the way that it feels to be in my body with my heart and my mind. So, whatever ended up getting excised had to feel honest to my consciousness. I wanted you to know how the music fit within all of these other moments for me, especially since most of the book is not about music. Obviously, when I was first writing it for Deborah none of that stuff was on my mind, I was just writing it for her. Later, once it got picked up by Semiotext(e), I was forced to look at it a little differently, because I knew that other people were going to read it, but that honestly didn’t really change the tone all that much. Of course, there’s a ton of stuff that wasn’t in the Deborah version, stuff about her being sick and all of that, which I didn’t include in the version I gave her. Why would I want her to read that? She wouldn’t want to read that, you know? But the feeling of both versions is pretty similar. There’s a ton of upsetting stuff I chose to leave out. Or like, I could have done a long section about when I was desperately trying to figure out what Lacan meant in 1984 or 1985, but I don’t think that would be interesting to read.

RM

I hope this isn’t too prying of a question, but what did the emotional space of those last couple months of intensive writing, where you were rushing to get a copy done in time for Deborah to read, look like? Did the task of writing change for you on a meta-process level, or was it more like, “I’m writing in the same way that I would normally, just faster and with fewer breaks”?

SFJ

A bit more like the latter. Yeah, it happened very quickly. I just remember sitting at the living room table and working for four or five hours a day. All the clichés come to mind—it was a blur, I don’t remember, all of that. But all of a sudden, it was done. I wish I had a more vivid story but that’s all I remember—sitting at the round table and writing like crazy, scrolling back and forth to make sure the structure was working.

RM

I want to talk a bit about melancholia and grief. Throughout the book—perhaps because the book tells the story of a full life—all of these various losses and deaths slowly accrue. I found your approach to writing about loss so touching—it’s quite sweet without being overly sentimental or precious, there’s a levity to the prose. You don’t shy away from addressing the losses you’ve experienced in life, but you also don’t make a show out of how horrible or depressing they might have felt—there aren’t any moments where you really dwell in this sort of woe is me, “Look at how shitty this was to live through” sentiment. What was the emotional space of writing about loss like for you? Did you find yourself weighing any particular responsibilities to the dead when writing about them?

SFJ

I don’t know how other people talk or think, but I feel like the way I handled talking about it in the book is pretty true to how most of my friends and I treat the subject. I’m a member of AA, so I spend a lot of my time in meetings with people where all we’re doing is trying to tell the truth. I don’t do a lot of small talk and chitchat anymore. I think that has influenced how I write. The point of the meetings, as we often say, is to tell on ourselves—we talk about the difficult stuff. Unless we don’t and we are just whining, which happens. I’m comfortable with the idea of having to talk about heavy stuff all the time. Which is a way of saying that it doesn’t feel all that heavy anymore. All of these memories, big and small, are always going through my mind, and my phone, and my friend’s minds. I mean, it’s obviously different to talk about one of your family members dying than it is to talk about how much you like A Certain Ratio or something like that. But, in some ways, it’s also not. It’s the natural sequence of thoughts that you inevitably end up going through over the course of a day. One moment you’re like, “Man I really miss my best friend” and then the next you’re like, “Oh cool, they have cinnamon buns today.”

What was my responsibility? I didn’t want to be petty about anyone—not just out of a sense of trying to be polite, but rather because that’s not something that I want to open up a book with my name on it and see. Those sorts of petty thoughts are rarely the things that I look back upon later and feel like, “Yep, that’s the truth.” The only person I really say, “Fuck this guy” about in the whole book is Prince, because I’m like, don’t spy on people and then throw them out based on purely inaccurate speculation. I mean, that was maybe the most fascist thing I’ve ever experienced (and maybe there is some psychic balance in Prince acting like a cop). If there were a column in the book with the “yeas” on one side and the “nays” on the other, the ledger would be a ton of yeas and then that one nay for Prince.

I tried to make every piece of kibble in the book roughly the same size. That’s what the churn of memory looks like. Maybe other people’s minds work differently, I can’t speak to that—but that’s the point of writing this book, right? This is my mind. How often do I have an experience that feels like a twenty-page reverie? Rarely. For that exact reason, I felt like I didn’t have any business writing these twenty, thirty, or forty page memories, even if in some sense it might have felt warranted. Like, you brought up Stone Roses earlier: would it have been more helpful for some readers to really get into the weeds about all of the details I gave you a moment ago? Probably, yeah. But that wouldn’t mimic the motion of the memory—doing that would miss the whole point of the book. That said, I’m sure my memory probably had a different cadence twenty years ago. The book would probably be different on a structural level if it was written pre-internet, or pre-smartphone.

RM

Right. I’m reminded of a line early on in the book, where you say something to the effect of, “I don’t understand why you can’t just take everything you love and put it in the same place”—I might be misremembering now, but I believe you credit Deborah with initially giving you that idea. The idea of love feels key here. There are all of these different chronological sequences where you pass through different experiences of love and desire, whether it’s a new crush or office flirtation, experiencing a new type of nightlife, or even discovering early childhood passions like baseball, graffiti, and theater. Each one feels totally novel, or as if it’s almost entirely disconnected from the others. There’s no buildup of experience. Earlier loves and desires don’t seem to color or diminish later ones—there isn’t a sense of jadedness or cynicism that creeps in with age.

SFJ

That’s why I wanted to keep each section short. The longer you talk about something, the more likely it is that you’ll start lying—not intentionally, but just because you get caught up with trying to turn it into a story. That’s sort of the nature of writing: we don’t have lying without language. That’s one of the hard parts about writing a memoir. You want to call someone up to get a second opinion, but the only person you have is yourself. What if you wrote a memoir and then waited a while before writing a second memoir made up of all of the exact same moments in time and anecdotes and material? You would have to write everything all over again in a different way that felt equally true to you. That would be quite an assignment. There are some instances in the book where I don’t know if I could have a second or third interpretation. But there are events in your life that force you to walk around with different viewpoints, especially if the event is particularly intense. That’s why I included the chapter on 9/11 that reads like a joke, but is also not a joke. [The chapter is titled “September 11th (2001)” and simply reads: “9/11.”] Our  family was physically close to the towers, just a few blocks away. 9/11 happened in front of our faces. It was one of my older son Sam’s most formative experiences. So, I have twelve different stories about it and then there’s the world’s opinion of it. It was something I knew I didn’t need to weigh in on. I felt overwhelmed not only by my own memory machine, but also everyone else’s memory machine. I feel the same way when writing about Brooklyn. I grew up there but I don’t like talking about it anymore. You say the name and everyone thinks, “High rent! Handlebar mustaches! Pickled things!” That’s not how I think about Brooklyn. I don’t think I’ll ever move back there and I feel a little heartbroken about it. There are certain topics and debates that you just want to stop being a part of after a certain point. Not like, debates like Death Cab for Cutie versus The National, which I have no interest in being a part of to begin with. Rather, there are certain arguments and things that you used to really want to talk about, or that maybe twenty or thirty years ago held great personal meaning, that all of the sudden stop meaning anything to you anymore. It’s a fascinating, strange feeling to work through.

RM

Before we end, I want to talk about the specter of alcoholism and sobriety that runs throughout a lot of the book. I mean, there are all of these literal accounts of your early experiences with partying and later stories of going to rehab and all of that, of course, but I’m also thinking about it in a broader sense—in this sense of, for lack of a better term, the idea of an “alcoholic” tone or character. For instance, there’s a way in which your early stories of shoplifting as a kid or writing graffiti, which occur well before you begin drinking, could perhaps be described as evincing a certain disposition towards the world that, in some ways at least, lines up with this sort of abstract notion of an “alcoholic” spirit.

SFJ

Totally.

RM

I don’t mean that in a negative light, of course—to recall the idea of dive bar chitchat, there’s a way in which that sensibility and the spaces it led you towards played a crucial role in your accidental foray into music writing. I’m interested in thinking about it in terms of a certain way of relating to the world and social life. I’m curious to hear you talk a bit about how you went about engaging with that sensibility throughout the book. It’s not a book about alcoholism, obviously—there are none of the sort of classic tell-all, “Look at how morbid and depraved this moment was” anecdotes. At the same time, it feels a little impossible to really contend with the writing without acknowledging that undertone.

SFJ

Right. I mean, on the one hand, part of my reticence to go into any sort of juicy detail has to do with the fact that my memories of those moments are, perhaps obviously, barely reliable.

RM

[Laughs.]

SFJ

It’s not so much an issue of having delicate sensibilities or being afraid to say certain things, so much as like, an issue of just not knowing exactly what happened. It’s not interesting to read someone going on and on about how they don’t actually remember how things played out.

The more honest answer, though, is that I didn’t think about it. If it was the right story, it went in. It’s the same answer as the one I gave to your question about grief and death, which is that it doesn’t exist as a separate or distinct category in my head. It’s all part of the same fruit salad. When I wrote the first version of the book I was moving quickly and didn’t have time to do a whole lot of meta thinking. When I went back to rewrite the version that exists in the world—the one that you and everyone else has read—I had time to revisit the sections about rehab, and I ultimately decided that I felt like they fit the tone of the book, so I kept them in. I wrote a long piece, which I’m very proud of, about getting off of benzos, which I did two years before going to alcohol rehab. I love that piece, but it’s not the same, it’s fairly reported and it didn’t fit with the rest of the book. A different project could go into all of that in greater detail, but it would just have to make sense as a whole. At the end of the day, I also just don’t have too many salacious, truly weird stories. We have this phrase in the program, “Compare and despair.” Oftentimes, I sit in meetings and feel like I haven’t done anything—there are people who have gotten themselves into truly such insane situations.

I don’t know how I feel about all of it. I absolutely wanted to plant that flag one way or another, because I feel very strongly that it’s important for people to know that people they know are in recovery, and that recovery can be beautiful. If I knew that, it would’ve probably helped me a lot when I first started trying to get sober around 2011 or 2012. I didn’t feel as if I knew enough people in recovery to really feel like they were a part of my world. So, I wanted to plant my flag and say, “Hey, here’s this thing about me.” Someone the other day called the book a sobriety memoir and I was like, “Bro, there’s not even that much in there.” I don’t think I wrote enough about it to deserve that title—there are other people who have made books that live up to that title, this book isn’t in the same league as them. I wanted to acknowledge that I went to rehab without it turning into this melodramatic third act where the sun comes out and the slow acoustic piano creeps in and I’m sitting on the porch with some old-timer learning about life. I simply wanted to say, “Hey, people you know have gone to rehab.” It’s not a lifetime special, it’s forty-two days of your life. They were a very important forty-two days, but to really get into that I would need to write an entirely separate three-hundred-page book. Maybe I will someday, or maybe the world is fine without that book.

What drives me bananas, what annoys me the most, is seeing somewhere like the New York Times run these horrible editorials about AA. They’ve run at least three in the last five years that are so arrantly inaccurate. I’ve never seen a movie or TV show or editorial represent a meeting—which happens all of the time—where it comes off as something which is really beautiful and fun and friendly. It’s always like, “I went to a meeting and then they said the Lord’s Prayer and everyone was super mean to me.” I’ve never been to a meeting like that in my whole life. Like, it’s made up. I don’t think they’ve ever been to a real meeting. It’s an incredibly warm and friendly program. It’s getting a bit better—there’s a meeting scene in The Bear that’s a little bit closer to reality. But like, in every single depiction there’s this big circle of chairs in the middle of a gym or something, which occasionally happens, but is almost never what things actually look like.

RM

It’s being done for a non-alcoholic audience, right? It’s a bit of a sensationalized, Natural History Museum style diorama—like, “And here we have ‘the alcoholic,’ a rare and troubled species.”

SFJ

Exactly. And like, that’s fine I guess—it’s the way most media works, so maybe it’s not worth getting too worked up about. But like, they always make it look so somber and bummed out. Sure, exaggerate it a bit, have them sit in a circle if you want, but also try to understand what the people are actually like. These people are everywhere, and they’re incredibly fun, funny, and caring.

RM

Last question: you’ve mentioned that you’re also working on a novel. What’s next for you, writing wise? Does the prospect of writing a book-length work feel different in any significant way now that you have one finished and under your belt?

SFJ

I’m under contract to Yale for a book in the Jewish Lives series, on a songwriter named Bob Dylan. I’m working on three other books, which nobody has bought yet—kidding, I haven’t tried to sell them yet. One is a book of essays called Pistachios/About the Frame, which is a response to what has been going on, more or less. One is a novel called Stripping Pitch Sets For Mahler, which was written partly in rehab, and the last is Invisible Village, a big messy attempt to put all of my artistic heroes in one book. They’re mostly musicians and some of the writing is pulled from things I’ve done, but mostly not. The artists I admire become this big family, most of them living in the East Village. The novel is the one that’s closest to being done. That status should belong to the Dylan book, and soon it will.