I count myself fortunate that, in my two decades as a journalist, I’ve had precious few interviews that were just really, really bad…although, for the record, whenever anyone asks me about my personal worst, however, I invariably cite a conversation that I had with Juliana Hatfield:
It started two hours later than I’d been told that it’d been scheduled, no-one had told her that it had been scheduled at all, and she clearly had no interest in talking to me at all, based on her general indifference to every question I had to offer and the constant stream of one-word answers that served as her responses. And to top it off, the most memorable part of the entire conversation – such as it was – came about only because I dared to close by asking the God-awful question, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be, and why?” Her horrified response: “I don’t want to be a tree!” (Okay, keep your cool, Juliana. It was hypothetical.)
Still, as excruciating as that experience was for me…and the fact that it occurred in 1992 and it’s still tops on my list speaks volumes as to the level of excruciation, I think…it still doesn’t come anywhere close to this:
Luke Burbank’s recent conversation with Sigur Ros.
Wow.
Luke, brother, I feel for you.
