October 1st, 2008 5:00am

Interview with Amanda Petrusich, Part Three

Here’s more with Amanda Petrusich, author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music.

Matthew: How are you doing talking about the same thing all the time now? In doing interviews, I’ve found that you get asked the same things a lot and it’s easy to just zone out and answer automatically, like you’d rehearsed it. I did that on NPR at one point and impressed/freaked myself out.

Amanda: You know, it’s funny, because the book is very personal in some ways, and I felt quite comfortable, at the time, with writing in the first-person. But you spend two years alone with this thing, and then all of a sudden it’s out in the world and people are asking questions about it, and you feel naked and silly. I’m hoping it gets easier. I need to memorize some answers that make me sound way more together than I am.

Matthew: Do you think you could just snap and be like “No more Americana! I’m listening to classical or hip hop for a year!”

Amanda: Oh man, it is already getting to that point. That’s the danger of writing about something you really love. I still can’t listen to “Pink Moon.” Do you ever feel like you just need to shut music out for a bit, kind of cleanse the palate?

Matthew: Oh man, yeah.

Amanda: It’s the worst thing about this job, I’d say.

Matthew: The weird thing for me just recently with finishing the R.E.M. project was that I figured “that’s it, no more R.E.M. for a good long time!” But then I ended up listening to some songs that I simply had not heard in a year or so because of the way I was doing it, I’d finish writing up a song, and then put it away. I think that was kinda motivated by having Michael Stipe do the q&a though. I’m probably done with them for a while coming up soon.

Amanda: Well, that was such an incredible project — you should write a book about fandom.

Matthew: My listening habits tend to rotate things in and out, while dealing with a stream of new things. Part of the motivation for doing the R.E.M. project had to do with their music having been out of my rotation for a while.

Amanda: Yeah, that’s inevitable. I regret not being able to spend more time with records, to memorize every note and breath and beat like I did when I was 15.

Matthew: Yeah, I think that’s it too, I find I write pretty well about stuff I’ve known a long time.

Amanda: It’s really transporting to go back to songs that meant a lot to you at a certain point in time. I mean, people say that about smells, but music gets the job done, too. That perspective is priceless! And rare.

Matthew: Yeah, it’s funny to get a new sense of where you were at some point. And realize why certain things worked in a way you were maybe too close at the time to grasp.

Amanda: Well put. That’s also part of why I loved Rob Sheffield’s book so much.

Matthew: Yeah. I’m still kinda amazed by how much it must have taken to dive into those really dark periods. I guess I can’t really relate to having dark periods. I have bad periods, boring periods, but no really major traumatic events in my life thus far. Knock on wood.

Amanda: I can’t even conceive of it. It’s brave and honest, and I think that’s what people responded to in the writing. Today is my third wedding anniversary, incidentally. I remember trying to read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking on my honeymoon, and I couldn’t make it through. And then with Rob’s book, I couldn’t finish the first time through, either. I actually just read the whole thing recently. I mean, it is just so devastating.

Matthew: So where are you going from this point? Are you working on anything now?

Amanda: I’m writing an article about hill country blues for Preservation Magazine, which is published by the National Trust for Historic Places. I’m actually heading back down to Mississippi in early October to do some field research. I’m also working on a project about 78 collectors. I got in cahoots with some of these guys while I was researching It Still Moves, and it’s just this incredible subculture — a real oddball fraternity. But the work they do is so priceless. We wouldn’t be able to listen to Skip James “Devil Got My Woman” if it weren’t for 78 collectors. We wouldn’t have The Complete Works of Charley Patton. They’re driven by some mysterious (maybe neurological? definitely uncontrollable) urge, and it yields tremendous results for the rest of the world.

Skip James “Devil Got My Woman”

Matthew: Are people still finding things? I imagine that it must be an odd thing, since there’s a finite number in existence, and they must pop up in strange places.

Amanda: What I’ve been told is that it’s extremely unlikely that anyone is going to find a Robert Johnson 78 in a Salvation Army. It could happen, but most of the known copies are accounted for, although obviously, no one knows exactly how many made it through the last 75 years intact. But the acquisition process now is mostly collector-to-collector — either trading or estate sales or things like that. It’s a whole network, with its own rules and its dominant players and all that.

Matthew: I was thinking that maybe collections are kept in families, and then suddenly they find their way to the market.

Amanda: If a known collector dies, I do think there’s usually some kind of plan in place for where and to whom the collection will go. But there’s definitely a treasure hunt aspect to the whole enterprise, and that’s what keeps it going.

Matthew: That’s really exciting. I like the mixture of adventure, and just kinda sitting around waiting and doing mundane things. It’s an interesting contrast. It’s so much the opposite of music culture now! Hunting for music for a lot of people today means running different variations on titles through search engines.

Amanda: Yeah, the boring/thrilling contrast is key. It’s not unlike writing, in a way — hours of tedious, boring, sitting-at-the-computer work, following by these tiny moments of total elation that make the whole thing worthwhile. It’s almost a cliche to talk about it now, but I do miss the tactile music search — flipping through the stacks at the record store, all that.

Matthew: There’s a lot to be said that is positive about how things have changed, but I think that loss of value — in terms of money or time spent or having affection for a physical object — really warps the way people deal with music now. People don’t have to make an emotional connection. Which is not to say that people don’t, but the rate and means of acquisition shifts the goalposts, makes the audience value different aspects of the experience. When you had to hunt and buy things, you were kinda forced to put more of yourself into it, more identity came along with the decisions people made as a listener and customer.

Amanda: Definitely! It’s rendered music disposable, which is really tragic in a lot of ways. I used to judge everyone I met by their record collections (ha, maybe that makes me an asshole). But I can’t imagine scrolling through someone’s massive external hard drive of MP3s and coming to the same sorts of conclusions. Music has become a less integral part of identity, for sure. Everyone listens to everything, but at the same time, it feels like no one listens to anything. Speaking in NYC-centric generalities, of course.

Matthew: Yeah, there’s a lot of things that end up on my computer and ipod that are totally misleading, stuff that I’m just reviewing or screening, etc. I think even people who aren’t writers have the same thing going on now. You can always still judge people’s bookshelves! Or lack thereof.

Amanda: Ha! Good point. I will resume my cold-hearted judginess.

Matthew: I mean, even if you’re not judging per se, it’s often enlightening to see someone’s collection of whatever.

Amanda: But yeah, people download things just to listen for 30 seconds and then move on. I mean, why not? I do that, too. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a fantastic trend. I’m big on personal spaces. I’ll come to your apartment and spend my entire time there checking out your stuff.