The arrow flies close

I'm shipping out to Pittsburgh in a few hours, and I'm starting to get nervous. For all the thinking I've been doing about the show tomorrow night, I haven't really come up with many questions for anybody I'll be talking to (which, by the way, is still basically a mystery as my contact has told me this is one of the busiest days of the whole tour for them and they're not sure when they'll have time to chat).

I've been brainstorming a list of questions, but they're all sort of vague and broad. I'm hoping to make this more of a general conversation and less about specifics. At this point, I think my goals are to build a rapport with the people I'll be writing about and to give myself a reasonable base of information to work with. Specific information to fill in gaps can always come later.

I think I'm just stoked to get some interviews at all. I've been doing this music journalism gig for a few years now, and it's been a while since I've been legitimately starstruck by an interviewee (and honestly, I can't remember it ever happening, although I'm willing to grant this is just selective memory).

While "starstruck" is probably not the right word, I do feel a bit more reverent about these guys than I do about the typical musicians I interview. It's not that they're particularly reclusive or hard to find, but there's some kind of mystique around them that I can't quite place. At the very least, if this experience can humanize them a bit for me, it'll be a step in the right direction.