Interview: Steven Moffat (“Sherlock,” “Doctor Who”)

Posted on May 4, 2012 by will

Steven Moffat may get a perverse pleasure out of playing the secrets of his shows as close to the vest as humanly possible, but when you’re the man behind Sherlock and Doctor Who, you can afford to be a little cheeky. Right before the first series of Sherlock premiered in the States, I was fortunate enough to chat with Moffat and his cohort behind the scenes, Mark Gatiss, when they were at the TCA press tour, and it was a highly enjoyable experience. As such, when I was pitched the opportunity to write a cover story for Vancouver’s TV Week on the return of the show, I’d knew Moffat would make for a good interview…and I was not wrong. Alas, TV Week does not put its pieces online, but for your reading enjoyment, here’s the full transcript of the conversation…

News Reviews Interviews: Well, I’m thrilled, as is my wife and most everyone I know, that Sherlock is finally coming back.

Steven Moffat: [Laughs.] Well, good!

NRI: How pleasantly surprised were you when the first series became such a hit?

SM: Oh, well, “shocked” is probably the word, really. I mean, you certainly couldn’t anticipate this level of thing, because it’s enormous. Mark (Gatiss) and I and…I think Sue (Vertue) as well, but certainly Mark and I talked about it. We reckoned an audience of maybe four million, lots of very good reviews, and maybe an award from an obscure festival would about cover it. And we would’ve regarded that as a hit. And it would’ve been a hit, but we thought it would be a snob hit. We thought it would be relatively small-scale. But the fact that it became an instant phenomenon in the UK, and then just about everywhere, has been…a proper shock, yeah.

NRI: Given that you and Mark are walking Sherlock Holmes encyclopedias…

SM: Well, we’re pretty good, yeah. [Laughs.]

NRI: …how far in advance, if only in your heads, plan out the series? Did you already have an idea for what Series Two would be?

SM: Um…we had one pretty quickly. I mean, not immediately. But the broad building blocks of “Scandal (in Belgravia),” “The Hounds (of Baskerville),” and “The (Reichenbach) Fall,” we had to do those, because they’re the three huge stories. Particularly “The Hounds.” That’s about as huge as it gets. So it’s a case of…well, we know we progress slowly in this show. It’s always gonna be long gaps between show runs, so there’s not a lot of point in just doing it for our pleasure. Might as well get the biggies up front. I was excited about doing the Irene Adler non-love story, and Mark was excited about doing “Hounds,” so, yeah, we had a plan pretty quickly.

NRI: You’d said before the series premiered in the States that the Sherlock Holmes Society had been thrilled with the results of the modernization of the Holmes mythos. Did you give them an advance screening of the second series?

SM: Uh, no. [Laughs.] We didn’t. Some years before, though, we were invited…or, rather, Mark was invited…to address the Sherlock Holmes Society, just in his role as a very prominent writer and actor and a Sherlock Holmes fan. So he addressed the Society as a guest, and at that time – because we’d already been talking about it – he said, “We have this idea to do a modernized Sherlock Holmes,” and, you know, they were all really, really keen on the idea and very crazy about it. We thought they’d be more sort of fuddy-duddy about it, but they really weren’t. They were really quite excited about it. And a few years later, just during the transmission of the second series (in the UK), I addressed the Sherlock Holmes Society with Mark as my date. [Laughs.] And they were all just thrilled with it. They were delighted with it. They’re not at all conservative in their appreciation of Sherlock Holmes. They like it if you change things up a bit.

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Taken from the Pilot: Delbert McClinton

Posted on April 25, 2012 by will

Like many other people, I first remember hearing of Delbert McClinton when he scored his one and only top-10 pop hit with “Giving It Up For Your Love” in the early ’80s, but he came back on my radar in the late ’80s through a combination of working at a record store (Record Bar at Greenbrier Mall, in Chesapeake, VA) and listening to an incredibly awesome Hampton Roads radio station called FM 92 that wasn’t afraid to play music that wasn’t on the charts. What I didn’t realize until the advent of the ‘net, however, was just how far back McClinton’s career went. I talked to him for The Virginian-Pilot last week – link to follow as soon as it’s live – and delved into Delbert’s history as deeply as I could, given the amount of time I had. Here’s the transcript of our conversation for your reading enjoyment…

News Reviews Interviews: So you’re heading back to Norfolk, where you’ve played more than a few times.

Delbert McClinton: Oh, yeah.

NRI: How do you like the Hampton Roads area? You certainly get a great reception whenever you’re here.

DM: Oh, I love playing up there, man, and I always have loved playing up there. It’s a good place to play.

NRI: You’ve long since been declared a full-fledged road warrior…

DM: [Laughs.] Well, I should hope so.

NRI: …but how long do you spend on the road per year nowadays?

DM: Oh, I don’t know. This year, I’ve worked less than ever. I’ve only had, I think, three dates since the first of the year. But it’s about to wrap up, with summer coming on and all these festivals and all. But I’ve been saving more time for myself these days and working less.

NRI: Does it take you a little bit of time to get comfortable doing that, given how much work you’ve been doing?

DM: Well, you know, when we went out this last weekend, it was the first time we’d been out since right after January 1st. We had a date in Charlotte. But I’d been off longer than I’ve ever been off in my life, and I was telling my wife the other day, “God, I hope I can remember these songs!” And I didn’t have any trouble at all. It all came right back.

NRI: Like riding a bike, huh?

DM: Pretty much. [Laughs.] But it was a lot of fun. We had a good time.

NRI: So you were born in Lubbock, and then you moved to Fort Worth when you were pretty young, is that right?

DM: Yeah, I moved to Fort Worth when I was 11 years old.

NRI: How did you first get into music? Was your family musical, or was it something you picked up on by yourself?

DM: No, nobody in the family was musical. It was just always there for me. I never even thought about it, not until I was considerably older, about how incredibly powerful that whole thing was. I never thought about it. I just thought, “This is just the way it is.” And it was. I didn’t have to think about this. I just had to do it.

NRI: When you look back at what you accomplished when you were in the Straightjackets, can you even believe some of the people you were backing at the time? Sonny Boy Williamson, Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’ Hopkins…

DM: Oh, man, I had some of the best on-the-job training you could have. [Laughs.] And I loved every minute of it, you know? I got to know a lot of those guys that are gone now that were the real deal.

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Excised from the AV Club: Cloris Leachman

Posted on April 24, 2012 by will

If you’ve seen my Random Roles interview with Cloris Leachman, you already know that we had a pleasant, lighthearted conversation about various highlights of her career, but you might also have been left wondering about the omission of this role or that. This is always a hazard of having a limited time to talk to an interview subject, but in the case of Ms. Leachman, who within mere days of her 86th birthday as of this writing (it’s on April 30), there were several cases where the roles were asked about but answered in such a way that there wasn’t any real point of offering up the responses…at least not on The AV Club, anyway.

If you frequent the comments sections of the AV Club, then you already know some of this stuff, but the issues at hand were twofold. First and foremost, Ms. Leachman occasionally struggled to produce the names of past co-stars, which is absolutely excusable given the length of her career and the number of credits on her resume. On the other hand, however, she was ultimately more interested in her lunch than she was in our conversation, so her concentration on my questions wasn’t exactly 100%…though, again, I find this excusable as well, mostly because she’s Cloris fucking Leachman. Still, to give you a better idea of the conversation, here are the excised bits, though I’ve included a bit of non-excised material to provide better contextualization without requiring you to flip back and forth between this piece and the final version of the interview.

  • The Fields (2011)—“Gladys”

Me: What was it about this particular script that made you want to do the picture?

Cloris: Oh, I just loved it. I loved the simpleness of it. They’re just living out there, and they have their work to do in the fields, and they just live a simple life and work hard. But it’s a very strong character, I think. Gladys. And I love my relationship with my family in it, too. Excuse me. [Leans away from phone.] I’m going to sit here. I have a lot more interviews. I’ve told you what’s going to happen. That’s what’s going to happen. I have several more interviews. What do you want me to do? Well, I’ll finish this interview or not. [Waits for a response, then comes back to the interview.] Just keep going. My housekeeper says she’s made some lunch for me, so… [Trails off.]

  • Kiss Me Deadly (1955)—“Christina Bailey”

Cloris: [Cackles.] Oh, did you like that one?

Me: Absolutely.

Cloris: That was great fun. And I loved…oh, what was his name? The actor I worked with. I just talked about him earlier. He plays the bad guy. What is the damned guy’s name? I can never think of it! What is it? [To the publicist.] Who was it that played Cap’n Andy with me in Showboat? He was in Deliverance. Who’s the guy in Deliverance?

Me: [Uncertainly.] Burt Reynolds? Ned Beatty…?

Cloris: Ned Beatty! That’s him.

Me: Um…

Cloris: Okay, what’s next?

[As it happens, Ned Beatty is not actually in Kiss Me Deadly. He was, however, Leachman’s co-star in Dying Room Only, which is also a three-word title revolving around death, so I decided to let it go and just move on. Unfortunately, it also kind of took Dying Room Only off the table, because I had visions of asking about it and having her say, “Didn’t we just talk about that?”]


  • Raising Hope (2010-present)—“Maw Maw”

    • Me:  You do have a tendency to get a little anarchic at times. I was there when you more or less commandeering the Raising Hope panel at the Television Critics Association press tour.

    Cloris: [Innocently.] Oh, did I? I’m very sorry. That was when someone asked me about Betty White and I said, “I never liked her,” wasn’t it? [Laughs.]

    Me: It certainly was.

    Cloris: There are two of me sometimes. Like when I put my leg up on the table when I was on Dancing with the Stars. I didn’t decide to do that. My leg just went up there. It had nothing to do with me. I was as surprised as they were. “What is that doing that? How’d my leg get on the table?” [Laughs.] Oh, excuse me. [Leans away from phone.] I want my lunch in here, please! Bring my food in here. Listen, I’m asking for something, I don’t want to argue about it, just do what I’m saying, please! My God… Sorry where was I?

    • Dancing with the Stars (2008)—contestant

    Me: Speaking of Dancing with the Stars, was that as fun for you to do as it was for viewers to watch?

    Cloris: It was totally wonderful. I’d rehearse for an hour and a half or two hours, and then I’d laugh so hard I’d start to wet my pants. And somehow I gained a pound a day. And I still have them. [Laughs.]

    • The New Adventures of Wonder Woman (1975)—“Queen Hippolyta”

    Cloris: Oh, I certainly remember that. Who was the costumer on that? He was a famous man. Donfield? He was… Oh, excuse me. [Leans away from phone.] I want my lunch in here, please! Bring my food in here. Listen, I’m asking for something, I don’t want to argue about it, just do what I’m saying, please! My God… Sorry where was I?

    Me: The costumer on Wonder Woman.

    Cloris: Oh, yeah. I remember him making by hand my hairpiece that I was wearing over my hair. It was all beaded. It was very beautiful, and he made it. He was very proud of himself.

    Me: Okay, you should probably go have your lunch.

    Cloris: I will if they ever get it to me. But they want me to go out there…and I’m not coming! [Laughs.]

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    Taken from the Pilot: Colin Hay

    Posted on April 18, 2012 by will

    I don’t really know how many people know this, but one of my earliest musical obsessions, even before I dived headlong into the Beatles, was Men at Work’s Cargo. Thing is, I have no idea how I came to be obsessed with it. Was it because I, like everyone else in the early ’80s, fell in love with the videos from their first album, Business as Usual and wanted to hear what else the band had up their sleeve? Or maybe because Cargo was in stock and Business as Usual wasn’t, so I took what I could get…? I haven’t a clue. But it hardly matters: the obsession proved a long-lasting one…like, to the point where, 29 years later, it remains ongoing.

    So that’s how I came to buy Colin Hay’s debut solo album, Looking for Jack (the one where he decided that he wanted to be credited with his middle name, James, as part of the package), and, indeed, why I have all of his solo albums. Is it 11? Maybe it’s 12. Again, I’m getting off track. The point is that I’ve been a devout fan of the man’s work since the very beginning, so when I found out he was coming to play at Norfolk’s Attucks Theater on April 22, you can bet I pitched The Virginian-Pilot on an interview…a pitch which, thankfully, they accepted. You’ll see my article in tomorrow’s Pulse or read it online right here, but here’s the unexpurgated transcript for your reading enjoyment.

    News Reviews Interviews: I’m glad you’re coming to the Hampton Roads area. I feel like I’ve had to go on a road trip most of the times I’ve seen you.

    Colin Hay: Now, where are you calling from again?

    NRI: Norfolk, Virginia. You’re playing at the Attucks Theater.

    CH: Oh, nice!

    NRI: I may be wrong, but I think the last time I saw a full solo performance from you was at the Village Theater, in New York City.

    CH: Wow, so you came to that little two-week run I had, when I was trying to go off-Broadway? [Laughs.]

    NRI: Hey, it worked for me. I always tell people about how it was effectively “Colin Hay: Storytellers.” Do you keep that same format for your shows now, or do you not tell quite so many stories?

    CH: It’s different all the time. I do pretty much that, but things keep on developing as you go through life.

    NRI: Was the Village Theater where you first got into the habit of telling tales before your songs?

    CH: No, what it was was an attempt to… I’d been doing that for many, many years, and different people had seen me do it all the time, and Fox were interested, and HBO were interested at one point, and they invited me to go to the Aspen Comedy Festival. I went there, and a producer from New York saw the show and then asked me if I would come to New York and do a couple of weeks and he would promote it and put it on and see if we could turn it into something. It was successful. It was one of the first times that I scripted the show, so that was an interesting process. I’ve done a number of things. I did something for a film company awhile ago, and interesting that you should mention the “Storytellers” thing, because I did a pilot for…well, not really a pilot. I don’t really know what you’d call it, but I did a kind of special filming in a studio with a director and so forth and took it to VH-1 and MTV and all that kind of stuff, with the idea of having anecdotes and performances. And it was before “Storytellers.” And just before “Storytellers.” [Laughs wryly.] Ultimately, MTV bought the series, but they didn’t feature me. But that was in the ‘90s, so…life goes on, y’know?

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    Remembering Mr. Jones – A Farewell To A Monkee, Pt. 2

    Posted on March 1, 2012 by will

    Back with a bit more from my conversation with Davy Jones from last summer’s TCA tour. I’m knee-deep in deadlines, so it won’t be a whole lot more right this second, but I don’t want to lose my momentum by letting too much time pass between these segments.

    After asking Davy about his work in Oliver!, I decided to ask him about the trio of singles he released in the brief window between being on Broadway and being in the Monkees: “Dream Girl,” “What Are We Going to Do?,” and “The Girl from Chelsea.”

    “That came straight after The Ed Sullivan Show,” said Jones. “I said, ‘Let’s go into the recording studio and record some stuff,’ and they said, ‘Fantastic!’ So they took me into the studio, and the pianist from Oliver! played the demo tape of me doing…”

    At this, Jones sang the opening lines from a Bobby Darin number (“More than the greatest love the world has ever known”), then switched gears and began to channel his inner Sondheim (“Maria, I just met a girl named Maria”). I know you can find his version of the former (“More”) on a self-released collection of early material entitled Just for the Record, but I’ll be damned if I can find any trace of a recorded version of “Maria.” If anyone’s ever actually heard it, do let me know, won’t you?

    Sorry, sorry, I know: less me, more Davy. Moving on…

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    Remembering Mr. Jones – A Farewell To A Monkee, Pt. 1

    Posted on February 29, 2012 by will

    I met Davy Jones twice: once in California, once in Virginia.

    The latter occasion was the most recent, and it was only a fleeting encounter, a quick backstage meet-and-greet before a co-headlining performance with Peter Noone at the Ferguson Center for the Arts, in Newport News, VA.  I  had done phoners with both gentlemen for The Virginian-Pilot in advance of the show, so my wife and I were granted a brief audience with them and had a picture snapped to commemorate the occasion.

    In addition, although Jones wasn’t doling out any autographs at that precise moment (they did, after all, have a show yet to perform), he and I had discussed the matter beforehand, so thanks to the kind folks at the Ferguson serving as middle man a bit later when Jones wasn’t surrounded by fans, I’m proud to say that I possess an autographed copy of Jones’s autobiography, They Made A Monkee Out of Me!

    As for the first time I met Mr. Jones, it was at the Beverly Hilton, during the Television Critics Association press tour. In attendance to support a PBS special that he was hosting, Jones agreed to a 15-minute sit-down. I’d hoped to do a lengthy Set List piece for the Onion AV Club, tackling his pre- and post-Monkees career as well as some highlights of his work with Messrs. Dolenz, Nesmith, and Tork, but the conversation didn’t go quite as I’d intended. In fairness, I’d only just dipped my toe into the Set List waters, so I probably could’ve pushed Jones a bit more and, in turn, gotten him to wrap up answers sooner. Instead, I just let him go until he stopped. What I didn’t realize, however, was that Davy Jones is not particularly prone to stopping, a fact which–now that I’m aware of it –makes his sudden death even harder to accept than it already would’ve been.

    When we sat down for our conversation, the first thing I asked him about was not the Monkees but, rather, the work he’d done when he’d played the role of the Artful Dodger in Oliver! To be specific, I wanted to know what came to mind when I mentioned the song “Consider Yourself.”

    “You know something?” he asked me. “When I was in the stables in 1961, the agents came–there was other actors that owned horses, so that’s why they where there–and they took me to London. I rehearsed the song…”

    At this, he burst into the first few lines: “Consider yourself at home / Consider yourself one of the family…”

    Then he slipped into a brief impression of the encounter that went down after the rehearsal.

    “All right, and what’s your name?”

    In a heavy Manchester accent. “David Jones.”

    “And where do you come from?”

    “I come from Manchester.”

    “Uh, excuse me, but…do you speak like all the time?”

    “Yes, I do. You’re right there, I do.”

    Jones grinned. “They gave me six weeks to go away and come back having learned a Cockney accent,” he said. “Me trying to sing in a Cockney accent…it’s like Mick Jagger trying to sing like he’s from the South!

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    Taken from the Pilot: Martin Short – The Director’s Cut

    Posted on January 19, 2012 by will

    Until recently, the closest I’d come to interviewing Martin Short was during a Damages panel at the TCA tour, when we were in Pasadena and he was speaking to us via satellite in New York – I think we can all agree that that wasn’t very close at all – so when I heard he was coming to the Sandler Center in Virginia Beach on January 19, I jumped at the chance to try and get him on the phone for The Virginian-Pilot. To my surprise, I Was successful. The first time he called, it was to apologize that he was going to have to call me back in 10 – 15 minutes, as he was running late and needed to get out of his house and into the car before we got started. Fortunately, I was in the middle of scrambling to finish an assignment, anyway, and I told him so. By happy coincidence, he phoned back within about 30 seconds of my having submitted that assignment. “Perfect timing!” he said, cheerily.

    And so began our interview…

    News Reviews Interviews: I’m very much looking forward to your upcoming appearance at the Sandler Center, especially since the venue’s website has a quote from you where you describe the evening as a “party with Marty.”

    Martin Short: [Laughs.] That’s right.

    NRI: So what can people expect from this party?

    MS: Well, they can expect anything and everything, but what I think they should expect is an entertainer. I think when you reach a certain level of fame… [Hesitates.] What I think people really want is to have a sense at the end of the evening that they got to hang with you, that they actually got to know you. In my case, I think it would be like if there was a party at someone’s house and I jumped on the piano and performed for 90 minutes. I try to make it as intimate as possible, but all the characters I’ve ever done show up. Jiminy Glick will show up and interview a surprise guest. Ed Grimley will show up. Franck (from Father of the Bride) will discuss who in the political scene has style or hasn’t. I will take everyone through kind of a faux journey of my life, from being a kid and having an imaginary television show right on through. My analogy of it is that it’s like my hosting Saturday Night Live and playing the cast as well.

    NRI: So would you consider it an extension of Fame Becomes Me, then?

    MS: I would say… [Hesitates.] Fame Becomes Me was an actual musical, with a cast. It has elements of Fame Becomes Me, but it’s also more of a nightclub act. I think it’s more intimate.

    NRI: What was the inspiration to do this? Did you see it as a chance to interact with audiences filled with longtime fans?

    MS: You know, I always believed that the longer you stay off the stage, the harder it is to go back on the stage. And, again, a lot of the – if you want to use this word – gimmick of me beyond being a singer-dancer-comic boy is looseness. I’ve seen people write about my appearances on talk shows, for example, saying, “You get the feeling that, if you went out to dinner with him afterwards, he’d be the same kind of guy. He wouldn’t suddenly be a dark guy or a depressed guy or a mean guy.” And I think that to achieve that kind of looseness in a public forum, you have to…well, you can’t be nervous. Take someone like Regis Philbin. The reason he is the way he is on television is because he’s been on television every day for 40 years or something. So it becomes second nature to him, and that kind of ease is contagious.

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    That Thing You Did: Bruce Jenner

    Posted on December 29, 2011 by will

    As 2011 comes to a close and I sit knee-deep in preparations for the January 2012 TCA Press Tour, it occurs to me that, for almost 12 months now, I’ve been sitting on an interview that I really should’ve posted a long time ago. Not that it’s in any way, shape, or form time-sensitive, but it certainly was a lot of fun to do, and I expect that at least a handful of people will be interested in reading it.

    I’m pretty sure you have to be better known than I am to be able to say that your work has a particular signature, but if you look through the interviews I’ve done over the years, there are definitely some recurring themes, and one that recurs more often than most is my tendency to bypass asking about a person’s more popular projects in favor of searching for a great but heretofore-untold anecdote about an obscurity…or several obscurities…from their list of credits. Sometimes it feels like a crapshoot, and when you find out too late that your interview subject has subpar recall, it can seriously bum you out, but as often as not, it results in a highly entertaining payout.

    It says a lot about me, I fear, that, when presented with the opportunity to chat with Bruce Jenner early in 2011, the first thing that leapt to mind was not to ask him about his life as an Olympic athlete nor about his career resurgence as a reality star but, rather, his work as an actor. It’s not like anyone, least of all Jenner himself, would claim that he delivered performances that were destined to secure him an Oscar or an Emmy, but, c’mon, the guy was in Can’t Stop the Music, for God’s sake! That’s right: Jenner played Ron White, the man working behind the scenes for the hottest new group in show business – the Village People! – in the only theatrically-released film ever directed by Nancy Walker, a.k.a. Rhoda Morgenstern’s mom and Rosie the Waitress.

    I had to know what that experience was like. I needed to, dammit. I mean, just based on this picture alone, you know…?

    And so I arrived at the E! cocktail party during the January 2011 TCA Press Tour with a list of Jenner’s acting credits in hand, looking for whatever stories he had to tell about his handful of experiences as a thespian. Thankfully, he found the concept absolutely hilarious, and he immediately said, “C’mon, let’s go out on the patio, so we can hear each other better…and so I can think, because nobody’s asked me about this stuff in years!”

    By the way, to definitely date when this conversation took place (January 5), just as we were chatting, Jenner received a phone call from one of his stepdaughters – he didn’t clarify which one – to inform him that Keeping Up with the Kardashians had just taken home the People’s Choice Award for Favorite TV Guilty Pleasure. It ain’t an Emmy. It ain’t even a Golden Globe. But, hey, it’s something…and, all things considered, he’ll probably treasure it than the Razzie nod he received for his work on Can’t Stop the Music.

    Let’s hit it…

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    2011: Interview Highlights from a Very Interesting Year

    Posted on December 24, 2011 by will

    2011 has been…interesting.

    Yeah, that’s about as good a word as I’ve got, really. These last twelve months have held more than a little bit of stress and some very legitimate terror about what the future might hold. For the first time since graduating from college, I found myself without a full-time job. A major decision had to be made: do I keep writing part-time but start looking for something else full-time to pay the bills, do I bite the bullet and go freelance, or do I just start drinking and never look back?

    Turns out it was a rhetorical question. Once upon a time, I was a guy with a degree in journalism who worked everything from retail to telemarketing to the back end of a debt collection firm while doing a little bit of freelance writing to keep his sanity, but now…?

    Now I’m a writer.

    Of course, the sanity’s long gone. But you take the good with the bad.

    Amazingly, despite all of the tensions and uncertainty that I endured in the first half of 2011, I’m wrapping up the year feeling like I’m in a better place as a pop culture journalist than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m still a regular contributor to Bullz-Eye.com – in fact, in the midst of all the transition, I somehow managed to get promoted to Senior Editor – but I’ve also branched out in a big way.

    The biggest coup, inevitably, was finding my way into the ranks of the Onion A.V. Club. It happened as a result of developing a virtual friendship with Noel Murray, who fostered an introduction between myself and Keith Phipps and then subsequently – and very, very kindly – agreed to serve as my collaborator on my first piece for the site:

    “Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?”: 16 TV-character crossovers with real game shows

    Thanks to my TCA comrade-in-arms Brent Furdyk, I’ve gotten to write some cover stories for Vancouver’s TV Week, including pieces about Smallville, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead. Courtesy of Shelly Washington and Caroline Luzzatto, I’ve continued to write for The Virginian-Pilot, which gives me the opportunity to see actual, honest-to-God newsprint on my fingers when I’m reading my work. I’ve also done a few things for Kirkus Reviews, a bunch of real-estate writing for newspapers in Houston, San Antonio, and San Francisco, and, although I haven’t done as much for them as I really would have liked due to frantically trying to make ends meet, I’ve written a few things for Popdose, which remains one of the best and most readable websites on the ‘net. (All hail Jeff Giles!) Somewhere in there, I even did a piece or two for AfterElton.com, including a short but very pleasant interview with Anderson Cooper. Now that Michael Jensen isn’t with the site, I don’t know that they’ll trust me to contribute further for them, but if his replacement is reading this, I remain available.

    Yep, there’s definitely a recurring theme here: I owe a lot of 2011 to my friends and colleagues. I’m sure they would tell me that any doors they opened wouldn’t have been available if I hadn’t been able to provide the quality of material that I’ve tried so hard to maintain, but it does not change the depth of my thanks.

    Here’s to 2012. May it be less stressful but equally as fruitful.

    Okay, enough with the schmaltz. Let’s get to the interviews, shall we?

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    Taken from the Pilot: Vince Gill – The Director’s Cut

    Posted on December 7, 2011 by will

    Vince Gill is one of those country artists whose reputation extends far beyond his music. I may not be able to readily throw out the names of more than a handful of his many hits, but I know he can smoke on the guitar. Also, he’s married to Amy Grant. And he was the singer for Pure Prairie League for a short time. Beyond that, I admit that my CD collection has a serious Vince Gill deficiency, but I own and love his 4-disc album, These Days. That’s right, not a greatest-hits collection but an actual 4-disc set of new material, spread across several difference styles of music. You’ve got to respect someone who’s that prolific and has that much musical flexibility. When I heard that Gill and Grant were coming to the Ted Constant Convocation Center on one of their occasional Christmas tours, I made the pitch to The Virginian-Pilot to try and talk to one of them. I admit to being pleased that I ended up pulling a interview with Gill. Not that Grant’s not great – even before she made her secular-music mark with “Baby, Baby,” I was already a fan of “Love Will Find A Way” – but…I dunno, I was just more intrigued about the idea of talking to Gill. Especially after I got some good tips on interview topics from my Facebook friends.

    Vince Gill: Brother Will?

    News Reviews Interviews: Yes, sir!

    VG: Hey, this is Vince!

    NRI: How are you?

    VG: I’m good, buddy! What’s happening?

    NRI: Nothing much. It’s a pleasure to talk to you!

    VG: Aw, thanks!

    NRI: Well, this is obviously not your first Christmas tour, but when did you and your wife first have the idea to do a Christmas tour like this?

    VG: Golly, well, you know, Amy and I first met through Christmas music, in ’93, so it’s something that’s pretty near and dear to us, ‘cause it kind of started our friendship. I was always her guest at a Christmas show she did every year for the symphony in Nashville, but then, of course, she would occasionally tour, I would occasionally tour. Then after we got married, we wound up deciding to just kind of combine our efforts and do a Christmas tour from time to time. We toured last year, and we’re gonna tour this year, but we won’t tour next year, so…I guess we just kind of pick and choose. Some years we’ll go out and do a tour, and some years we won’t. But it’ll be fun. We played last year and had a great time, and a lot of the same folks are coming out with us this year, so I’m looking forward to it.

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