Though Catherine Adel West is fairly early into her career—her first book was published just six years ago—her work has already been called “keenly observant” (Publishers Weekly), “masterfully suspenseful” (Booklist), and “multilayered” (Kirkus). Her latest novel is Strangers Behind Closed Doors, a page-turning thriller in which a police detective, Redding Stark, works to uncover who is behind the recent disappearances of Black women in Chicago. The book, which is West’s first thriller, has already received significant praise and has been optioned for TV by Universal Television. And though she’s thrilled the book is getting such great recognition, West admits that seeing it through from inception to publication was an extraordinary amount of work.

“The first draft of the book was 122,410 words,” West says. “My editor, God bless her, was like, ‘Ummm, you think you can cut some words?’ I knew it was coming, because I basically wrote a book-and-a-half. I cut over 22,000 words. It was a lot. I keep saying this with each subsequent book, but I don’t think I’ve ever worked this hard. It paid off. But, oh God, the work that went in...”

The novel was written over the course of six months, primarily on nights and weekends, as West juggled her writing career and her full-time job as an editor at a financial services company. It was a long process, but one that she thoroughly enjoyed.

“I found that I really love to choreograph and write fight scenes,” West says. “I don’t know if I can go back to my contemporary fiction. Writing fight scenes is really cathartic. That’s what always happens when you’re writing a book. You learn something new about yourself.”

Over Zoom, West chatted with me about her writing process, her message to unpublished authors, and the physicality involved in writing her book.

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SANDRA EBEJER: You have a line in your bio that says, “I’ve always wanted to become a writer. I just didn’t know it until now.” When did you start writing? When did this become a career goal for you?

CATHERINE ADEL WEST: I have two degrees in journalism, a bachelor’s and a master’s. I always wrote [fiction], but it was a hobby. I never considered myself a writer until I was about 32. Looking back on it, it was a transformational moment. I just didn’t recognize it when it was happening. I was at a friend’s wedding, and I ran into an old college friend of mine. I was telling her how I just got back into writing short stories and I was giving her an idea for one, and she was like, “Oh, that would be a great book.” She had already written a book, and it was traditionally published. So I was like, “Oh yeah. It would make a great book! I’ve got two degrees in journalism. I can write a book. It’ll be so easy.” Girl... It was so hard.

I made the mistake everybody makes, just thinking about the images associated with writing and not the actions themselves. So I’m thinking of myself sipping coffee and typing on my laptop, and not the blood, sweat, and tears that it takes to write a book, plot a book, character development, research. You’d be amazed at the amount of research that goes into a book. I was even amazed. They taught us how to research at U of I [University of Illinois], and I’m still like, “This is a lot.” I’m reading articles, I’m reading books, I’m interviewing people, I’m going through documents. It’s crazy work to write a book. So, I didn’t know until I was 32 that this is something that I want to do for the rest of my life. Come hell or high water, this is something that I want to do.

Why did you decide to write a thriller?

My publisher asked if I wanted to pivot into a different genre. At first they were thinking something like Kennedy Ryan or Tia Williams, and I am not gifted like that. I cannot write romance to save my life. What I always wanted to do is write a thriller, but an action thriller, not a psychology “I’m going crazy” or “my husband isn’t who I thought he was” type thing. I wanted a more action-oriented, female-led crime thriller, and that’s how Strangers Behind Closed Doors came to be. Also, I wanted to talk about the issue of Black women, brown women, indigenous women, people who are not white, going missing, and nobody cares. So I decided to meld those two.

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To that end, this book is very much about the lack of media and police attention given to disappeared Black women. That is something that absolutely deserves to be written about, but you need to balance that with the storytelling. Was it a challenge at all to keep that theme throughout the book but not have it feel too heavy handed?

I didn’t care. I’m going to put this in your face, and you either deal with it and figure out how you’re part of the problem and how you can be part of the solution, or you don’t deal with it and say stuff like, “Well, I just didn’t identify with the characters.” People have absolutely valid criticisms of books, and I’m not discounting those, but we all know that some—I’m gonna just call a spade a spade—white people will close a book because it’s making them feel things that they’re just not comfortable with feeling, and I didn’t care about any of that. I just wrote the book and did the best I could. Did I try to balance it? I feel like I did, but again, I don’t care if I did or I didn’t. I just wanted to write about this social issue and twist it into this mystery, and it being a Black female-led book.

Well, the characters are great. I love the character Giovanni. You’d mentioned all the research you had to do. There’s a lot of police work in the book, but then there’s also Giovanni’s job as the chief concierge at an exclusive hotel. How did you go about researching these roles?

I read a couple of books about hotels and being a concierge. I interviewed a concierge at a five-star luxury resort. I also interviewed a Black [female] Chicago police detective. But I interviewed a concierge because I wouldn’t have known things like an R&R is really like what it’s described. It’s the turning over of a room. You’re only given 15 to 25 minutes to turn over each room. You only have so many housekeepers. You have back of house; you have front of house. All of these things I wouldn’t have learned had I not interviewed her. That’s how I got Gio’s technical aspects down.

Were there any authors or books or other works of art that really influenced or inspired you while you were working on this book?

Absolutely. S.A. Cosby is a fantastic crime writer, and I read all of his books. I really like Reacher. I love that show. I enjoy John Wick. It’s a combination of different media—books and TV and movies—and those are always my inspiration. Movies especially when I have to deal with fight scenes, because I need something visual.

Also, my mom. Both of my parents are Army veterans, but my mom taught me how to fight, and she can kick people’s ass, so I would run fight scenes past her, and she would tell me if this is feasible, if it’s not feasible. I also try to be creative with some of the instruments and tools that were used in the fight scenes, like the meat tenderizer. Because of course you’re gonna have guns and knives here and there, but what’s something different, you know? I was just going through different things. My Google search history on my laptop—I swore somebody was gonna come for me. But I was like, “Oh, meat tenderizer. That would hurt!” So yeah, just an amalgam of different things.

That was actually one of my questions. You shared on Instagram that your mom helped you choreograph the fight scenes. And I will say, when I was reading some of these fight scenes, I was struck by how detailed they are. You really get into the specifics of what punch lands where. How did you bring all of that together?

I’m so happy I live alone sometimes. I would physically work out how things would go. So I would stand up and I would throw a [punch] and then stand on the opposite side, and be like, “Okay, if it’s left-handed, it’s gonna hit the right [side of my] face. If it’s right, it’s gonna hit the left side of my face. If I hit the stomach, then how will that look?” So I’d work all of that out, and then I’d read it to my mom, and my mom would give me further pointers. And again, I read a lot of books, so I was reading a lot of fight scenes. But the thing is, these are fight scenes [primarily] between men. I’m sure they’re out there, but I can’t think of any books where it’s a woman fighting a man or a woman fighting another woman. And I mean fighting. I don’t mean hair pulling, windmilling. I mean duking it out.

So reading a lot of books, physically acting it out, and then running it past my mom. Because women, we hold our bodies different, we fight different, and I needed to make it as plausible as possible. That’s why I was trying to be so detail-oriented about what punch would land where, and then how you’re physically going to be feeling. Because you need to know that if Giovanni gets hit in the face, she’s dazed. It’s not like, “I got hit in the face and I’m a superhero, so I’m just going to keep fighting.” I felt like I needed to encompass all of the senses because then it made it more realistic.

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There are some twists that happen in the book. Did you plot them out in advance? Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I am a reformed pantser, and I was reformed against my will. You have to write whole book outlines for your publisher, so I had no choice. With Saving Ruby King, I pantsed. I jokingly say that’s why it took me five years to write. Because I pantsed and it’s my first book, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But The Two Lives of Sara, which is my sophomore novel, took me five months, and Strangers Behind Closed Doors took me six months. So outlining drastically reduces how long it takes for me to write the book.

Was there anything you learned from the publication of your first two novels that you used in the writing of this one?

I tried to make sure to adjust my pacing, so it’s more of a page turner. I learned to shorten my chapters, how to end on a very important question. These are the things that I had to learn from my first two books. I also learned that I love incorporating references to movies and music and television shows, but how to do that in a decent way, so that it’s not distracting. Just little odds and ends that I’m going to take with me into all my other books going forward.

I love when authors write about their hometown, warts and all. You’re a native of Chicago and that city is almost like its own character in the book. What is it about the city that makes you want to write about it so extensively?

Because I grew up there. I was born and raised on the South Side. And it gets such a bad rap sometimes from the ogre in charge. You know, the person who’s in Washington now. And it really pisses me off. How are you going to talk about a city that you don’t know? All you’re seeing is what you want to see, which is the ugly. You don’t see the great. You don’t know anything about it. I have a chip on my shoulder about it, so I try to do any and everything I can to show all of the city—its grit, but also its beauty and its glory, and the people and the food and the little intricacies you don’t know about if you don’t live here. I just need to make my city a character. I feel like it’s some holy mission on my part to show Chicago.

You do a really great job promoting your book on social media. Writers aren’t always known for loving the promotional aspect of the job. How do you feel about it? Do you enjoy the social media experience?

I enjoy it. I’ve always been super social. I know that there are some authors who are like, “Ugh, no.” And I get it because writing takes a lot out of you, and then you also have to put yourself in the spotlight and be like, “Hey! Buy my book!” And how do you do that and not seem hokey with it? But I’ve just always been really extroverted. I love talking about me, so I love talking about the book. I’m just going to find entertaining and different ways to do it. it’s one of the more fun parts of my job. I enjoy it.

What do you want people to get from reading this book, other than simply be entertained?

I want people to see where they fall within a racial system that was and that is regulated to continue to oppress people who are not white and Christian. I want you to see where you fall in that category, and if you’re not satisfied with where you fall in that category, freaking do something about it. Okay? Read a book; search out knowledge. Do not pull every Black woman or man you see and ask us a whole bunch. Do your own research, please, because we’re not here to educate you like that. Let me just say, I can and I will if I must, but I’m not the representative of my people. We’re not a monolith. So I want people to get out there, do their research, see where they fall, and make steps to just do better. That’s it.

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You’ve been open about your frustration that the publishing industry doesn’t give enough marketing support to Black authors or books with predominantly Black characters. With that in mind, what advice would you have for aspiring Black authors who want to publish novels and have their work be seen but feel like there’s no way their books will reach audiences without the support?

Don’t do it for the acclaim; do it for you. Do it because you have something important to say and everything else will follow. Because we need our stories out there. And I don’t like to say “aspiring” authors. If you write, you’re an author. I don’t want any authors out there who haven’t yet been published to feel like this is a deterrent. Figure out what’s going to work for you, but don’t not get your story published. The disparity is so unnerving and it’s really irksome, unless you happen to hit it big. But if you don’t, you’re relegated to smaller things, and it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating for me in a lot of respects, but I am going to keep pushing and keep doing what I need to do, because our stories are important, they’re relevant, they speak to the history, the present, and the future of this country, of the world at large. You’re too important to not want to get your story out there.

To learn more about Catherine Adel West, visit her website.

To purchase Strangers Behind Closed Doors, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Of all the records stacked side by side in our living room, the Monkees’ 1966 eponymous debut was my favorite. Not for the songs, catchy as they were, but for the sleeve. Caressing the LP, slightly scratched from years of repeated playing, the sleeve would have been just another piece of paper were it not for the doodles drawn by my mother’s teenage hand: ink sketches of girls with long flipped hair wearing mini dresses and go-go boots, surrounded by declarations of love for different members of the band.

“Elaine,” my mother wrote about herself, “loves Peter.”

Peter? I thought. Eww.

My discovery of this album in the mid-’80s changed my perception of my mother. It was a peek into another time in her life. Before marriage, before divorce, before bills piled up. Before all of it, this record showed me, my mother was a girl who drew swirly hearts and had crushes and listened to the Monkees. She was a girl like me.

I’d discovered the album when I was a tween myself and a fan of The Monkees TV show, which was then in syndication. I loved the music, the series, and particularly band member Davy Jones, whose brown eyes and pouty lips made my heart skip a few extra beats.

Unbeknownst to my mother, the record became my prized possession. It was a snapshot of who she was during simpler times: a girl my age, one who doodled and giggled with girlfriends like Cathy and Carol, whose names were written on the sleeve in bubbly cursive. I’d run my fingers over the decades-old ink, envisioning them gabbing about boys.

What did her voice sound like back then? I’d wonder. When she found out her friend liked Davy, did she respond with “Eww,” as I had about Peter? What else did she like? Would we have been friends?

Like most kids, I’d always seen my mother through a single lens: that of an adult, one who had never been anything but grown, as if her life began the moment I was born. The record offered a rare glimpse of her as a girl, to me as a girl. When I held that sleeve in my hand, I could toss all notions I had of her aside; we were simply two preteens bonding over boys and music, decades apart. The album allowed me to know her in a way that no other item had.

Twenty years later, living 3,000 miles away, I called my mom, catching her in the midst of cleaning. Somehow, the record collection came up.

“Don’t get rid of them, OK?” I said, thinking specifically of The Monkees. “If you don’t want them, I can take them the next time I visit.”

“Oh, those old things? I tossed those already.”

My stomach dropped. I was stunned. My reaction — some combination of “What?” and “How could you?” — probably sounded extreme. My mother couldn’t understand why I cared about a stack of old albums no one had listened to in years. And I couldn’t find the words to express that The Monkees LP was more than just a collection of pop tunes. It was a portal to a time when we were both young. It was the bond I felt with her when I held it in my hand.

A few weeks later, my mother reached out to tell me she’d discovered another box of old albums in the attic, and I was welcome to take any that I wanted. On my next visit, I sat on the living room floor, flipping through the box’s contents. My eyes scanned each cover as I read the artists’ names: “Lynard Skynard. Prince. The Beatles. Cher.” No Monkees.

I was heartbroken. I couldn’t believe the album and its sleeve were gone. I wanted so badly to run my fingers along the sketches once again, to connect with those young girls, my younger self included, and their seemingly uncomplicated lives. More out of musical preference than nostalgia, I brought a few of the records home with me. One rainy day, I pulled one out of its plain white sleeve: Carole King’s Tapestry, released when my mother was 17.

I placed the album on the turntable. As the needle traced the grooves on the vinyl and King’s voice filled the room (“It doesn’t help to know you’re just time away”), I noticed a faded inscription on the album’s cover — “Elaine Keating,” my mother’s maiden name, written in her cursive script. There were no scribbles or doodles or declarations this time. Just her name, that of a woman just a few years shy of marriage and motherhood. And like that, the portal opened, and we were once again two young women forging a bond through time.

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Here are 5 artists who, for various reasons, chose to follow a new career path.

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I’ve interviewed a lot of people and let me tell you...if you want to be inspired and moved and reminded of the transformative power of the arts, the man you want to talk to is Wendell Pierce.

I had the great pleasure of talking to Wendell twice. The first time, in 2023, we had a quick 10-minute call to discuss makeup artist Debi Young, who I was profiling for Shondaland. Then, in 2025, I interviewed him for Next Avenue. We spent 30 minutes on Zoom discussing his incredible career: his role as Detective William “Bunk” Moreland on The Wire, his many films with director Spike Lee, and his Tony-nominated work in theater. His range is extraordinary. Last year alone, he appeared in Marvel’s Thunderbolts, DC Comics’ Superman, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, the Starz crime drama Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and CBS’s police dramedy Elsbeth, while also preparing to star in Othello at DC’s Shakespeare Theater. It was a pretty incredible way to celebrate his 40th year as a professional actor.

Our conversation didn’t just focus on his work but expanded into larger topics—the purpose of art, what he turns to when he’s seeking inspiration, the rebuilding of his beloved hometown of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and more.

Unfortunately, Next Avenue couldn’t publish the entire interview due to its length. In addition, the publication has since shut down, and the article is no longer available on their website. So, in honor of Wendell’s new film, They Fight, which recently premiered on Hulu, I’m thrilled to share our chat now in its entirety.

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SANDRA EBEJER: You have so many projects out this year. At this stage of your career, how do you decide which projects to say yes to? Does a role or a project have to have something in order for you to say, “Yeah, I want to spend some time working on that?”

WENDELL PIERCE: There’s always different variables that pique my interest. You’re always thinking of creating a body of work, trying to make it as diverse as possible, as reflective of your interests. I also try to think of things that are going to be challenging to me. And then there’s commercial decisions, too—that’ll be good business, put me out there a little bit more. You know, I’ve never been a comics guy. I’ve never been a superhero enthusiast. And so that was quite curious to get into something like Thunderbolts. And then have the opportunity to be in a franchise like Superman? How can you turn that down? Those were pleasant surprises at this point in my career.

But at the same time, while I’m doing press for the superhero movies, I’m about to do a workshop on a new Suzan-Lori Parks play. I look forward to going back to television and doing a season of Elsbeth. And then at the end of that, do Othello at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., while a crime drama show like Raising Kanen is happening. I hope it shows people the range I can have. That’s the range that I’m trying to challenge myself with, and also doing the trifecta, as I call it—television, film, theater—all in a year. I try to do that every year.

One of the projects you have coming up is Highest 2 Lowest, which received a great reception at Cannes. If I’m not mistaken, this was your third time working with Spike Lee. Is that correct?

Let’s see... Yes! The third time. I did Get on the Bus, Malcolm X, and now Highest 2 Lowest.

What is it like working with him as a director?

Spike is great. Spike is very creative. Spike digs deep into his knowledge of the medium of cinema. I feel like I’m a part of a little repertory company of actors that he uses. We go all the way back to Fort Greene [in Brooklyn], which was like an incubator of talent. It was like a Black arts movement in the 1980s when we were all getting out of school and starting our careers. I met him all the way back then in Fort Greene, which is a great story of that neighborhood and the people that were there. Lorna Simpson, who actually has an exhibit now at the Met in New York, and Spike’s movie is about to come out—I was just thinking about how we all started in Fort Greene at the same time.

Spike has great references in cinema. You know, the idea that he would do a movie like this, a Kurosawa movie... He has a great wealth of knowledge about that. And also when it comes to putting together groups of actors, he has a knowledge of how Orson Welles used his repertory group of actors in the same way. And then there’s a familiarity of friendship and mutual respect. I remember how excited he got to see me working with Denzel [in Highest 2 Lowest]. He said, “Ooh, I got Denzel and Wendell! Oh man, do your thing. Do your thing.” I really appreciate that about Spike. He has a great capacity for creation, putting all the elements there, that something special will happen.

I have to ask you about The Wire, which you will be asked about for the rest of your life.

And happily, I accept. I am so blessed that that will be something that I’ll be known for for the rest of my life.

I’ve interviewed a number of your colleagues, and some of your fellow cast members on The Wire have talked about the blessing and the curse of being cast in that show. What impact did the series have on your career?

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Glen Phillips never intended to be a rock star. In 1986, at age 15, he and high school friends Todd Nichols, Dean Dinning, and Randy Guss formed a band with the intention of having fun and playing a few shows. And while they wanted to make good music, Phillips says they had no musical career aspirations.

“Mostly I was excited that seniors wanted to hang out with me,” he recalls, laughing. “I was a freshman, a nerdy high school kid, and it was just fun to make songs and play shows. I’d been more of a theater kid. Actually, my theater teacher freshman year, it was his first year teaching, and he said, ‘You know why I am here? I love the theater more than anything else, and I saw all my friends going to New York or L.A., and I knew they were going to have that life of auditions and getting their feelings crushed and bad reviews, and I just wanted to love the theater, so I’m going to teach.’ And I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll be a high school teacher...’ I’m sensitive to criticism and rejection, and so I didn’t think I had that self-confidence that you need to do well in this business.”

Though he thought he would go on to study education at San Francisco State, Phillips and his friends continued to make music and perform. Calling their band Toad the Wet Sprocket (a nod to a Monty Python sketch), they released their debut album in 1989 to little fanfare. But in 1991, their third album, fear, debuted on the Billboard 200, while its singles, “All I Want” and “Walk on the Ocean,” played in heavy rotation on radio and MTV. Suddenly, they were rock stars. And though critics have never quite known what to make of the band (other than including them on regular “Worst Band Names of All Time” lists), they’ve amassed a dedicated following of fans who have stuck by them for decades.

Now, 40 years and eight studio albums after its inception, Toad the Wet Sprocket is still having fun and playing shows—with three of its four original members, no less. (Drummer Randy Guss left in 2020 due to health complications.) They recently released Rings: The Acoustic Sessions, on which they revisit 14 older songs with new arrangements, and this summer they’ll be touring with Men at Work before going back out on the road in October for their first-ever acoustic tour.

I recently had a wide-ranging chat with Phillips over Zoom about his early influences, the new album, and the song he wishes he’d never written.

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SANDRA EBEJER: It’s hard to believe it’s been 40 years since Toad the Wet Sprocket first formed. Who were some of your influences back then? Were there any musicians you wanted to emulate?

I’d been kind of a metalhead when I met Todd. I was really into Ozzy and Iron Maiden. I loved Rush. He turned me on to Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, R.E.M. Randy was really into Elvis Costello and The Water Boys. So it was a bunch of new music for me. It was before they called it alternative—some people were saying post-punk. There wasn’t necessarily a name for it yet, but it was that indie college music that really got me.

This summer marks the 35th anniversary of the release of Toad’s album fear. You’d released a few albums and had been around for a few years, and then “All I Want” hit the airwaves. How was that period for you guys when you started appearing on MTV and getting press?

It was both cool and disorienting. I mean, we’d done a lot of touring already for two records, and we had an audience, and they would talk about the “All I Wanters,” the new crowd. I think having the “All I Want” video—we were very into our indie credibility, and it shattered that. And so that part was hard for us because we wanted the cool kids to like us, and the cool kids didn’t like us anymore. At the same time, we were getting to tour. It was really exciting and it was also kind of difficult. It’s an interesting mixed bag, I would say.

I have to ask you about my all-time favorite Toad song because I have you here and who knows when I’ll have another chance to ask about it. I’ve been in love with “Before You Were Born” since I first heard it 35 years ago. I don’t know that that’s a song that you play live much anymore. Is there anything you can share about that one and how it came about?

We don’t play it all that much. It was written for a friend of mine who didn’t grow up knowing her father, and whose entire family rejected her mother and her. [It was] about the fate of being born into a certain family and being discarded before you even get to become yourself, knowing that you’re outside and not wanted. That was the basis of it.

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The album also includes “Hold Her Down,” which is a really tough song to listen to in terms of its content. What was the reaction when that song was released?

“Hold Her Down” was, and still is, a very difficult song, and once again was based on an experience that someone close to me had of a violent attack. I think the intent was to have it be confusing and disorienting, and kind of painful to listen to, to have it be switching perspectives. Knowing more of what I know about trauma now, I know that song has been helpful to people, [and] I know it’s also been hurtful to people. I would never write about that subject in that way anymore, especially in the era of Andrew Tate. In this era of excessive toxic masculinity and aggression and misogyny, the confusing nature of that song I don’t think is appropriate anymore. And I’m not even sure if it was appropriate when it happened.

The song is confusing enough—and I would say, for me at this point, ineptly enough written, lyrically—that I have considered trying to scrub it from all the streaming services. And once again, I know there are people who’ve been through that, where it takes them into a cathartic place that moves them forward, but I feel like if there’s any ratio at all for that reaction towards anyone who’s actually been hurt by it or thinks it is in some way promoting or condoning sexual [assault], one person is too many. I wish that song didn’t exist, personally. I was 21 and writing about something that was beyond my capacity to really understand the impact of.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always found it cathartic. But I understand what you’re saying. It’s so subjective, in how each person hears things.

Yeah, and there is a compassionate gentleness needed in talking about things. You know, there’s this amazing book that won the Booker Prize by Keri Hulme called The Bone People. It’s about child abuse, and it’s about the love that can still exist with an abusive parent and their child. And I have recommended that to people who have said it’s the best book they ever read, and then people who were like, “How could you have me read this?” I didn’t know about their own history; I didn’t know about their own trauma. You get older and you understand how subtle things are, and dealing with that subject in such a, once again, cathartic and emotionally messy way—I wanted it to be hard to listen to, and I may have done a better job at that than I should have.

Well, and to your point about the book, we also don’t live in a culture now where you can have nuances. There’s no gray areas anymore; everything’s very black or white.

And humanity exists in gray areas. I mean, we have a toxic narcissist running the country right now—a malevolent, hateful individual—and that has been normalized. I can’t think of another time where that has ever been considered normal or acceptable. It’s a really weird time to be in. And so at the same time there is that trauma awareness, counter to that is the complete opposite—just literally caring about nobody and that being trumpeted as virtue and people talking about how empathy is overrated and represents a kind of weakness. I don’t know what to make of any of it anymore. It’s disheartening.

I completely agree. I saw you guys perform last fall in Albany, New York, and you did that stunning acoustic version of “Rings.” I was so excited to see that that was the tentpole for the acoustic album. What made you decide to visit these older tracks in this new way?

Well, we’d been playing this acoustic subset for a while and in the middle of the set, breaking things down. And throughout our whole career, back in the day when we were doing radio and press and in-stores all the time, that was always a part of who we are and what we did. But it was also looking [at the] 40th anniversary and [asking], can we do a retrospective project that’s new, that breathes new life into things? Instead of the jaggedness of all those years of recording, bring them up to now and see what we had to work with. We knew that we needed to have the singles and the more popular tracks and some fan favorites and some real deep cuts, and so it was a lot of fun to just go, “What are our favorite songs, and what do we think could work?” It was a really great project.

When you’re putting together an album like this, is it difficult to choose which songs are included? Are there any debates about which tracks get included and which don’t?

I don’t know if there were debates. There were some questions at the start of, “What album are we trying to make here? Are we trying to do something that’s a really honest, everybody in the room acoustic record?” And I think having Robert Stevenson mixing—he got his Grammy for Queens of the Stone Age. He managed to find power in the acoustic tracks and this treatment of them that made us realize, “Oh, this is a studio record.” It’s acoustic instruments, we gave ourselves a palette, but we didn’t have to have it be this thing we were capturing absolutely live and trying to have like a black and white photograph of an event. We could actually take it some places. That really shifted how we looked at it. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s just what works for the project, and what do we think we nailed. “Rings” we wanted to do, and we’d been trying to do it how we always did it, which is this fast-paced rock song, and it just wasn’t working. I went home and did a very primitive piano demo on it and sent that to Dean and he took that and really fleshed it out. So, it’s always trial and error. You want to find where the song wants to live.

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Many of the songs on the album go back decades. Do the meanings of the songs or what they mean to you change as time goes on?

Yeah, in subtle ways. I like to write with an emotional specificity, but even the emotional specificity usually has this element of ambivalence. And ambivalent gets used a lot to mean doesn’t care about something. “Meh, I’m ambivalent,” you know? But ambivalent means I feel two ways, sometimes very strongly. As we said before, human beings, we’re complex. Like, take “All I Want,” which is about being in the moment. The chorus is about that joy, that happiness; the verses are about being locked in limitations and bad habits of communication. It’s those moments where you step out of that into going, “Is everything actually okay?” and how fragile those moments are. They don’t last. And I think because of that, those combinations, those feelings, they’ll always come up again. I mean, some songs are just silly. “Nanci” is just silly. But the stuff that really hits home—it might work for when you go away to college, it might work for when your mom has dementia, you know? [Laughs] Because we wrote more in that emotional space and less in a narrative, most of the stuff ages decently because it’s just about emotional authenticity.

The industry has changed so much over the last 40 years. Toad does a lot of VIP ticket experiences and meet and greets. In your solo work you do smaller living room concerts, and you have a subscription plan where you do livestream performances for fans. How do you feel about where things are now? On one hand you have more direct contact with fans, but then you’re also doing so much more without a big label to support you.

I mean, I miss album sales, I’m not gonna lie. I miss radio. I miss passive income. I miss privacy and that feeling that when I get home my only job was to write the next record. And now there’s a constant influx of things that need to be done that aren’t related to that, and so I write less, I feel less creative. In terms of the business, it’s been changing forever, right? Recorded music was a massive threat to live music early on. Like if you wanted a hit, you used to have to go to a revue that a publishing house would put on, and you’d walk home with the sheet music, and you’d play it for your family. That’s how it used to work. And streaming has really changed the landscape. I think the economics of that at some point have to change into something where artists are not considered quite so disposable. I don’t think there’s enough respect for creative work in general. And I see that in business, as well. People will make a product, and they don’t know how it works. It’s all the people who work for them that actually created this thing. It’s the age-old labor and capital questions.

With AI coming in, I would be terrified being a new artist right now. I’m very grateful that I have an audience that’s been with me for a long time, been with Toad for a long time, and they want to see us in our imperfection. Somebody recently was like, “Perfection is boring. There’s nothing there!” You get an AI song, and it’s right in all the ways that music should be, but it’s not wrong in any of the ways music should be. [Laughs] There isn’t the emotional catch in a voice or the emphasis that somebody’s gonna make when they’re feeling it, and it can’t be different tonight, it can’t forget its lyrics. People want the humanity, and I think there are a lot of people, especially a lot of young people, who as many of them are falling into being owned by their phones and social media, there are many who are choosing to opt out of the digital world and are seeking authenticity. I think the more this stuff gets out of hand, the more precious authenticity is, and I feel lucky that that’s our product. What we try to make in our art is something that’s authentic and something that makes you feel. So once again, if I were starting now, I definitely would have gone and become—well, maybe not a teacher anymore, either. [Laughs]

You know, people ask for advice. I generally tell them to study physics and make a time machine. But I also think it means the answer is doing what you do that no one else can do, which has always been the answer in art. Everything’s been said, but if I write a love song, it’s not going to be the same love song somebody else would write. For somebody who’s a young artist, don’t chase. Find your voice. Todd, our guitarist, turned me on to Mk.gee and Dijon, and they, to me, are so fresh and rule breaking. Even though they have major label backing, they really have a vision, and it carries top to bottom. And that faith in your own vision and your faith in the ability to execute it [is key], especially now that the tools are so democratized that anyone can record a record, anyone can make a video. If we’re going to do an album, it’s going to be because it’s great songs with things we need to say. But the industry itself... It’s a strange era, but a band like us can be independent and do pretty well. So I feel mostly grateful for our position in it.

Are you seeing a change reflected in the audience over time? Do you see a lot of younger people coming, or is it just us old folk?

Yeah, we’re getting a generational twist. I mean, I’m a grandpa now. My oldest is 30, and so, yeah, we’re seeing people who look more like my children at the shows, because they grew up listening to us. It’s been really wonderful to have that generational upswing.

That’s cool! I interviewed Renee Stahl a couple of years ago and we talked about the song the two of you did together, “You Were Meant to Be,” which makes me cry every time I hear it. Do you enjoy collaborating with other artists? Is co-writing something that appeals to you?

Most of my writing these days is co-writing. I am easily distractible, so it’s really good for me to have other people in the room. Now that I have less of that youthful fire, where you think all your ideas are good, I’m intensely and instantly critical. So, even if I’m writing the lion’s share of a song, just simply having somebody where it’s, “Does this work?” “Yeah.” “Okay, you sure?” really helps it move along. So, yeah, I love co-writing.

At this stage of your career, is there anything you wish you could do better when it comes to your music? Is there something you aspire to get better at?

I mean, all of it. I need a basis in theory again. I did two years at city college before we went on tour when I was 18, but you get in a rock band and you end up getting in habits. I messed up my left arm 20 years ago now. Sat on a glass table and cut my ulnar nerve, so I’m partially paralyzed in this hand. I was really starting to study guitar at that point, and then I just had to learn to play again and move things on a capo and figure out what shapes I could actually achieve. It’s stabilized over the last decade where I understand the range of it, and even the weight of the guitar I’m holding, how much that compresses the nerves, cold—all the things that will make my hand more paralyzed. I have things I can do when I have more mobility, and things I know how to work around when I don’t. I want to learn to play keys better. I want to get my theory back. I’m envious of my friends—Dan Layus from Augustana has been doing all these gorgeous string arrangements for his music—and I regret not having that childhood basis of theory, because I see how much it informs people’s capabilities.

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When did you begin playing music? Were you a kid?

I played a little guitar in sixth grade and then tried to learn metal riffs from magazines like Guitar for the Practicing Musician when I was a teenager, and then I was in a band and so it was all about writing music. I’m a writer and singer first, and I’m a passable guitarist, but just having fluency really helps in every way, and for my friends who are musically literate, I see how much that feeds in their capabilities.

Well, since we’re discussing Toad’s 40th anniversary, if you could go back 40 years, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give yourself?

I mean, I would have bought some Apple stock... Mostly just to be really grateful and communicate better. That’s about it. Not be so scared of the future, but be more present and more grateful for when things are working well, because things always change and they change again.

To learn more about Toad the Wet Sprocket, visit the band’s website.

To learn more about Glen Phillips, visit his website.

To catch Toad on tour, find dates here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You might also enjoy…

If you are a fan of Stephen King’s writing, I highly recommend checking out Monsters in the Archives, the fascinating new book by Caroline Bicks. As I shared in last week’s interview, Bicks is an author, professor, Shakespearean scholar, co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast, and the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. Thanks to her day job, she was able to get unprecedented access to King’s archives, and spent her yearlong sabbatical studying five of his earliest novels—Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Pet Sematary, and Night Shift.

We chatted for about an hour, and there were some things that didn’t make it into our published interview. So, I’m happy to share video exclusives from our chat.

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

In these videos, you’ll hear about…

• what was off-limits in the research and writing process

• how the research began to seep into her personal life

• why she didn’t include Stephen King’s The Stand in her book

• that pesky rumor about Stephen King’s ghostwriter

Enjoy!

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Greetings from the Land of Migraine!

This heat and humidity and the general 2026 of it all may kill me. I’ve had near-daily migraines for weeks now and I’m so over it.

Anyway, hi. How are things with you? I hope you’re faring better than I am.

Not a whole lot has happened since I last wrote, in part due to the ongoing ache in my head. One fun thing: I did start a whole mess of chatter on Threads after sharing some writing I did a few years back.

A few years as in, when I was 10.

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It started with a celebratory post about my first-ever journal entry, which just had its 40th anniversary. Apparently I decided my first time writing in a diary should be about something important, so I used the page to share that I liked a classmate, but I Lovvvvvvveeeeeeed Michael J. Fox.

Being the fickle girl that I was, the love didn’t last long.

Almost exactly seven months later, I declared that I’d moved on from Michael J. Fox and was in love with Mackenzie Astin, but like, for real this time.

Turns out that this journal was the starter journal for pretty much every tween girl in the '80s. A majority of the responses I got on Threads were some form of, “OMG I HAD THAT JOURNAL TOO!” Second most common response: “OMG I LOVED MICHAEL J. FOX, TOO!”

Anyway, it’s been fun. I’ve had a lot of engagement because of the posts, which is unusual for me. Turns out that people couldn’t care less about my modern-day writing, but share a cringe-inducing page I wrote in fourth grade and people are all over it.

To those that are newer here, I’ll also add that I had the pleasure of interviewing Mackenzie Astin just about a year ago. So, to the me of 1987, you’re welcome. (He was unbelievably kind and lovely to chat with.)

Anyhoo, I hope you had a chance to read last week’s chat with Caroline Bicks about Shakespeare, Stephen King, and her year of terrifying research. Her book, Monsters in the Archives, is such a great read. I highly recommend it, especially if you enjoy reading about the craft of writing.

Later this week, I’ll share my chat with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Glen Phillips about the band’s 40th anniversary and their new acoustic album.

Next week, there will be no new interviews. I’ll share a couple of things from the archives but nothing new, since I’ll be on vaca.

I hope you’re doing as well as can be. Thank you for reading this far! I’ll see you in a few weeks!

Leave a comment

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

When Caroline Bicks was 12 she became a fan of William Shakespeare. Around the same time, she became a fan of Stephen King. Though the two are rarely lumped together, Bicks—who is an internationally-recognized Shakespeare scholar as well as the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine—says she discovered how much the two had in common after a yearlong sabbatical spent researching five of King’s early novels. Thanks to her role at UMaine, she was given unprecedented access to King’s archives, and throughout the research process kept in touch with the author himself. What she discovered was that despite living centuries apart, the Bard and the King of Horror had more in common than one might think.

“Part of the pleasure of this project is I had a chance to talk to Stephen King as I went,” Bicks says. “He’s very supportive, I think because there hadn’t been people paying attention to how he writes—the actual language, his word choices—and he clearly cares so much about that. He hadn’t had a scholar come forward and want to do that kind of work. So when I got a chance to talk to him about word sounds, like the attention to the word ‘grit’ that I saw him pulling out as he was redrafting Pet Sematary—that’s a book all about digging things up and what comes out of the ground, and grittiness and grating and terrifying gravelly voices—he was like, ‘Yeah, I always think about how words clang on the reader’s ear.’ That was a revelation. That’s why Shakespeare’s poetry sticks in our heads, but I don’t think people think about how Stephen King’s words stick in our heads. They have that same lyrical sonic power.”

Bicks shares all that she learned during her year of research in her new book, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. Part-memoir, part-master class on the craft of writing, it’s a fascinating exploration into King’s process as well as Bicks’ relationship to his work. The book has already received acclaim from numerous sources, including King himself, who told his social media followers that it’s “the best book about my process that I have ever read.”

I recently spoke with Bicks about her year spent in the archives, shaping her research into a book, and how it felt to revisit King’s stories as an adult.

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

SANDRA EBEJER: You were in your job for roughly four years when Stephen King called you to say hi. What was that moment like when you first heard from him?

It was crazy. I had been a King fan since I was 12 and I first read Night Shift. I took this job at UMaine. It’s an endowed chair. It comes with this great fund to support the public humanities, and they wanted a Shakespearean, so it was everything I’d been doing in my career plus. It was endowed in his name because he’s our most famous alum, but he didn’t endow it. I took the job and they were like, “You’re never going to meet him. Don’t even reach out to him.” So when he called me at home, I was like, “What?!” [Laughs]

We had a nice introductory conversation and then I reached out to him via email. I said, “Would you come talk to our students?” I do my homework. I know he cares a lot about Lisey’s Story. He’s said that’s the novel closest to his heart and I knew he was working on a streaming series of that. So I was like, “Would you come and talk to the students about adapting a novel that you love for the screen?” And he said sure. And I said, “How about also talking about On Writing, because that’s coming up on a big anniversary?” And he said sure. He said, “I’ll come for two days in a row.” I was completely flabbergasted, but I knew I had to keep it secret because he wouldn’t want upper administration or media involved, so I was carrying this secret with me for months organizing this visit.

He insisted on driving himself to campus. He gets out of his car, a totally unassuming sedan. I don’t even remember the color of it. He puts me immediately at ease and we just chat. He talks to the students. He was so generous with his time and loved talking to them. You can tell that he’s a teacher at heart.

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You’re a Shakespeare scholar and also a big fan of Stephen King. Do you find that there are similarities between their works?

Oh, yeah. Shakespeare’s always in my head, in part because I’m teaching and reading the plays, writing about them and thinking about them, and I do this podcast with Michelle Ephraim, Everyday Shakespeare, where we’re having fun with Shakespeare stories and thinking about how they relate to our everyday lives. So it wasn’t completely odd that I would start reading another writer and see echoes.

What I was most surprised by—and this came across day one when I started with Pet Sematary and got a chance to look at this remarkable manuscript they have in there—is the second-to-last draft of it with all of the copy editor’s sticky note questions to Steve and all of his handwritten responses. And what came through loud and clear was his attention to word sounds. The copy editor was like, “Is that really the word you meant?” He’s like, “Yep. That’s the word I meant. Say it out loud. You’ll see.” And he’s not talking down. He just wants to explain why he cares about that particular word sound. And of course, Shakespeare was writing to be heard. He’s writing for the stage or he’s writing lyric poetry, which has its origins in a spoken tradition. So that was the first surprise for me. It was like, “Oh, wow. He really cares about word sounds.”

Shakespeare’s work is held in high regard. Stephen King, not as much. There aren’t a lot of people who love both.

You know, there are a lot of Stephen King fans who know their Shakespeare and they appreciate it. But, to your point, I don’t think there are a lot of academics or Shakespeare scholars [who like King]. I think Stephen King fans have always understood; I think the Shakespeare scholars police the boundaries.

What would you say to those who snub their nose at King’s writing?

I would say Shakespeare was not taken seriously in his own time by academics. Both Shakespeare and Stephen King were writing for popular audiences. Shakespeare took a lot of flak from the university-trained writers of his day, who were calling him an upstart crow. There’s always been this association of popular writers with something that’s not elite and literary. That boundary has been in place, usually set up by people from a particular academic background who have a lot at stake in keeping those boundaries up to justify their own high literary standards. And the more I’ve leaned into this project, the more I see that those boundaries are completely false. When you’ve got a brilliant writer like Stephen King who’s so well read, who knows all of the writers and is referencing all of them in his writings, you can hear the echoes of them. He just straight-out references them. He knows his high elite literary readers.

The novels you cover in the book are ones you read as a teen, and you revisited them for this project. Did you find that the stories feel different now that you’re older?

This is part of what was driving this project for me, which is so unlike an academic project in some ways. Even though I was doing the same kind of close reading I do when I do my academic writing, it was important to me that I was coming into this with my scared little kid self and that I didn’t lose touch with the emotional reactions that I had to his books when I read them the first time. I really wanted to reconnect with them, even though that was sickening and scary at points, because I’m not drawn to horror books now. So going back and reading them again, in terms of what I was feeling in my body, felt the same. And that was a lesson in fear and horror. You process those emotions in the same parts in your body. That’s not going to change.

What does change is—and this is why these stories endure—yes, the monsters are terrifying, but it’s really about that way he has of being able to home in on those human fears of loss, whether you’re going to lose your child or your mommy or your ideals or your friend or your pet. These are fears we all will experience, and he knows how to capture that and make that the real core horror. Like “The Boogeyman,” which was that [Night Shift] story that had scared me so badly when I was 12. The first time I read it, I was feeling that fear of, “Something’s gonna come out of my closet and kill me.” And that story focuses on three small children who meet that fate. But as an adult talking to him about why he wrote that story, he told me it was because he had two small children and he was worried about crib death. So returning to that story as an adult now, of course it’s going to hit [differently]. I mean, I don’t think I’m ever going to lose touch with that core fear, but there’s another layer. Like, “What about my kid?”

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Did you know all along that this was going to be a book? Or did you go into the archives thinking you were just going to explore?

I went in thinking I’m just going to explore. I had a sabbatical year. The Kings were very generous and said, “You can spend that year in the archives.” They hadn’t let anyone in there before for an extended period of time. And I was very clear about the parameters with them. I said, “I’m just going to look at these five books that scared me terribly when I was a teenager. I just want to understand why they’re still sticking in my head, and I want to see how you crafted those iconic moments.” I had no idea what I’d find, because you can’t actually know what’s in the archives until you’re there. It’s all digitized, but you have to go into the archives to have access to even the digitized copies of things. Even as I was doing the research, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this will be a really good chapter on this.” I really wanted to let the whole experience just happen.

And that was a first for me, because usually when I embark on this kind of research, I have a book in mind. That’s a very academic approach. “I need to write a book to get tenure or to make full professor.” I mean, I always care what I’m writing about or researching as an academic, but it has a goal that I’m trying to meet. This I had no goal. Part of what made it so pleasurable was I wasn’t putting pressure on myself to make this into something.

How did you go about crafting all of your research into a compelling story?

I was in the fortunate situation where I got a book contract with just one chapter. I had just written the Pet Sematary chapter, and I didn’t have a ton of myself in it in that first draft. I got to work with David Ebershoff at Hogarth, who’s an amazing editor, and he was the one who encouraged me. He said, “Bring more of your story in.” I had done first-person essay writing as a separate track from my academic work, but I didn’t imagine that I could put together my academic voice with my memoir voice. Once I gave myself permission to do that, it flowed really easily, because I could pick the parts from what I had discovered in the manuscripts that spoke to me in a personal way.

You know, it’s such a great question. It’s getting me thinking about how it’s also renewed my relationship to my academic work. Because we get taught as academics not to have emotions about what we study or what we write. That’s ridiculous! You write about what you love as an academic; you just aren’t allowed to say that you have a personal connection to it. [Laughs] But I’ve been writing about girls and women in Shakespeare my whole career because it matters to me as a female-identifying person that I want to write about these aspects of Shakespeare’s plays, and that’s fine. That’s still really great scholarship.

What surprised you the most as a result of this research?

There were surprises every step of the way. Again, because I was leaving myself open, I didn’t know what I would find. There were a lot of surprises as I was moving deeper into the research. It wasn’t until I was done that I realized I was moving backwards. I was starting with his most recent book, Pet Sematary, and ended with Carrie.

There’s so much that’s already known about Carrie. If you’re a King fan, you know that in the first draft of Carrie she’s an alien that sprouts horns, so I knew that. But when I actually saw it on the page, I was like, [gasps]. There was still something very shocking about it. I think because I read her when I was 13, I had a certain attachment to her, and she was the only teenage female character of his that I had read during that time. So to see her so alien was a shock. And then he’s drafted this, he’s redrafted it, he’s changed her into a more sympathetic character—I was reading all those drafts. That was fascinating.

Then I found that note from Bill Thompson, his editor, to the compositor and the copy editor, saying, “Note: locale has changed to Maine.” I had noticed that the first couple drafts were set in Boston. That was a very cool discovery, something that was surprising to me, because that’s his first novel. That’s the one that put Maine on the map for people all over the world. I don’t think there had been a writer that famous who had written a book based in Maine. So I was like, “Wait. This isn’t a Maine book?” That was a surprise, even though there were bigger, more shocking surprises, like the ending to The Shining that I found in the archives. It’s totally different. I won’t spoil it here, but that was shocking.

But this was shocking in another way because I was like, “Oh, she’s not a Maine girl.” That led to all kinds of great conversations with him about how he was thinking of her as an all-American girl. And that just got me thinking about why Carrie does have such staying power. Because this could happen anywhere in America, in any high school. It’s not a Maine story in the way that ’Salem’s Lot [is]. The conversation I had with him about ’Salem’s Lot and growing up in Durham, Maine, was really revelatory for me. I was like, “Oh, this is not a vampire novel. This is a novel about his love for his hometown.” That’s a Maine novel.

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What do you want people to get from reading this book?

Two things. Obviously I’m hoping this casts light on what an intentional craftsman he is, just by showing those examples. I’m very grateful that he’s allowed me to publish manuscript page images, so that people can see it. I’m not making this up. So, I’m hoping that will be put to rest. This is someone who’s intentional about his writing process. On a bigger scale, I hope I’m contributing to a conversation that’s already out there among horror writers, that you can be a popular writer and a literary writer. You can be a brilliant craftsman, beautiful writer, and a writer of popular fiction all at once.

Also, one more layer is thinking about the purpose that horror serves. The way it helps us metabolize our very real fears, and that it doesn’t have to be a traumatizing experience to read it. In fact, it can actually help connect us to one another. That’s really come through more as I’ve been talking to people about the book, just seeing how it brings people together at a time when we’re all so siloed off from one another and from our own emotions. I think I’ve cried more talking to people about this book, and they’ve cried too. And that’s good! We need to get in touch with our feelings again. We’ve had a really crappy time as a planet, and we continue to have a crappy time. We need these stories, I think, more than ever.

There’s an acknowledgement in the book that we’re in a difficult time with books being challenged or banned throughout the country. Carrie, as you point out, is one of the most banned books in America’s schools. Having spent some time with King’s books, what do you think we lose when they’re taken away?

That’s a great question. I think about what impact those stories had on me the first time I read them as a kid. Even though that was a horrifying experience reading those books, it was also a way for me to metabolize my own anxieties. I was a really anxious kid. I think we lose a tool for metabolizing anxiety as kids. I think we also lose this ability to connect with one another through these stories that we’ve all read together.

The good news is he’s inspired so many great writers over the past 50 years and will continue to do so. They’re brilliant writers who are taking up the torch and are continuing to write, so we could ban his books and there will be other wonderful books. But I think we’re going to lose a lot of urtexts that influenced [his work]. It’d be like taking away Shakespeare. You want to take away Macbeth? That’s probably one of the earliest English language horror stories.

Are there any other authors who have had an impact on you?

I have so many core memories of reading particular writers’ prose. Like Virginia Woolf—I still remember To the Lighthouse. That just hit me, through both her prose and what she was saying. And Toni Morrison, Beloved—huge impact. I just taught that for the first time last semester in a course on American Ghost Stories, along with The Shining. Her works always hit me in a particular way because they’re so lyrical and painful and beautiful at the same time. [William] Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, the Southern Gothic writers really hit me. I don’t know if it’s influenced how I write prose. I don’t think I’ll ever be as brilliant as any of them, but I appreciate how they’ve fed me.

What would you recommend as an entry point for a Stephen King or a Shakespearean work?

It depends on what your tolerance level is. I would never recommend Pet Sematary to someone who doesn’t like horror because that is probably the most horrifying book I’ve ever read. So if you’re someone who doesn’t like reading horror or are scared of it, I would say start with On Writing, his memoir of the craft. It’s just brilliant. If you feel like you’re ready to read some horror, I would say The Shining. That’s my favorite of his books, in part because of getting to talk to him about how he was thinking of a Shakespearean tragedy when he was writing it. I see all the layers, and I’ve come to appreciate that that is a book about intergenerational trauma in a way that is so powerful, much like the Shakespeare play he was thinking of. And yes, it’s horrifying. But I still think that’s the one that has the psychological layers that people will connect with in a way that you can metabolize. Because it is a more slow-moving book, you can close it. You can be like, “I’m gonna stop at that chapter.” Others of his books you have to just keep going, but The Shining actually allows you to [pause], because he was imagining a play.

If you’re not comfortable with Shakespeare or you think you’re not going to be able to understand it, watch a film or see a production. Don’t sit down and read a play. The Kenneth Branagh Hamlet is amazing. Any of the Macbeths that have come out recently are all brilliant in different ways. If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere where there is live theater, go see a production. I don’t think there’s one that’s like the gateway one. They all have their different wonderful qualities. Macbeth is probably the one that’s the tightest. Unlike The Shining, you can’t actually look away from that. [Laughs] You’re gonna have to just stick with it. There’s so many ways you could go in with Shakespeare.

To learn more about Caroline Bicks, visit her website.

To purchase Monsters in the Archives, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You might also enjoy…

As we wrap up June, I thought I’d share some things that have reverberated recently…

After you peruse all the things, please comment: what’s reverberating with you these days? What are you making, reading, watching, or listening to that excites you?

This is a benefit for paid subscribers. If you’re interested in reading this and hundreds of others in the archive, please upgrade to a paid subscription. It gives you access to inspiring interviews, and helps me keep the lights on. Win-win!

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Five Things I’m Into

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It came about because I’d just published my 100th interview (with Miki Berenyi) and I was reflecting on how far I’d come. So I pulled together a list of all the things I’d learned from all the folks I’d talked to. Then I did my usual routine—read it, read it again, formatted it in Substack, added URLs, sent myself an emailed copy, read it again, checked all the links to ensure everything worked—and once I was satisfied that it was pretty and perfect and ready to be shared with the world, I scheduled it to be sent to you, Gorgeous Reader.

Then I went on with my life and didn’t look at it again.

Until yesterday.

Imagine my surprise when I opened up the list and saw this.

What the hell?

I have ZERO memory of adding that “and if you’re not landing” line. It’s not on the draft copy that I emailed to myself, so I must have gone into Substack between proofing it and scheduling it, decided I had something else important to say, added a line and then got halfway through and gave up. Maybe I was distracted by something shiny. Probably my phone.

Anyway, I have literally no idea where that #15 was going. My apologies to anyone who got that far. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m just a one-woman show over here trying to keep it all together, and sometimes things fall through the cracks. Like the second half of sentences.

On the upside, at least you know for sure that AI isn’t involved in any aspect of this publication. It’s just all me, making all the mistakes.

Anyway, if you look at the list online now, it’s actually 75 things and not 75 1/2 things with that one half-finished line.

I hope you enjoyed reading it, and I also hope you enjoyed my chats with Miki Berenyi and Nora Kirkpatrick. I really appreciated all that Miki had to say about the state of the industry today. The more I talk to people like her who have been maintaining an artistic career for decades, the more I learn how difficult it’s getting for people to continue to work in any area of entertainment. It’s depressing, but I’m grateful to those who, like Miki, hang in there and continue to make art. (Even if they have to juggle day jobs to do it.)

Later this week I’ll publish my interview with Caroline Bicks, the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. Thanks to her role, she became the first scholar to have full access to Stephen King’s archives, and she used a yearlong sabbatical to research his five earliest works. She shared all that she learned in Monsters in the Archive, a really fun read that’s part memoir, part master class. As a Stephen King fan, it was fun to chat with her about his work and its impact on her life.

That’s it for now! Have a wonderfully creative week!

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It seems as though there’s almost nothing that Nora Kirkpatrick can’t do. She’s a television actor (The Office, Shrinking), WGA Award-nominated writer (Amazon’s Daisy Jones & the Six), and director (ABC’s The Goldbergs). She’s created, written, and directed a number of unique projects, including a 15-episode interactive TV show, The Coop, starring Tony Hale, and Hulu’s live-action VR comedy series, Door No. 1, starring Snoop Dogg. As if that’s not impressive enough, she’s also a rock star—as a founding member of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, she spent seven years touring the world, earning a Grammy Award and a gold record along the way. Not bad for a girl who grew up in rural Iowa.

Though she has a lot of projects on her plate for the coming year—including a rom-com feature, Whodunnit, and an Amazon series, Escorted—she’s currently promoting Couples Weekend, her debut feature film. Written and directed by Kirkpatrick, the dark comedy (available to rent on Amazon Video, Fandango at Home, and Apple TV) stars Josh Gad, Alexandra Daddario, Daveed Diggs, and Ashley Park as two married couples who spend a weekend together in a remote cabin. When Gad’s Mitch and Daddario’s Debs discover their spouses are having an affair, they have very different ideas on how to navigate the situation. Kirkpatrick says the film stemmed in part from her love of theater and her desire to bring actors together to delve into complicated situations.

“I had been working a lot in television,” Kirkpatrick says. “And I was missing the theater workflow. I was missing actors being able to stand and deliver, to do real scene work, to do things that weren’t quick snippets and quick setups. I knew when I made my first movie that I really wanted it to feel like the actors could dig in, so that was the tonal concept in my mind. And then thematically, I had been thinking a lot about the intricacies of intimacy, and how well our partners know us, and how much truth is in true love. These were the themes that were floating through my mind, and then this dilemma arose—could there be a situation where you have two alliances, to your partner and to your best friend of 20 years, and could that make something that normally would be very cut and dry pretty complicated if somebody else’s marriage was also on the line?”

Over Zoom, Kirkpatrick chatted with me about the challenges of making the film, her love for production design, and her conflicting feelings about AI.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To read all posts and support ad-free, independent journalism, please become a paid subscriber.

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SANDRA EBEJER: I’m always interested in hearing how people came into the entertainment industry. You grew up in Iowa, which isn’t widely known for movie stars and famous musicians. When and how did you first develop an interest in the arts? Did you grow up wanting to work in the industry?

NORA KIRKPATRICK: Man, I would have loved to grow up wanting to work in the industry. I didn’t even consider that a real possibility, because I didn’t know anyone who worked in the industry. I grew up doing theater in Iowa. My mother is a journalist and a writer, so I was very involved in the creative community, but in terms of, “Why don’t you grow up and be a writer-director in Hollywood?” I was just like, “That sounds great. How do you do that?” I would say it was a windy road to me getting to a place where I could verbally say, “This is what I want, and I’m going to take the steps to get there, even though I might not know exactly what those steps are.” I went to UCLA for college, which was very helpful to be in this community. I was in theater school, and that began the visualization process of what 10,000 possible steps can you take to make this your job.

You’ve worked in the industry for a long time, and you directed a VR feature for Hulu, but Couples Weekend is your first time directing a straightforward feature film. How was it for you to take on that role? Was it intimidating?

Sure, absolutely. But I had a great team around me, and all of my department heads I had worked with before. My DP [director of photography], my costumer, my AD [assistant director] were people I had worked with, some of them three to four times before, so I felt like we were really solid and had a great communication style. I had wonderful producers there with me, so I felt very supported. I knew it would be incredibly difficult. We had 20 days and not very many resources, so I knew it was going to be hard, but I think sometimes in those moments I can write down, “All these things are going to be hard. Those are facts.” Then I can accept them as facts, so I’m not surprised about them in the moment. Like, “The tree won’t fall down, and we ran out of money for this thing, and we have to finish this whole scene in 20 minutes.” I’m like, “Okie dokie! I knew this would be hard. Let’s see what we can do.” So those challenges I felt very invigorated by because I had prepared myself for the possibility.

Were there any moments during the making of this film where you faced a challenge that seemed insurmountable? Anything you were really proud to have pulled off?

I mean, the whole thing. The tree falling was harrowing. [Laughs] It’s hard to fall a tree and have it be big enough and intimidating enough to make it play. I was told at the beginning of the movie that we had no overtime. Not that you really ever need it, but some days you could go 20 minutes over, you’ll finish 20 minutes earlier the next day. There can be kind of an ebb and flow, depending on whatever. But I was told we had zero overtime, which is such an interesting thing. So when the day is done, the day is done. And I’m efficient with my team in terms of that, but it was interesting to go into it with no wiggle room. There are no extra days.

We got rained out several days, there was lightning, we couldn’t shoot for hours, there’s no extra time. How do you make that up? How do you move it around? Usually on a movie, there’s a lot of movable pieces. We had none of that. So it was quite a challenge, but I will say we had so much fun doing it. Even when it was hard and I would go home and collapse on my bed at the end of the day, I was like, “This is so fun!” The people were so great, and the cast was so wonderful. I’m grateful for all of it. I will say that anytime something like that happens and you have a shoot where you’re limited, it really just makes you better.

The movie has such a fantastic cast, and they do genuinely seem like two couples who all know each other really well. Given that they had to work in such close quarters for an extended period of time, did you do anything prior to filming to ensure that they would feel comfortable with one another?

You know, we didn’t have a lot of time. We had a table read, and we had a few days of rehearsal, but I will say this, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen four people take to each other faster. I think because many of them come from the theater—three of the four have been on Broadway—they have a shared language, and as soon as they met, I felt like they’re almost going to have too much fun. I got very lucky in that everybody got along great.. And boy did they show up prepared every day, which is not an easy task when some days we were shooting 10 pages of dialogue, which is tough. I really lucked out.

You’ve said in past interviews that you’re obsessed with production design. Why is that such an important aspect of the filmmaking process, and how did it factor into this film?

I just love thinking about design so much. I love what it can say about a character, about a place, about a world. It just feels like this X factor, beyond when you’ve written the script and cast it, where you can put all these other ideas. It’s just such an exciting place. And our production designer, Liam [Moore], did such an incredible job. He completely transformed this house. He had ordered curtains and wallpaper from the ‘70s, so the house really smelled like the ‘70s, which was a stage direction in the script, and he just took it and ran with it.

I just have an interest in it in general. For me, it feels like such a fun part of the process. I grew up watching these movies, basically all made in the ‘90s, and they all had such an attention to production design. Toys, Strictly Ballroom, Defending Your Life—all of these movies have a slight heightening in terms of concept and design. I think somewhere in the early 2000s we got into a zone where comedies didn’t have a real focus on production design. They were maybe so realistic that we lost the aesthetic value, and I got a little bummed by that. Funny can be fancy. I feel like there’s a way to keep the humor and keep the lightness, but also have it look real pretty.

A lot of times when I talk to an artist about a specific project, they say there were other works of art they looked to as inspiration. For example, an author writing about a midlife crisis read only books on difficult marriages and middle-aged challenges as she was writing. Were there specific films or works of art that inspired or influenced you during the making of Couples Weekend?

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one that I always go back to. Things that are a pressure cooker where people cannot leave and you have to deal with it in real time. I loved The Worst Person in the World so much. It’s spectacular. Those ones where all of the turns, all of the stunts in the movie, are emotional. It’s not car chases; it’s not things blowing up. It’s emotional turns. I’m really interested in that. So, those two movies were things I was watching.

Years ago, while working as an actor, you were also a professional musician. Your Instagram has a lot of great photos from your touring days. Do you miss that era? Do you think you’ll ever get back into playing music and touring?

I do miss it. It was so fun. I work with one of the guys from the band, Mitchell Yoshida. He scores a lot of things that I do. He scored this movie, so I still get to interact with it in that way. It’s really hard to do this and to be on tour. We were on tour maybe seven months out of the year. So I miss the music part, but as long as I can incorporate that into what I’m doing, I feel fulfilled.

You’ve written and directed VR comedies for Hulu. In the few years between then and now, technology has advanced so much. How are you feeling about where things are heading? Are you excited by new technologies? Are you concerned?

It certainly is going to change. There’s no way to say that it’s not going to change jobs. It is. It already has. What they can do now with animation and creating a show in a day based off a prompt—I mean, that’s real. That exists. So much of it’s going to be shifting. I am excited about using AI as a tool in the VFX toolbox. There are some things that previously would have been so expensive, you can’t do them. Now with AI, you can. You still need a VFX team to orchestrate that and work through it, but it’s a tool in that toolbox that makes a lot of new things possible. I probably share everybody else’s worries about how far is that going to go and how many jobs will be replaced, and that is very sad. I think it’s a double-edged sword.

Are there any artists you look to as an example of the career you’d like to have?

That’s a toughie. I’m excited about oscillating back and forth between bigger movies and smaller movies like this one. This one was very personal to me, very meaningful, made on a smaller scale. I made a movie after this one that is a big rom-com. So, my ideal career is a balance of those two elements, where I continue to keep writing and working on the things that are very personal to me, balancing them with these really fun, joyous, bigger projects, where I get to work on a scale that’s also completely exciting to me. That’s my ideal dream.

It’s a difficult time in the entertainment industry. Anytime I talk to someone who has been in it for a long time, they say production has never been slower. What advice would you have for someone who looks to the work that you’re doing and thinks, “I would love to do what she’s doing”?

Yeah. I’ve been there. There were so many years where I was saying, “I want to do that. How do you get there?” It can feel like this Grand Canyon of “I do not know how to get to the other side.” I’ve completely been in that position and still find myself in that position in many ways.

The thing that brought me a lot of freedom in those moments is making my own work. I think the only control position you can put yourself in, especially when you’re starting out, is writing things, making them with friends. I made a lot of short films before I ever got to make a [feature] film. I made a lot of presentations and spec commercials before I ever got to make a real commercial or real TV show. And not that those were platforms in any way, but they were great education for me, and they also helped me build a community of people that I would then be working with when it became a real job. I think if you want to be doing it, you should be doing it on whatever scale you can, and hopefully over time that scale begins to grow. That can be a very difficult thing to do, but if you build a community of people who are in the same boat, you can help each other out. You can work for free on each other’s projects. [Friends and I] were helping each other out on our projects, we work together now on paid jobs, and it has been a beautiful evolution.

To learn more about Nora Kirkpatrick, visit her website.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You might also enjoy…

Last week’s interview with Miki Berenyi was a fun one. I was a big fan of Lush back in the ’90s, and I’ve recently been listening to a lot of her newer music through Piroshka and the Miki Berenyi Trio (MB3).

(If you need a refresher on her music, check out the videos for Lush’s “Ladykillers” and “Hypocrite,” Piroshka’s “Everlastingly Yours,” and her latest release, MB3’s “Island of One.”)

We chatted for a long time about so, so many things. In fact, we chatted for so long, a few chunks of our interview didn’t make it into the published piece (or you would’ve had to read a 10,000-word article). So, I’m sharing some video exclusives from our chat.

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

In these videos, you’ll hear about…

• Miki’s approach to songwriting and how it’s changed over the course of her career

• why she wrote her memoir, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success, and how it felt to share it with the public

• her future career goals

Enjoy!

This is a benefit for paid subscribers. If you’re interested in reading this and hundreds of others in the archive, please upgrade to a paid subscription. It gives you access to inspiring interviews, and helps me keep the lights on. Win-win!

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Creative Reverberations wasn’t meant to last this long. I launched it during a difficult time in my life. It was a distraction, a way to do something productive while I figured out the next steps in my career. I assumed I’d interview a few artist friends about their work, maybe publish an interview every three or four weeks, and move on to something else after six months or so.

Two years and 100 interviews later, Creative Reverberations is still going strong. Over the last 26 or so months, I’ve interviewed more than 100 artists, and have learned quite a few things about perseverance, resilience, and the creative process. I’m sharing some of what I’ve learned in the hopes that it might help others as much as it’s helped me.

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1. If you run a Substack, most of the people who are closest to you won’t read your work, and that’s okay.

2. That said, your biggest fans may turn out to be your mom and your spouse. (Hi guys!)

3. Want to interview someone? You’d be surprised by how many people will happily say yes. All you have to do is ask.

4. But, if you don’t get the interview you want, don’t be discouraged. Even respected journalists working on major book projects have a hard time getting people to talk to them.

5. Meeting your childhood crush is an incredible experience.

6. The pieces you think will do great sometimes fall flat.

7. That’s true for all mediums—sometimes the projects you love the most get the least recognition.

8. No one will, or should, care about your work as much as you do.

9. Stay true to your vision, even when it goes against everything else out there.

10. Just because you make a connection with someone during an interview, it doesn’t mean you’re friends.

11. People you don’t know will open up to you about deeply personal things during an interview. Still doesn’t mean you’re friends.

12. Celebrities are just as insecure and anxious as the rest of us.

13. The entertainment industry is in a free fall. Even people who have been in the business for decades are worried.

14. Still, don’t give up on your dreams. Better to try and fail than not try at all.

15. If you’re just starting out and you want to make a living in the arts, don’t quit your day job.

16. In fact, maybe don’t try to monetize your art at all.

17. It’s okay to just make art for the fun of it. Sometimes it still leads to a lifelong career.

18. When the world is becoming a raging dumpster fire, the arts are what will save us.

19. AI is both respected and feared.

20. All work is tolerable when you feel like you’ve found your purpose.

21. If you get offered an incredible opportunity, like the chance to work with an artist you admire, don’t let fear stand in your way.

22. Even the most talented artists struggle with imposter syndrome.

23. Discord can lead to beautiful harmonies.

24. The people you interview may say things that get them in trouble. Doesn’t mean your time with them wasn’t worth it.

25. Artists have always struggled to make money, and monetization platforms like Substack are not new.

26. Even if you’ve interviewed someone five times already, if you like their work enough you’ll always have new questions to ask.

27. A creative life requires the ability to pivot and try new things.

28. Sometimes working for free on friends’ projects pays off in the long run.

29. There is no reason to feel like you have to stay in one lane. Cross lanes. Or abandon them entirely.

30. Sometimes literal childhood wounds can influence the work we do as adults.

31. Art has the power to heal entire communities.

32. It can also be a gift during life’s darkest moments.

33. Playing pretend as a grown up isn’t silly. In fact, it’s empowering.

34. Chance encounters can literally change the trajectory of one’s life.

35. You can create an entirely new story out of a well-loved work of art.

36. Even bestselling authors sometimes have day jobs.

37. When you’re working on a project that’s important to you, be prepared to see it through to the end.

38. Reality is far more wild and weird and wonderfully interesting than any work of fiction.

39. A single piece of art can live “a thousand years.”

40. Sometimes the best thing you can do is simply live for a living.

41. Inspiration is all around us.

42. Even the littlest ones deserve access to good art.

43. Taking time off to creatively recharge is a must.

44. Life’s darkest moments can be turned into beautiful art.

45. Don’t shit on one-hit wonders.

46. Marriage in the toilet? Write about it.

47. There are no rules when it comes to making art.

48. Successful writing careers can begin anywhere, even Reddit.

49. Labels are stupid.

50. Parenting—having a parent, being a parent—is an endless well of inspiration.

51. It can take decades, sometimes an entire lifetime, to unravel all that was done to us as kids.

52. When all else fails, laughter is the best medicine.

53. The seemingly easiest art is often the hardest to pull off.

54. The thing you’re most scared to share is most likely the thing everyone will relate to.

55. First thing in the morning is the writing sweet spot for most authors.

56. Burnout is legit; you have to take care of yourself if you’re going to maintain a career in the arts.

57. Having a mentor can be enormously helpful in navigating industry changes and challenges.

58. Sometimes it’s good to hand over the reins, especially if you’ve been the one in the driver’s seat for most of your career.

59. Twitter, shockingly, can actually lead to something good.

60. Sometimes success means being so good that people don’t even notice your work.

61. It can take decades before your work is recognized by critics. Doesn’t mean you haven’t been doing great work all along. They just took a while to catch up.

62. Oddly, the work can actually get harder as you get older.

63. If you have an idea that seems utterly bizarre—like, say, launching a print magazine as publications are folding left and right—just try it. You might be surprised by how well you do.

64. Don’t ever lose sight of the fact that your unique voice and perspective matter.

65. In fact, embrace what makes you different.

66. Even when it feels like you’re totally alone in your work, people are, in fact, noticing.

67. Starting over is terrifying, but also wonderfully freeing.

68. When the world feels messy and awful, rage cleaning along to a good playlist is a great way to get through it.

69. Don’t beat yourself up over the little mistakes. They are, after all, what separate us from AI.

70. True artists never stop learning.

71. Comparison kills creativity.

72. Still, when you’re a working artist, it’s hard to not pay close attention to what other artists are doing.

73. There is nothing wrong with saying no to an artistic project if it doesn’t fill your soul.

74. Sometimes silence is the most profound statement that one can make.

75. This is your life. Right now. Do what you love, because this is all we get.

Hopefully some of this has resonated. Thank you for reading! Can’t wait to see what we learn from the next 100 interviews!

Thanks so much for reading! If you’re enjoying this content, please share the publication with others!

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In March 1996, British band Lush released their third LP, Lovelife, a collection of hook-driven, Britpop earworms—among them, the singles “Ladykillers” and “500 (Shake Baby Shake)”—that brought the band commercial acclaim. Though it became Lush’s biggest seller, frontwoman Miki Berenyi looks back on the album and its release with mixed emotions.

“I suppose it’s difficult to not think about what came immediately after,” she says. “The disintegration that happened when we toured that record, and then, obviously, Chris’s mental health declined. But when we were recording Lovelife, everyone was on quite an up because we’d gotten a new manager, 4AD [record label] was a fresh wind, and we were doing it with our live sound guy, so the recording was really good fun. Afterwards, things fell apart.”

In October 1996, Lush’s drummer, Chris Acland, died by suicide, leading to the band’s breakup. For nearly 20 years after, Berenyi stayed out of the limelight, raising children and working as a magazine editor before a 2015 Lush reunion tour brought her back to the stage.

In recent years, she’s fronted the Miki Berenyi Trio (MB3), a band she formed with her partner, K.J. “Moose” McKillop, and guitarist Oliver Cherer, after the publication of her 2022 memoir, Fingers Crossed. The band’s album, Tripla, was released in 2025 to great acclaim (Under the Radar called it “a melodically intricate and richly layered mix of guitars and electronica”), and earlier this year, they released a standalone single, the catchy “Island of One.”

Over Zoom from her home in the U.K., Berenyi talked about her memories of Lush, her approach to songwriting, and why MB3 won’t be returning to the U.S. in the near future.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To read all posts and support ad-free, independent journalism, please become a paid subscriber.

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SANDRA EBEJER: You’ve been doing some tour dates around the U.K. Do you still enjoy touring? Are you having as much fun with it as you did back in the day?

MIKI BERENYI: I am. I mean, it’s a very different experience, but it made me realize that playing live was one of the things I always enjoyed about being in a band. It’s the admin around it that’s a real pain now. It’s a lot of organization, and when you don’t have the money that people used to have—the record companies had the money—you are doing all this stuff yourself, like booking hotels and paying for visas. But the actual playing is great. In some ways, when it’s smaller scale, it’s easier to manage. It doesn’t have to be some epic touring. You can just play weekend gigs. So, in that respect, it’s actually more manageable. I’m just glad it’s still a part of my life. I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing it, because hip replacements and things like that start happening at some point. [Laughs]

I was looking through your Instagram and saw you’d posted some upcoming tour dates, and you apologized for the design that you’d done on the image. I assumed you had a whole team helping you with marketing and admin, but it sounds like that’s not the case.

Yeah. People at Bella Union [record label] will help, and we’ve got Chris Bigg, who’s always done our artwork. He was involved in all the Lush artwork, so he’s done every record I’ve ever made. But [with] that day-to-day stuff, you can’t keep pestering people. Everybody’s now freelance and doing their own thing. The other thing people forget is it’s not Lush. I went to see Chapterhouse last week and I know Swervedriver are touring, but they are the actual band. That affords a different level and a different status. The minute you peel off and form a separate thing, you’re starting from scratch. I might as well be some DIY kid trying to put my own shit together.

My introduction to Lush’s music was 1994’s Split, and the first two tracks on that album, “Light from a Dead Star” and “Kiss Chase,” were my favorite songs. For some reason, I couldn’t separate them. If I made a mix tape or CD, I had to include both of them in that order. Are there any songs from that era that you’ve continued to love over the years?

It’s always difficult with your own songs. I’ve always felt once a song is written, I’m like, [claps hands] done! Now it belongs to whoever listens to it. I’ve done my bit. “Light From a Dead Star” meant quite a lot to me. A lot of the songs on Split, me and Emma [Anderson, Lush guitarist] exposed a lot more, which is why it was a double blow when it got slagged off in the press. It was like, “Lush just write about fluffy clouds” or whatever. I thought, “Really??” [Laughs] It was written about her dad dying! I’d written about my childhood! It felt quite exposing for us. I do like “Light from a Dead Star” because I put quite a lot, lyrically, into it, hinting at things that had been difficult in the past without trying to give too much away. It’s also a nice concise song. I still play it live occasionally, but I had to lower the key. It’s way too high! [Laughs]

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We don’t have a drummer now and it’s a different kind of band, so we’ve reworked some of the songs, so it feels more like a this-era song. The fact that it’s slightly reinvented makes them fun to play again. I don’t particularly love or hate any of my songs. In a funny way, I’m not that attached to them. They’re something I did. It’s like looking at old photos. You’re delighted that they’re there and they bring back memories.

It’s crazy to think how much the music industry changed between Lush’s initial breakup in 1998 and the band’s reunion in 2015, not to mention that all of you were older and had gone through many life changes. How was it for you to get back into making music professionally at that point in your life?

It was terrifying as a prospect, because as soon as we were coming back, it was going to be at the Roundhouse [U.K. venue]. I’d never played anywhere that big as our own show, even back in the day. And I hadn’t done a gig in 20 years and was completely out of practice, so it was daunting. But I did approach it in a very professional way. I was just practicing and practicing. I had to look at old footage to see what the hell I was playing and relearn a lot of the songs, and we did a lot of rehearsing. I wanted it to be super, super good. And it was kind of remarkable how it comes back to you. Yes, the world had changed, and the funny thing was, part of the reason we came back is that in that intervening 20 years, shoegaze had become a thing. Like, who fucking knew?

The realities of touring... Yes, we were older. Obviously, people having children made it more stressful. And we were having to raise the money ourselves and fund it. But on the whole, it felt really exciting and positive. And I do think, despite all the personal falling apart afterwards, it’s partly why I continued with music, because I did think the actual playing was fucking great.

A few years back you published a memoir and began playing shows on the book tour, which led to the forming of the Miki Berenyi Trio. Is it safe to say that without that tour there would be no MB3?

I’m not sure, actually, because we did [the band] Piroshka. What I realized with Piroshka was we had a great time, but having a band of six people was incredibly cumbersome. We were encouraged to tour America, and I thought, “I cannot take that kind of financial risk. That’s insane.” And so, yes, you’re right. I wrote the book and then I was asked to do book talks, and often they want you to play music. I don’t do solo play. I tried it once and it was a fucking disaster, so I’m not doing that again. But we did three or four Lush songs—it was me and Moose and Ollie—and we were really enjoying that, and then the trio came out of that. But I don’t know. I wonder if we maybe would have done something anyway, because I had already realized with Piroshka that the way to do this going forward musically is to make this a lot more nimble and manageable, so that we can rehearse in my garden, we can fit into a car. It’s so much easier to set up and maneuver. We can just do gigs at weekends. People can get on with their day jobs. That was already a thread that was going.

I love MB3’s latest single, “Island of One.” What can you share about that tune?

It was a Nilüfer Yanya song that sparked it. I mean, I think of the live set, and I think, “Here’s a song that is never going to be played live because it’s too slow or too complex, so it’s just going to be meh live.” And I wanted an upbeat song [to] fit in the set. If we’re going to get these Lush songs out of the way, eventually I want something danceable. That kind of writing-to-order does feature quite a lot. I will write a more doomy song if I think that the live set could benefit from it, or if you’ve got an album full of certain songs, then [I’ll] write something that will balance that. And that’s quite good for me. I need a framework sometimes.

The [Nilüfer Yanya song] was called “Just a Western.” It’s got a laid-back, mellow vibe. I started there, and then sped it up massively. I don’t like ripping off other people’s music, so it will always get changed. I’m not going to lift something from someone and pretend that I came up with it. I have to change the notes and the tempo and the beat, and even strip it back to the point where there might just be a phrase or a thought that remains. And so, yeah, it’s quite a lively track. I mean, lyrically, I’ll be honest here, I’ve been visiting my mother. She’s 82 and I love her, but fuck me, people are hard work as you get older. I’ve just about fucking got through the kids, and now it’s coming at me from the other end. So it was a lot to do with that.

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I read something once about the Lush song “Ladykillers” that I thought of when you talked about needing a framework. Is it true that you wrote that song intentionally wanting to write a hit single?

Yeah, it is. Emma wrote “Single Girl” with the same thing in mind, if memory serves. I think Split was seen as very introverted, very much out of the zeitgeist when it came out. This was the rise of Britpop, and the album was seen as that same murky, fucking introverted shoegaze shit, and when we did Lovelife, people accused us of jumping on the Britpop bandwagon. I understand why, but I also think it was a bit sink or swim at that point, right? If we’d have come out with another Split, well, it may not have even come out. With Lovelife, we did think, “Okay, we are going to have to play this game a bit.”

Now, there are album tracks that are absolutely classic Lush. It’s not like it’s a whole album full of outgoing, boppy songs. But I’ll tell you what got to me. It got to me that people were like, “Lush showed so much promise. They look like pop stars, but they play this fucking moody music,” blah blah blah. I remember playing a semi-secret gig at the Dublin Castle. We used to do a cover of Blondie—the French version of “Sunday Girl”—as a bit of a laugh. We played it at this gig. This fucking gig was full of all these Britpop types, and the number of people who were like, “Oh, you should do that more often. You should not play the guitar; you should sing and be quirky and do pop songs.” I remember thinking, “You know, I can do this, right? I’m not not doing it because I can’t. I’m not doing it because I fucking don’t want to. I know I can be some coquettish little lead singer and do sexy moves and not have to have a guitar. I just don’t fucking want to.” [Laughs] “Ladykillers” was, in a way, a bit similar. It was like, “I can do this. I do know how to write a song like that. It’s just not massively interesting to me.” I mean, on previous records, I’d written “Hypocrite.” I’d written bouncy pop songs. I do like doing them. I just don’t want to do them all the fucking time, okay? [Laughs]

Are there any artists or works of art that have influenced your work, or that are really inspiring you right now?

There’s a film called The Mastermind I went to see and just fucking loved. Because I’m of that age now where 80% of the films that I go and see that people are like, “You’ve got to see that. It’s amazing,” I come out going, “I fucking hated it. I feel like I’ve been assaulted because it just feels like it’s going bang bang bang bang bang in my face.” So anyway, I went back and started watching all these Kelly Reichardt films, and oh my God, the space! I can breathe! It’s got this pace where I can think and feel in the beats in between, and it’s so moving. It feels so profound. And musically, that’s always been part of what I like doing. There’s a breathing space. The lyrics have got a point, but they’re not fucking in your face. You have to mull on them a bit. I don’t even particularly like explaining lyrics, because I really like it when people have their own interpretation, where they go, “That to me meant that.” Great! That’s exactly what it should be doing. And I just felt that film just really resonated. I thought, “Someone’s still doing this. Brilliant! Someone still thinks this way!”

I saw that MB3 won’t tour the U.S. again. That’s such a bummer.

A lot of people said, “Is it because of Trump or the political situation?” No! God, no. We had fucking 18 years of Thatcher. This country was in a fucking hellhole. It’s not my fucking fault. I didn’t vote for her. And I feel the same way about going to America. I’m assuming most people at the gig don’t want any of this to be happening, so it’s not their bloody fault, right? So, I don’t have a problem with that. What is very strange is the wealth divide that is just rapidly increasing all over the bloody world at the moment—the cost to anyone but the richest fucking people is just unsustainable, you know? I had an absolutely brilliant time when we toured in October, but I must have spent six months working on that tour. It was insane. I mean, I literally got a check the other day for the withholding tax on a tour that we did in 2024. It’s taken me this long with accountants and lawyers and the IRS and the God knows what. I just can’t do it. It’s too much. If that eased off, I’d be back in a flash, because it’s fucking great touring America. Unfortunately, it just becomes too much of a burden.

I heard a clip where Shirley Manson of Garbage said they can’t tour anywhere in the U.S. other than the coasts because it’s too expensive. And if a band like that can’t afford it, what does it say for the smaller musicians who are just getting started?

No shit. I was out with the band Blushing last night and they were saying the same thing. They might record another album, but they said, “We’re not sure if we can keep touring because we lose so much.” And they’re American! They don’t even have to get the bloody visas! But it’s a big country to tour around, and it’s expensive to get from one place to the other. You need the funding for that, and you need help with it. It’s very difficult to do on your own.

Is there a way for musicians to make a living outside of touring? I know we live in a world where you can release a single and it can be online instantly. You don’t have to do a huge music video, you don’t have to get radio play. But is that enough? Can artists still make a living? Or is touring still non-negotiable?

The difficulty is that every revenue source has been squeezed to the point where what you get back from it versus the amount of work you have to put in just does not balance in any meaningful way. I would argue that most people in music have to have another job to be able to do that. I think writing is now the same. People can spend fucking ages writing a book; they’re never going to see a penny. And I get it. We live in a culture now [where] people can access whatever they want for free, and if they have to pay for it, they think, “Meh. Maybe I won’t bother.” And the reach is the difficult part. My hope is that people get bored of being spoon fed stuff by algorithms that want to make creativity as cheap as possible, and at some point that well really does run dry. It’s not very satisfying.

My argument always is, we can sit here and have AI art and AI photography and AI films and listen to AI music—I can fucking tell you now that those who can afford it will be having their private gigs with live musicians. They will be buying art by actual people who put paint to canvas. They will still want that real stuff. It’s the rest of us that are just hoovering up this shit. At some point I hope people recognize that it is shit, and that what they want is the absolute humanity that is always encapsulated within any piece of art created by people, and that they then veer back to that. You don’t have to pay a fortune, but you do have to go to gigs. It can’t just be the handful of committed people. It has to become a thing that people start going out to again. You have to not tolerate slop, and go, “I don’t want that.” And if that’s all the algorithm is feeding you, then you go looking elsewhere.

So I always have an optimism for it, but I think people’s expectations at the moment are that they want the same level of record releases, touring, the same kind of show as they came to expect from bands who had been massively supported by major label money, and they want that from people who are doing two fucking jobs and trying to fit that creativity into other shit. It’s not going to happen. It’s literally not going to happen.

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Yeah, as somebody who runs a Substack, the whole idea of putting the work in that doesn’t pay out is spot on.

Totally. There’s people that I follow on Substack, and every time, I think, “All right, fine. I’ll take out a fucking subscription.” But here’s an idea: why don’t we have, I don’t know, a thing that you could pick up and read that has all of these people in one place that I could just pay for the whole thing?

We could call it a magazine!

Yeah! Like a kind of collation of people’s writing! Fuck. We’re gonna have to reinvent the wheel.

I have a 13-year-old son and I think at some point his generation will bring that back. I do firmly believe it will come back around. Whether or not you and I will still be here to experience it, I don’t know.

I think the same. Because even a lot of the music reviews I read, I think, “I know what happened at that gig. I know what you heard.” I’m reading this Simon Reynolds book, because I’m going to do a book talk with him, and the writing is so fucking great. To read something that is considered and references art and travel and politics, just the whole miasma of things, I feel like it’s food. It’s amazing! I have high hopes for it coming back, because I think people need that kind of sustenance.

To learn more about Miki Berenyi, visit her website.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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This coming Friday marks a huge milestone for Creative Reverberations: the 100th interview.

ONE.

F’IN.

HUNDRED.

I can’t express how big this is for me. I vividly remember sitting in a restaurant back in the spring of 2024, telling my husband that I was thinking about launching a Substack. After I explained what Substack was, I laid out my rough vision of a publication that would focus on all things creative, with weekly interviews as the main focus. I listed off a few folks I’d reach out to for interviews—mostly friends who work in the arts—and said I hoped that it would last a few months.

And here we are, 2+ years and 99 interviews later—not to mention all the playlists and recommendations and other posts. Though I have interviewed a few friends, a majority of the chats have been with people I didn’t personally know and had only admired from afar, sometimes for decades.

Whether you’ve been reading since the first interview or are new to this publication, I cannot thank you enough for being with me on this journey as I talk to artists about what they do, why they do it, and how they find the fortitude to keep going, even when the odds are stacked against them.

To celebrate, I’m launching a few new subscriber benefits in the coming weeks.

• The Reverb, a monthly roundup for paid subscribers of all the things that have been inspiring me lately

• Weekly threads where you can tell others what you’ve been watching, reading, and listening to, and what’s been inspiring you

• Opportunities to promote the creative work you’ve been doing (your podcast, your music, your visual art…) with other subscribers

• Occasional roundups of Creative Reverberations posts and interviews you may have missed

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Details will be sent to your email as these things roll out over the course of the summer.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed my interview with Kevin Lingenfelser on his work in TV and film.

Coming up this Friday for the 100th (OMG) interview is my recent chat with Miki Berenyi, frontwoman from the ’90s band Lush and, more recently, The Miki Berenyi Trio. I knew, having been a huge Lush fan back in the day, that I’d enjoy meeting her. I had no idea how much fun it would be to chat with her. Definitely keep an eye out for this one—it’s good.

That’s it for now! Have a wonderfully creative week!

Thanks so much for reading! If you’re enjoying this content, please share the publication with others!

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For more than 30 years, VFX supervisor Kevin Lingenfelser has contributed his talents to dozens of film and TV projects, earning three Emmy Award nominations along the way. Over the years, he’s worked on an impressive roster of titles, including The Truman Show, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Thor, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Preacher, and Armageddon, among many others. His success and longevity in the industry can be credited to his passion for the work. Lingenfelser says he seeks out the projects he’s most interested in, and always aims to finish a job having learned something new.

“One of the things I tell myself at the end of every show I do is if I didn’t walk away having learned something from it, I need to stop doing what I’m doing,” he says. “So every show, I can easily say I’ve learned at least one thing, if not multiple things, about how to do something differently.”

His latest project is Man on Fire, a Netflix series loosely based on A.J. Quinnell’s 1980 novel. Set in Rio de Janeiro, it stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as an ex-mercenary who must keep an orphaned teenage girl alive after her family is murdered by terrorists. It’s a fast-paced thriller full of explosive special effects, though Lingenfelser says his goal for the project was to make even the most action-packed moments look photorealistic—so much so that he appreciates that audiences haven’t noticed some of his work.

“The feedback has been good,” he says. “There are certain things that haven’t been commented on, which is great, because people weren’t even aware that we did the scene.”

I recently spoke with Lingenfelser about his many influences, the sometimes bizarre research he must do for his work, and how he and his team pulled off a particularly challenging explosion in Man on Fire.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To receive new posts and support my work, please subscribe.

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SANDRA EBEJER: Your first IMDb credit is 1993’s Demolition Man. Did you know from a young age that you wanted to work in this field?

KEVIN LINGENFELSER: I thought I wanted to direct, but Alien was life changing for me. When I saw that film, that’s when I was like, “Oh my God. Where the heck did that thing come from?” I knew then I wanted to go into the visual effects side of things.

I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been working now for over 30 years in the industry. I’m what they call production-side supervisor, so I no longer work for a specific visual effects vendor. I work for the studios, and then I hire the vendors to do the work. I like being in the so-called driver’s seat. I still answer to producers and directors if it’s a film and a showrunner if it’s television, but there’s a lot of control that I’m able to have over the work and how it evolves and the final result, which I’m a big fan of.

Do you find that each director or showrunner has their own way of working with the visual effects team? Do you have to figure out how to navigate that in order to align your vision with theirs?

Absolutely, yes. Every time I start a new show, one of the first things I want to learn is how savvy they are with visual effects. Are they used to it? Have they done a lot? I look at their reel or their resumes, and I see they’ve had some experience, but not a lot. So then it’s about leading them through the process, especially once we get on set and we start filming. We have a plan in place for why we need to do certain things, because during a shoot, if there’s visual effects involved, we’ll need to collect data. It’s very important to align with the first assistant director, because they control the set and the pace of things, so they have to understand that we have to get data for our shots in order for our work to come together.

It’s critical for everybody involved—makeup, hair, special effects, stunts—to work together, especially when there are shows where a lot of that work mixes and you’re working with all the departments to achieve a final result. It’s not always about just doing a CG [computer generated]-only shot. A lot of times there’ll be real elements that you need to integrate into the final work, and we come in and either add something CG or we augment something. We may augment a stunt; we may augment makeup effects or augment an explosion. It usually happens after the fact, when it’s in editing, but I’m a big believer in getting a real element on film and augment that. Like if there’s a car crash, I’m not going to be one to say, “We need to do that CG.” I will hear what the plan is from stunts, what the plan is from special effects, and if they can do it in camera, I’m all for it.

Man on Fire was a good example of that. There were certain CG shots that we had to do—the destruction of Rayburn’s condo you’re not going to do for real, so we knew we had to do that [in CG]. And anytime an actor is near fire or explosions, it’s a combination of, what can special effects do? How close can Yahya get to that explosion with it being safe? Do we need to shoot him on a blue screen? There’s a lot of variables. We have a plethora of meetings, and we have scouts for a lot of this stuff, but we also have to be able to pivot on the day and change when things don’t go as planned.

Like, now it’s very common for us to do all gun fights and gun hits and squib hits [in CG]. Even on Resident Evil, they just had 3D-printed weapons. They didn’t have an armorer on site, so we ended up doing all the muzzle flashes, all the shell casings being ejected, all the impact hits [in CG]. That was the same for Man on Fire. In the seventh episode, there’s a massive shootout in this hospital. There was a reception desk, and special effects were able to rig the front of that desk with some squibs to blow, but after that, anytime you saw an actor with a pistol or a rifle shooting, that was us. They did have airsoft weapons, so you would get the real slide action on the gun and you would get a little indication of the CO2 dispersing from the end of the barrel, but we still had to add that firing muzzle flash, we still had to add the shell casing ejecting from the side, so it’s a lot of work.

Man on Fire was a good example of all the departments working together to achieve that end game of [making it appear] realistic. With this show, it was important to do more invisible effects. But it is important to gel and work with all the departments in order to achieve the best looking visuals that you can for every show and every film. Otherwise you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

When you’re doing gunshots or something similar in CG, do you do research on how to make it look realistic?

Yeah. When we were doing Resident Evil we were dealing with mutations and things of that nature. The amount of research we did online, we were all worried. Like, if someone’s tracking what we’re looking into, it’s not good. [Laughs] Because we were looking at pictures of people with diseases, pictures of homeless and what happens to them over the years in the conditions they are in, what happens to the skin and things of that nature. And gunshot wounds, that’s another thing. There’s tons of references online—ER imagery, people with shotgun blasts. We have to look at images of people shot in the head. There’s a resource that I like going to on YouTube. The guy must be into well over 100 videos now, and every time he drops a video it’s like 10 films, a scene from each film, and it’s a headshot from that film. Stuff like that is always great reference, because you’ll find all sorts of examples there. He doesn’t curate; he doesn’t take out what I would qualify as not so great. It’s just whatever he finds, basically. So I will look at stuff like that. We try to look at as much real-world photos that we can, just to help inform our decisions, in trying to make sure things look real.

You mentioned the scene in Man on Fire in which a bomb goes off and a large condo building collapses. We see the destruction from various angles, including the inside of a car that’s rolling away from the building. Can you talk about how you prepared for and shot that scene?

The story takes place in Brazil, but we did film the majority of the series in Mexico City, and it doubled very nicely. The locations [department] found this area in Santa Fe, Mexico—not Santa Fe, New Mexico, but Santa Fe, Mexico. It’s an industrial district, and there was a lot that was empty, so that was chosen as our foundation. The art department built just the foundation structure, which is basically the lobby, nothing else. The rest of it was us.

So when we shot there at night for the sequence, we had two vehicles we put a GoPro in, so that you could see the vehicle go through the motions. They put both vehicles on flippers, so when the explosion goes off, those timed off and flipped the vehicle, and the GoPros inside it. We didn’t augment or do anything to that; that was just raw. So we left that alone. It caught a good amount of the explosion through the windows of the car, and it worked really well. And then the rest was basically previs [previsualization]. That sequence and the tarmac attack sequence in [episode] 102, we previs those so we knew exactly what shots we wanted to do, and that was our roadmap for filming. When the practical explosion went off, we had about 13 cameras for just that base explosion, and then RISE Visual Effects was hired to do the actual destruction. There were two buildings that were created, and one was destroyed. And then RISE used Houdini effect simulations to create the destruction.

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One of the things—getting back to reference again—that I started looking at early on was footage of demolitions of buildings all over the globe. It’s all mathematically driven, and very controlled. And so we went down that road a bit, but then the showrunner, Kyle Killen, was like, “This needs to be dirty. This is a terrorist attack.” In a traditional controlled explosion, it’s almost like a domino effect, from the floor up—nuke in the foundation and then the explosions go up. Those can be rigged with hundreds of explosive devices to make sure that the building not just comes down, but pancakes. He didn’t want that. He wanted it to have this very dirty, gritty, chaotic look. So we still went with the foundation getting blown up as a practical element, and then midway through the shot, there’s a second series of explosions that sever the building, and then that forces the building to collapse and fall back.

That also works because in the story, [the character] Poe has arrived from her night out. She’s trying to get home before her dad discovers she’s out, and she’s on the roundabout area in front of the building. We couldn’t have the building collapse straight down or toward her because she’s supposed to survive the incident, so that’s why we came up with that. I think it’s a better sequence for that. I think it would have looked too methodical, too precise, if we’d done it the demolition-type style. I’m much happier with the fact that it has a dirtier, more chaotic look to it.

Man on Fire is loosely based on a novel, and there’s also a 2004 Tony Scott film. When you join a project that’s an adaptation of an earlier work, do you do much research into those works? Or do you try to push them aside and only focus on this current iteration?

The only time we referenced anything is [because] they wanted an iconic Man on Fire scene. There’s a point in the 2004 film where Denzel [Washington] has got the police chief strapped to the hood of a car, and he’s inserted an IED into the dude and tries to get as much information out of him as he can. He tells the guy that he’s gonna die, and then he walks away, and it goes off. It’s basically two shots. There’s a wide scene, the explosion happens, and then there’s this really strong tight on Denzel’s face with the explosion in the background. They wanted to emulate that with Yahya, and we have something like that in the prison sequence where he throws this duffel bag full of C-4 [explosives], and then he presses the trigger and this explosion goes off. The director, Clare Kilner, filmed it with six cameras, and then edited it. We ended up with three shots—the wide and him blowing it up, then another angle low on the ground, him walking, and then we end on him tight walking out of frame. But otherwise there wasn’t really [any reference].

I’m a huge Tony Scott fan, and I loved Man on Fire when it came out, but this is its own story. You have the John Creasy character, you have this young girl, but the circumstances are completely different. But, I will say this: the marketing of it, I think, could have been done better. Because when the first trailer dropped, people thought, “They’re remaking the Denzel film.” I don’t think there was enough done to make people understand that no, this is the same character, but a totally new story. This is not a remake. We didn’t even use the word reboot to describe the series. It was just its own thing. So that was unfortunate, at least for me, when I was reading some of the comments in YouTube and stuff like that.

Who would you say are some of your influences?

[H.R.] Giger was a big influence. I was mesmerized by the OG Godzilla. Hideo Kojima, I love his works—Death Stranding, what he did with the Metal Gear Solid series. I love action films. John Woo was a huge influence of mine. When I got to work with him, that was amazing. I worked on Broken Arrow first, did some stuff for Face/Off, but then ended up visual effects supervising Windtalkers for him. Tony Scott was big. Ridley, as well, obviously, because of Alien and everything he’s done. And working with Tony on Spy Game, even though we only did like 20 shots for the film, was great.

And then beyond that, when I see any kind of artwork... I think that’s been the one good thing about social media is that people have been able to get their art out there, so it inspires me. I keep telling myself I gotta keep drawing, but I have this block where I can clearly see the final product in my head, but when I translate it to paper, it’s [not the same], so I get frustrated. The one thing I’ve been doing religiously is Inktober, so every year I will do 31 drawings, and I keep hoping that jumpstarts me into keeping up with it.

I have a lot [of inspirations]. Anime—when I saw Akira in the theaters, oh man. I’ll never forget that. Right now I’m finding a lot of inspiration from video games. The storytellers nowadays in video games are amazing. I just played the game Mixtape, and that was amazing. It’s this very simple concept. The game was only like three-and-a-half hours, but it’s a pure joy because it was all structured around music. The guy who did it curated all these songs that fit perfectly in each sequence of the game. I was blown away.

I like horror, because I find that horror is a very creative genre, more so than any other. Comedy is hard; dramas are more straightforward. But with horror, there’s almost no limit to what you can do. I find that exciting. I’m a big fan of The Descent. That’s a fantastic film, and the creature design in that, the simplicity of it, is great. I have so many different things I watch and hopefully learn from and am inspired by.

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What advice would you give to someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?

When I went to Digital Domain Vancouver, we were doing Jack the Giant Slayer, a Bryan Singer film. The talent pool up there was pretty shallow because at that time DD was one of the first big AAA studios to have a facility there. No one else had joined yet. There’s Vancouver Film School up there, so we would get kids graduating from there and we would hire them. But one of the frustrating things I found is that quite a few of the kids didn’t want to invest the time to learn the processes. They were like, “I want to be a composite supervisor. I want to be a visual effects supervisor.” It doesn’t work like that. One big negative of Covid was that studios and streamers pivoted and were like, “We’re getting as much content out as we can.” There was a shortage of people, and people ended up getting promoted into positions they were not ready for. Unfortunately, that course has not been corrected.

The other downside is because so many facilities now are work-from-home, these junior and mid-level artists don’t have that ability to turn to a senior artist next to them and be like, “Hey, can you take a look at this and tell me what I’m doing wrong or how I could improve this?” That’s gone. You have to wait until a review where you get on a Zoom call, and you’re looking at it that way. So, these poor kids aren’t getting experience handed down to them the way that they should.

A lot of people will tell you for this industry it is important to understand the fundamentals of photography, understand color theory. Roto is a discipline that I have mad respect for, because I’ve asked people to do precise roto of things like a person with flyaways and crazy hair—that’s an art unto itself. A lot of people are, “Oh, AI can do that.” No. It can get the base structure. When you’re talking about really fine details, that takes an artist. Learning those disciplines and understanding them are important, so as you move up through the ranks, you’ve understood the whole process. You don’t necessarily need to learn how to animate, but it’s important to understand what each department does in order to finish a shot. It makes everybody’s jobs easier. So, the more you can learn and absorb, the better.

I’m also a big fan of people who are interested in the work. I tend to go after specific things. I have a list of 10 shows or films that I’m actively pursuing, and they’re in stages of various development points. I’m always excited when I work with people who are excited to be on the project that I’m on. Because if you’re just doing it as a nine-to-five job, you might as well go do something else. You have to have passion to do this job, especially with all the craziness going around and all the uncertainties.

I love doing what I’m doing. I would talk to anybody trying to get into the industry to explain the kind of things that I’ve said. I wouldn’t talk anybody out of it, because if this is something you want to do, more power to you. I’m all for it. It’s just unfortunate that I would have more caveats and more discretion to impart, because the industry has changed so much over these last five years.

To learn more about Kevin Lingenfelser, find him on Instagram.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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So, last week’s flooding catastrophe was thankfully not as bad as it initially seemed. We stored a bunch of items in that corner of the basement—nothing priceless, just old movie posters and things we weren’t using but didn’t want to toss—and the bad news is, those items were soggy and moldy and needed to be trashed. The good news is, they sopped up most of the water and kept it from seeping into the walls. So…yay?

It sucks that it happened, but thankfully it turned out okay.

In the meantime, I had four interviews last week, three of which were with musicians I’ve been listening to since the ‘90s (hence the email heading): Luscious Jackson’s Jill Cunniff, Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Glen Phillips, and Tracy Bonham, whose interview was published last Friday.

Teenage/young adult me was having the MOST amazing time last week! I mean, I was singing along to Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “All I Want” when I was still in high school. And here I am, talking to the band’s lead singer about it! Life’s crazy sometimes.

After the round of interviews was over, I decided to put together a little playlist of some of my favorite ’90s songs. It’s by no means a complete list—that would go well into the thousands—but it’s a start. Sharing it with you here, in case you’d like to take a trip down memory lane…

Speaking of memories…on Friday night the boys were away on a camping trip, so I decided to watch Valley Girl, which I hadn’t seen in years. OMG that movie is so, like, totally good, fer sure! It may be the only time I’ve found Nicholas Cage attractive. And the music is perfect. Just pure ’80s joy.

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So I took to Threads and Notes and asked my fellow Gen Xers what their favorite nostalgia movie is, and I got quite a few great responses—everything from the expected (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club) to the very unexpected (The Deer Hunter??).

If you’d like to chime in, you can find the conversations on Threads or Substack’s Notes.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my interview with Tracy Bonham. I’m sharing a video clip from our chat over on Instagram later today, so follow me there if you want to check it out. Later this week I’ll share my interview with Kevin Lingenfelser, who has overseen the special effects on hundreds of high-profile films and TV shows. His latest is Netflix’s Man on Fire, and we talked quite a bit about the show and the bizarre research he has to do to make visual effects look realistic.

That’s it for now! Have a wonderfully creative week!

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In 1996, Tracy Bonham burst onto the music scene when “Mother Mother,” the first single off her debut album, The Burdens of Being Upright, took over the airwaves. Two Grammy Award nominations, an MTV Video Music Award nomination, and many comparisons to Liz Phair followed. But, as listeners would soon discover, Bonham wasn’t just another, as Howard Stern called her, “angry young woman.” Her work defies categorization. A classically trained musician, she seamlessly incorporates violin and piano into even her hardest rocking songs, and to date has released eight studio albums, each different from the last.

Now, Bonham is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Burdens with an upcoming album, due out in November, in which she will re-record every track. She says it was important for her to reconnect with the songs, which she views differently now that she’s in her 50s.

“When Burdens came out, I was 27 or 28,” she says. “Those songs were trying to figure out young Tracy, and now I’m 30 years older and still trying to figure out young Tracy. So the thread is still there, but I think now comes with it some wisdom. Part of my mission is to alchemize whatever that anger was, whatever that deep sadness was, whatever the loss was that I was dealing with into something beautiful for the world.”

It’s a busy time for Bonham. Last year, she released Sky Too Wide, an album of new tracks alongside fresh takes on a few of her older tunes. And earlier this year, she played a series of shows in Boston, where she lived when her career began, which she admits was daunting.

“I’m so happy I did that because I had so many conflicting feelings about it, having spent 11 years there,” she said. “But I was young and I went through that awful relationship and then I wrote the album about it and then I left. But I also felt as though, because I came out of the gate so quickly, at least in other people’s minds, other musicians were jealous and haters, and I just didn’t feel comfortable.” (Not surprisingly, the shows were a huge success.)

Over Zoom, Bonham chatted with me about crowdfunding albums, the ever-evolving music industry, and how a breast cancer diagnosis changed her approach to making music.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To receive new posts and support my work, please subscribe.

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SANDRA EBEJER: It’s crazy to think that Burdens is 30! That album is very much a rock album, but you’re a classically trained musician and you played violin on it, as well as guitar. As a result, your music really doesn’t sound like anything else out there. When you were first starting out as a young woman, was it difficult to convey to others how you wanted your music to sound?

TRACY BONHAM: I would say, “yes, and.” I’ve been discovering, as I look back, the stage and the studio and the rehearsals was really my only place where I could feel comfortable saying what I wanted. So, in a way, I felt like I could be understood. Not always did it turn out exactly the way I wanted it to, but I do feel like I had enough knowledge to be like, “No, this needs to be this way,” and most people could understand that.

That’s great. You’ve been playing music since you were very young. Were you one of those kids who was drawn naturally to playing, or did you kick and scream and fight the lessons like most kids?

No, totally born into it. Just out of the womb, this is what you’re doing. My grandfather was a musician, my mother was a musician and then music educator, so it was just in the water. It was a natural thing for me.

When “Mother Mother” came out, it was a huge hit. Suddenly you were all over MTV and in magazines and your song was on the radio. What was that period like for you?

It did feel rather sudden in that I had only just started writing songs. It felt like only a few years prior I had a handful of songs, and then all of a sudden, I’m a songwriter! And boom, now you’re expected to write more! I was thrust into the limelight, and there was a lot of pressure, and I was not prepared for it. Now, I had been a musician all my life and I was used to performing—I’d been on a stage since age five or seven—but the business was completely foreign to me. I’m still learning that business relationships should not be friends, and I got myself into partnerships that did not work, as far as management or whatever. There was a lot to juggle, and I wasn’t prepared for that in many ways. Also, my self-confidence... You know, fame is a weird thing, because if you’re a little bit insecure, then it really plays with your head. I felt like I had to please people. If people wanted things from me, I didn’t know how to say no. The boundaries were all blurry. So personally, I felt unprepared for it, but musically I felt ready, and I think that’s what connected with people.

“Mother Mother” has turned into an anthem of sorts. You’re doing the “Scream Like a Mother” event to raise money for the upcoming album. What does it mean to you to see all of these women screaming along to this track, decades after its release?

To hear these women’s accounts of what the song meant to them 30 years ago when they were growing up, or even younger people now, because they’ve connected with it, was amazing. I guess ’90s music is kind of back, and my song was in Yellowjackets, so I have some young people discovering my music now. I think this is why I’m doing this re-record. I just thought maybe this is something I wanted to do, but now I see it. I see these women. It’s becoming more and more evident to me. I want to be a voice or at least help women find their voice. It doesn’t even have to be women. I’ve just been feeling this urge to lead by example. I want to start doing this myself. I’ve been a holder-inner my whole life, especially in relationships. I think it’s time. There’s a movement happening. I think there’s this feminine fire that’s emerging, and I want to be a part of it, honestly. I want to help spread it. I want to be a part of it and also benefit from it myself.

Sky Too Wide, your latest album, came out of an incredibly challenging period in your life. What was behind the decision to include not just new songs but revisions of some of your earlier work? And why those songs in particular?

It started with a physical thing. I started having neck issues because I’d been playing the violin and the guitar for however many decades. It hurt to play. That’s why I don’t play as much. So I started playing piano more because it doesn’t hurt and my posture is fine. When I started to gig—and it was mostly solo gigs or duo gigs, because my career had kind of slowed down, I was a mom, I was doing smaller gigs, then Covid [hit]—the piano was my best friend. It was my place of solace. This is where I could work out my new songs.

[On] Sky Too Wide, I think all but one is a piano song, and then the rearrangements of songs were all on the piano, too. And it opened up this world of classical influence that I had from growing up and loving classical. My mom put me in piano lessons when I was seven, and I loved the repertoire, especially Debussy and Ravel and Satie, mostly the Romantic composers, and that started to emerge. It was really more for me and my own heart and soul, and then I started to perform it and then realized I wanted to record it.

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Sky Too Wide was partially funded through Kickstarter, you’ve done other crowdfunding campaigns in the past, and you also have a Patreon. How do you feel about these monetization platforms? On one hand, you have more direct contact with your fans, but on the other, it’s a ton of work.

It’s overwhelming. I mean, yeah, you’re right. The silver lining is that there’s direct to fans. It’s really nice to hear from fans and share and also be more real. Gone are the days where the major record label is protecting you from the fans. Now, you can get in there and have so much interaction, which is really wonderful. But it’s overwhelming. What I’m learning is you’ve got to have your people, and there’s so many different hats to wear. I’m trying to do my social media myself, but holy crap would it be nice to have someone else deal with that. And then I’ve got PR, I’ve got all of these different factions, which I guess was what the record label used to provide. It’s a real education. It makes me look back and be grateful and less of a hater of my old record label, because I want to hate the music business in general, but it’s a big job. There’s a lot of rules. So I’m fighting it right now, but I’m also embracing parts of it. Definitely putting a team together is important, and that’s currently what I’m doing so that I can enter into this 30th anniversary with all guns blazing.

After you recorded Sky Too Wide, you were diagnosed with breast cancer. I know from my own experience with it that it’s life altering. How did the diagnosis and the treatment you endured change your approach to making music?

Wow. It really opened my eyes to how much I’d been holding on and allowing stress and anxiety from other people, relationships, whatever it was. It had taken me so far down the wrong path in my life. I wasn’t the director of my life. I let everyone else decide for me. And I honestly think that getting sick was an indicator. It’s a wake-up call. Also, my mom had breast cancer. She’s a survivor. When I watched her, I concluded that she was a holder-inner too, and that’s probably what made her sick. I’m no doctor, but I think that there maybe is a level of truth. My body, before I even was diagnosed, was already giving me signs that I really needed to pay attention. I had some gastro thing that was terrible. I went down to 92 pounds. I was emaciated and I couldn’t figure that out. And then I had the breast cancer diagnosis, so something was telling me to wake up.

What I did with that information was I went more into the present moment. I started to be more present with my music and my performances, more mindful, less chatty. Less like, “Oh, that wasn’t in tune,” or “What are they thinking right now?” It was more like, “This is my love bubble. I’m going to stay right in here and connect to love, God, divinity, whatever.” And that has really helped me come to this place where I’ve found a new mission to help others do that as well. But it’s been a great learning path. And in some ways I look back, and I’m so fortunate. It sounds like you are, too, but I’m kind of like, “Thanks, cancer!” [Laughs] Thumbs up! Can’t say that for everyone, but...

For sure. You have to look for the bright side and the blessings in it, because otherwise you’ll just bring back the cancer with all the anger and the rage.

Exactly! What does that do for you?

I’m really glad you’re doing well, and it’s all behind both of us. I’m curious—I’ve been doing a lot of interviews with people whose albums came out around the same time as yours, and it’s been interesting to talk to them about songwriting. Some of them say songwriting is so much harder now that they’re older, while others are like, “Nope. It hasn’t changed at all!” How about you? Do you feel like your approach to songwriting has changed over time?

Yeah, I do. It’s a different platform; it’s a different set of pressures. Before, in the ’90s and early 2000s, there was so much pressure. All you wanted to do is get on the radio. And then after Burdens I felt like I needed to be something, especially for my second album. I needed to be edgy. I needed to have another hit. I needed to be pop or sexy or whatever. So right now songwriting is not, luckily, about that. It’s more about connecting with something higher. It sounds woo, but it’s really more of a spiritual process for me.

And it comes and it goes. I’m kind of a binge writer. I go for long periods without, maybe because it’s so like [breathes out]. It takes over. But, for instance, “Damn the Sky (For Being Too Wide)”, the song on Sky Too Wide, came in a flow, a stream of consciousness. It’s maybe the second or third time I’ve actually had a song where that has happened, and then I’ve released it almost as is. And those moments, they’re not all the time, but I do try to remain open for that. Even though the Burdens songs are already written, I try to do that, at least with the arrangements. I try to ask, “What would I want to hear now?” and not worry about pleasing others.

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I like to ask people about their influences or sources of inspiration, things that they’re listening to that are inspiring them. You mentioned a few classical musicians, but are there any other works of art that you’re influenced or inspired by?

For sure, but why does this question always go [mimics head exploding], and I draw a blank? Like, what is wrong with me? Gosh, you know, I listen to all types of music from all places of the world. Senegalese music really gets me going. I love Fela Kuti, I love Éthiopiques. My son is from Ethiopia, so I really got into that, where there’s like Ethio-jazz. It just makes me happy, and it’s such a different sounding scale, but also with Westernized influence. I love Courtney Barnett. She has humor [in her lyrics]. Every once in a while you’re just like, “Oh my God. She just said that in the song?!” It’s almost conversational and sometimes mundane. It’s like a grocery list, and you’re like, “Why didn’t I think of that? I love that!” I love that kind of songwriting. Lately I just love those guilty pleasures, like going back into my childhood, where it’s like ’70s and ’80s music. It’s fun to dance around to and not give a shit.

You’ve collaborated with a ballet, performed with Blue Man Group, contributed to music made by some of the biggest artists in the world, released incredible albums of your own. Is there anything you haven’t done yet that you’d still like to do?

Yeah! It’s on my 5, 10-year plan. It keeps getting pushed back because I can’t stop being Tracy Bonham. [Laughs] But what is it? It’s not a musical. It’s like a folk opera, but it’s not an opera and it’s not all folk. I have this production that I’d like to put on. It’s called As the Crow Flies. I’ve been working on it for eons and eons. It keeps popping up and then I keep pushing it, but it’s really good. I have all of these songs written and demoed, and some of them are orchestrated, and they’re so good, and I have a storyline, [which] needs work. And I still can’t decide—is it an illustrated book with music? That seems awesome. I remember those from my childhood, where you listen and you turn the page. But it’s about 30 minutes of music, so then is it a stage production?

So calling the universe: I want to know, how do I put that out into the world? Because there’s a message. The crow can’t find his voice. He was teased by all the other songbirds who could sing, but he sounded funny to them, so he’s ridiculed. And so he goes into his own little imaginary world, and he’s got all these songs. One’s called “One Note Joe,” and it’s all like one note, much like “One Note Samba.” But these little characters, they all have their plight, and they all have their self-imposed limitations that they are trying to get over, and I feel like it’s going to be so great when I can actually sit down and really focus on it and bring it out into the world.

It doesn’t have to be one thing. It could be both a stage play and a book.

Right? I know. I just need to start doing it. At one point, I was like, “Maybe I’ll just start by it being a one woman show,” and I’m just workshopping it, you know? I’ll sing all the songs, maybe I want other people to do the voices. I don’t know.

I mean, Hadestown started as a concept album and then blew up to be something bigger.

I just got chills. Exactly! I do think about that.

You’ve done a ton of work in the musical education space. What do you say to young artists who aspire to become professional musicians? Do you think it’s still possible for them to build a career in the field?

I think the word career needs to maybe be redefined or something, because I don’t even know what a music career is anymore. But if it’s self-expression and it’s your calling, then no one should ever discourage you from doing that. But you have to be like that Rilke [book] Letters to a Young Poet. He says something like, “If it’s not your passion, if it’s not something you eat and breathe, then maybe you shouldn’t do it.” Maybe you should find another job that pays, because you have to want to eat and breathe it and live it in order to really make any headway in the world.

I think the best music also comes from that place where it has integrity. It’s not just writing a pop song to get a buck. I don’t even know if anyone does that anymore. Now we have AI to do that. So, in a way, maybe the true artists, the young ones, will rise above. I’m hoping there’s going to be some kind of movement that is more about real artists, live music, things that we can see and feel and touch that are not based on artificial intelligence. I guess I would just talk to a young person and try to instill some kind of fire and passion, or have them ask themselves truthfully, “Is this something I really would want to hold my feet over the fire for?”

To learn more about Tracy Bonham, visit her website.

To see Tracy on tour, check out her upcoming dates.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Sometimes your furnace breaks down when you’re on vacation. And sometimes you have to spend a ton of money from 3,000 miles away to have it replaced. And sometimes, four months later, you discover that the new furnace has been slowly leaking, ruining all the items around it and causing a wet, moldy mess.

Annnnnd, sometimes you have to reschedule an interview because you need to spend the time sorting through moldy items to salvage whatever you can while waiting for the HVAC people to show up to tell you how much it will cost to fix everything.

Anyway, hi. It’s been a day. It’s the first of June, and already the month is a shitshow. I can only hope it gets better from here.

One good piece of news to share: over the weekend, Brian Andreas shared an incredibly sweet note to his socials about our interview.

I always put a ton of work into each interview, but since I work by myself I don’t really have anyone to give me feedback. So it’s nice to receive some kind words, especially in such a public manner.

Oh, and if you haven’t read the interview with Brian and his wife Fia, you should check it out. They’re pretty amazing.

This coming Friday’s interview is…a surprise! For both of us!

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I had an interview scheduled last week with a musician and was planning to run it this Friday. But she flaked and missed our call. (Totally fine. I get it. We’re all overwhelmed and running on fumes, so it’s understandable.) So now I’m going to chat with her later this week. Maybe I’ll have time to transcribe her chat, write it up, and get it published by Friday. Maybe I’ll end up running one of the other interviews I’m doing this week. Who knows.

Just know you’ll get something in your inbox on Friday. And hopefully by then I’ll have a dry basement.

In the meantime, wishing you a wonderfully creative week!

Thanks so much for reading! If you’re enjoying this content, please share the publication with others!

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