My Process In Action

“We’re going to start with a warm-up that I call ’10 Plus 10,’” he says. “It simulates the hammering triviality that one goes through when promoting a record. We’re going to do push-ups, and we’re going to do them as fast as we can. And after each set I’m going to ask you a series of questions. You have to answer quickly and move on to the next set, or we start over from the beginning, and I get shocked.”

The notion of doing a set of push-ups in time with Wyatt is daunting–even in a baggy button-down it’s clear that he’s in exponentially better shape than I am. I struggle through the first round, after which Wyatt immediately turns the whole experience inside-out, making what was initially just a strange premise for a feature into a kind of meta-joke on the entire act of feature-writing itself. “What are the 10 dumbest interview questions you can possibly ask?” I blurt out seven quickly — “Where did you get your band name?” “How did your band meet?” — before I come to a dead stop and there’s a muffled buzz and Wyatt’s head suddenly jerks sideways. “Not fast enough. We have to do it again.”

We move on to the questionnaire. “You sent me this list of magazines you subscribe to,” Wyatt says. “You read the paper versions of these?” I nod.

“What do you do when there get to be a whole lot of them?”

“I save them,” I reply. He arches an eyebrow.

“Why do you save them? Because you may read them again one day?”

I stammer, and he cuts me off before I can answer.

“I want you to think about that, and also think about what would happen if you were in a situation where a circumstance forced you to leave those magazines behind. What would happen there? I want you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who can’t save those magazines and see where that takes you.”