How long does it take you to write music criticism ?

does this include brainstorming? or actual writing?

actual writing only

do you feel like it takes you too long?

lol at the idea of listening to an album before reviewing it

You should only have to listen to the first ten seconds or so of about half the tracks on any album. The really important thing is to be drunk (or stoned).

i'm not sure if it takes me too long. i dont know any other music writers personally, so i'm curious what the mean average is.

For a 200-300 word there's little "brainstorming" per se. The trick for me is to squeeze as many pensees as possible while still constructing an intellectually honest review.

For longer things I've taken to writing in longhand, then transcribing it; but that's a personal thing.

yeah i agree about the brainstorming part. that goes hand in hand when im writing a review. i had an editor once who said he could write a solid 350 album review in 30 minutes or less. the dominos pizza of music writers

solid 350 words not albums that is

Hey, Marsh did the 350 albums thing in that red Rolling Stone guide.

hmmmm, perhaps something along the lines of 1 hour per 100 words. Very neat.

if you are writing a review that is 200-800 words, it should take you no longer to write than the length of whatever you are reviewing. if it takes you longer than that, then your review sucks and nobody will want to read it. if your review is longer than 200-800 words it might take you longer to write it, but be advised that nobody will want to read it whether it sucks or not. so, write quickly and don't write that much.

that seems mostly right

It's quite right.

While what Scott says has a lot of truth in it, it really depends on what sort of a writer you are. Obviously, you shouldn't spend your time poring over the review and making sure that every single word is perfect, because readers will be able to tell that it's artificial, but there is certainly something to be said for, you know, editing. For me, since I use voice recognition to write (although hopefully not for much longer), it can sometimes take a while. Also, I am kind of a perfectionist. However, the writing of the thing is never really a big problem for me once I sit down to do it. The two biggest challenges for me are finding the "in" to the review, and wrapping the damn thing up without resorting to trite clichés like, "This is essential listening for every Prostitute Disfigurement fan." Once I have the angle from which I approached the review, it really doesn't take that long. Finding that perfect conclusion usually requires putting the review aside for a day or two, though. If it's a short thing, though, and you don't have any physical handicaps, it really shouldn't take more than an hour to type it up once you know the approach that you're taking. And if you take longer than that, YOU FAIL AT LIFE.

Huh. That may be the longest thing I've ever written on ILM. And it only took me 11 minutes to write.

Still shorter than most Sunn0)))) songs.

Dammit, now this has tapped into my latent OCD. I'm totally going to start timing myself whenever I write CD reviews... I hate you forever, Oscar.

i'm just thinking about one of my favorite eps ever; it's only fifteen minutes long, but i could spend 45 minutes writing something about it. that's just a special case, i guess.

also i'm not good.

How many times do you normally listen to a record if you, y'know, actually have a reasonable turnaround?

Depends on how good/bad it is -- sometimes I've had to struggle to get through the whole thing once before writing about it, and other times I can listen to it for five times before I feel ready to put pen on digital paper. So, that averages out to about three times?

I write a 300 word review in about half an hour, and then spend about another one to three more hours cleaning it up; editing, word choice, etc. Generally that's because I work through what I'm going to write while listening to the album - so when I hit the third listen-through, I have a good idea of the review's narrative. So everything else is just making sure I said it exactly the way I wanted to.

That said - sometimes it takes multiple total rewrites to get it perfect. So I've taken six to seven hours on a small review before. Tends to be an aggravating process in those circumstances, tho.

usually 2 times, sometimes 3; if i listen to it more than that, it's for my own enjoyment

Usually when a multiple rewrite situation happens, I find it best to put it aside and work on other stuff before coming back to it. If you have a short deadline, though, that might not be an option.

Also, sometimes I like to write the review while listening to the album (esp in listenings at the record label, where you know you won't get to listen again later at home). So I might technically listen to an album 4-5 during a review writing. Or sometimes a lot of listening to a few songs and only 1 listen for other songs.

I almost always listen to the album while I write about it, partly because I never take notes on prior listens, and partly because it helps me get in the right mood to talk about it.

Obviously, you shouldn't spend your time poring over the review and making sure that every single word is perfect, because readers will be able to tell that it's artificial

I've probably been guilty of this before.

I suspect we all have.

Except Scott, I guess, but he's on like a whole other level than us mere mortals.

200 words or less is what i used to agonize over! i would write little things for the village voice and they would SUCK and they would take me forever. mostly, cuz i'm a blabbermouth. then i would read chuck's or george smith's tiny blurbs and they were always so fuckin' good and i would ask myself: how dey doo dat? then i remembered that they had both been doing it for 20+ years and i felt like less of a moron. AND they are both good journalists who at one time wrote about non-music stuff on tight deadlines for newspapers and they knew how to be punchy and clear and concise in their sleep. but 300+ words is still perfect for me. i start and i know when to stop. and then i'm done. i just don't have TIME to worry things forever. and it hardly ever makes it better even when i do. i just go with the flow. if i'm not feeling it, i make something up.

"i'm just thinking about one of my favorite eps ever; it's only fifteen minutes long, but i could spend 45 minutes writing something about it. that's just a special case, i guess."

or you could write a book about it! i was just talking about music reviews of a certain length.

now, if we are talking about stuff that is 1000+ words long, that's another story. that can take me a day or two or three or longer depending on what it is. or if it's for my own amusement or not. i wrote something long-ish for emusic last year, and i had to remember how to write like a normal human. it took me a while.

depends on the record. if it prompts severe love... it's quick and easy. the gospel passion play flows. if it's absolute dislike... that's a little harder solely because then there's the question of, "why write about this at all? will this be subjective trash?"

it's the mediocre records that are hell. forcing yourself to take sides. giving it up for a band you normally love but you've just realized are a one trick pony. and there's the inevitable questions of, "am i just not into this genre right now?" there's nothing worse than lackluster feelings turning a crit into a lengthy, meandering, nondecisive wankfest. seriously, spare us!

one funny thing about growers however... i've got a few records from a few years back that i mediocrely reviewed in the past that now i would either destroy or gush over and probably give a better crit overall. so... 3 years?

I actually have one thing I consistently fuck up with when I write reviews. Since I'm more interested in "what is the album about" than "is it any good" sometimes I'm not clear enough about whether it's *GOOD*. And albums I've loved, I've seen Metacritic give a 70% from me. Because it just wasn't clear enough to the aggregator, I guess, how much I liked it.

Man, I've spent hours writing and tweaking 250-word reviews.

For magazine pieces, I'm extremely, extremely meticulous, but for web stuff, where there's no strict word limit, I just sit back and blab away.

hour/hour and half usually

would probably take me shorter if i wrote straight through, but that rarely happens with re-listening to songs and the internet

For me it's the listening that takes time. I listen over and over until I know clearly what I feel about it, then it takes about 5 minutes to write it down. Maybe 15 minutes for like a 2-disc mix cd.

Couldn't possibly say; As soon as I know I've got a review to write, I generally start a new document and leave it open in the background of whatever I'm doing, adding thoughts and sentences and reordering every so often as a new idea comes to me, until it's done / just before it's due, when I'll focus and pull it all together. That's pretty much the same whether it's 150 words or 600.

As for the "how many times do you listen first?" question, that = as many as possible unless I REALLY can't stand to listen to it again.

When it comes to listening, sometimes I know what I'll write after the first spin, but on average I probably listen around a dozen times (I've never kept track)...depends if it's a tidy 40 minute album or a 79 minute slogfest!

if it prompts severe love... it's quick and easy. the gospel passion play flows. if it's absolute dislike... that's a little harder solely because then there's the question of, "why write about this at all? will this be subjective trash?"

Haha -- I'm the opposite! It's the stuff I love that takes longest to write about.

Ditto.

Probably because I find it much easier to be pseudo-objective with stuff I dislike, i.e. find reasons why I dislike, and voice them. With stuff I love I struggle beyond IT MAKES ME FEEEEEEL, MAN type platitudes.

it's so easy to hate.

ILX to thread.

Christ, I spend an insanely long time on the average 3-sentence not-for-publication ILM post, with all my attendent anal-neurotic OCDisms. (Refusal to use a word twice if possible, hyphen-or-semicolon agonizing, "Should I leave that typing error intact for the sake of 'authenticity'", etc.) And I'm still never satisfied, and half of 'em make me cringe when a thread gets revived a year later. I've written maybe two-dozen reviews over the years for Amazon and the like, starting each one with great enthusiasm, and every one of 'em turned into an hours-long just-finish-the-fucking-thing! ordeal.

No WAY could I ever write this stuff professionally, or even regularly/voluntarily on a not-for-profit basis. I'd end up hating all music and possibly dying younger than Lester Bangs.

Ideas are hard but they come in an instant, details are easy but they take time.

DERAIL: since you guys write reviews, i assume you've done some interviews, too. is there some standard device for recording a phone interview? my mom works at a magazine and still uses shorthand for her phone interviews.

I have an Olympus digital recorder that holds about 6 1/2 hours, and a phone-line splice I bought at Radio Shack. So I record straight from the phone. I can later export the interviews to my hard drive as AIFF files and convert 'em to anything I want in iTunes (this is helpful if, say, The Wire wants to stream MP3s of an interview on their website).

I use one of those Radio Shack suction-cuppy microphones that stick to the phone, connected to a tape recorder, and it works brilliantly. Transcribing sucks, but it has to be done.

Next step will be to do a set-up like unperson's above.

"it's the mediocre records that are hell. forcing yourself to take sides. giving it up for a band you normally love but you've just realized are a one trick pony. and there's the inevitable questions of, "am i just not into this genre right now?" there's nothing worse than lackluster feelings turning a crit into a lengthy, meandering, nondecisive wankfest. seriously, spare us!"

OTmotherfuckingM.

Generally, for me it's an hour per hundred words, including the dickering in writing. I tend to use blog posts as first drafts, tossing notes or whatever up, and having to read it back helps. And yeah, that's ignoring all the other shit that has to happen (coming up with an idea, an angle, an approach, a judgment).

Longer pieces, well, I don't usually write longer than 300 words, so that takes a bit more effort per 100 in order to keep things cohesive. Also, I have a bad habit of starting sentences and paragraphs with conjunctions, so I have to go back and take out all the retard phrasing.

And lately (see what I mean about those damn conjunctions?) I've been freelancing for Hustler, and their reviews are all 25 words, and I find that it takes me sometimes an hour or two to get one right. There I usually have the benefit of writing up things in order to placate publicists, so I can sometimes churn 'em out—"Hey, here's three glib phrases and an exhortation to purchase some product!"—that woulda been half a review, right there.

Oh, and for transcribing, I had been using a phone jumper that you'd plug between the handset and the phone, then run a line-out to a tape recorder or whatever, but it just broke, like, a week ago and so I need to get a new one. It was fine, but it meant that I had to use a landline, which meant that I had to do it at work. I'm hoping to find a mini-usb thing that does the same job, since I have a USB out on my phone and an in (and line in) on my mp3 player.

First drafts are what ILM is for.

I'm actually in the market for a voice/music recorder right now. What's the fancy one that everyone "wishes" they had?

Kinda eying the Olympus LS-10 and the Sony ICD-MX20DR9.

Either way, I want to try the Dragon voice recognition software (Dictate on the Mac).

This will all be used for a slew of long interviews for a book. So I am WAY open to suggestions on how to streamline my process.

First drafts are what ILM is for.

Heh. This is more true than you know.

BTW, for a non-smartass answer to the topic of this thread:

It's obviously different for everyone. So much of what I write are 80-150 word previews for shows. Most of the time I already know enough about the artist/venue/event to give the average reader a perspective on whether they'd be interested or not.

I try to write fairly objectively, often writing 200 words quickly, then doing one strong editorial pass to boil the info down, make it more readable, and lower the word count.

I did not follow this process for this post though.

Alfred -- well, considering that I use ILM for first drafts myself...

Nate -- Dragon is what I use, and it's very good, although I need to warn you that, unless you have a very clear, modulated speaking voice with no accent, it is far from perfect. However, it's done well by me for going on six years now, so I recommend it.

Does anyone else have to do grabs? 25 to 35 words that are editorially mandated to be pithy, informative, entertaining and summarize the review?

These take me an unholy amount of time, thought and energy. Then the copy editor changes them.

First drafts, never heard of them. (Ill-formed thoughts, yes.)

Ill-formed thoughts are what ILM is for!

(I can do this all day)

"First drafts are what ILM is for.

Heh. This is more true than you know."

I've kind of wondered about that. I try to hold back on using ILX for stuff I'm gonna try to get paid for because a) it feels like cheating, unless I'm looking for some supporting quotes; b) because I have an irrational fear that there's so little insight in what I actually get paid to do that any of these ILX folks who read it could steal what little ideas I do have and write them up first; c) I'm afraid that editors will think, Oh, yeah, I saw that already as an ILX thread and not want to pay me for it.

But I'm curious about people who have done it and had some success with it. Mostly, regarding reviews/criticism/features, what ILX helps me with is getting the vicious mocking of my weaker or unarticulated thoughts out of the way. Occasionally, my inability to bolster what I'd previously assumed ends up being a good thing and changes the way I think about music, and that helps me write. I'm still trying to come up with a reason that I think "dated" is a valid criticism in the face of Chuck knocking all of the legs out from under me (it makes emotional sense but not critical sense, at least to me).

I'll test ideas here that might get used in published work. Nothing more.

So I just finished a 1000 word profile and it took me roughly 10 hrs. Brainstorming was included in those 10 hrs, seems about right to me. I do alot of post-show 350 word reviews, and I can wrap those up in about an hour, as long as I took notes during th show. I reviewed the Dirty Projectors a couple weeks ago and I brought my laptop so I was able to finish my review by the end of the show. That felt nice !

Ha ha. Working on your laptop during a concert, C/D?

But yeah, basically what Alfred said applies to me as well.

Stupid Q's: A band just asked me to help write "a one sheet."

1. I assume they're referring to the one-page band bios i get in the mail?
2. For ethical reasons, I shouldn't write a feature or review of the same band, right? Even though they just released one of my favorite releases of the year?

Working on your laptop during a concert, C/D?

Hell with that -- work on your iPhone instead. (Not that I would know...)

Ned Raggett has been assimilated.

Tape Store -- yes to both questions. Definite conflict of interest on that one. Although I did review both the Metalocalypse CD and DVD, when I know the guys who do the show...

Ned has the fastest thumb on the West Coast.

to answer the question, i guess it depends on how critical or in depth i want to be. words and detailed evaluation can take time. dismissal or mild observation rolls off the keys.

For Festivals where you only get a couple of sentences an act and the deadline is two minutes after it finishes I've been guilty of composing and sending reviews on a mobile.

I wrote Lipstick Traces in about three days.

L....... i........ p....... s.........

Being a booking agent and a writer (and someone who knows way too many people), I'm really careful about conflict of interest.

I would definitely agree that you can't write a feature and a one sheet on the same band.

Ned has the fastest thumb on the West Coast.

It's all about knowing how to transfer typing skills.

Wow, some of you guys write fast. I take numerous hours to write 350 word concert reviews.

I write in order to meet the deadline and have written good stuff in a few hours and long features in 48 hours start to finish. I've also dicked around for weeks with assignments and then written something the day before, taking notes and then doing it in a few hours. probably, a little pressure never hurt anybody, me included.

goddddd, i just had the worst interview ever...I fucked up, ran out of shit to talk about and just sort of ended it really quickly, "Anything else you wanted to add?" "I hope this isn't a four-page article"

"Okay, thanks, Mr. Dylan."

haha, it was a classical violinist. I wish i had gone w/ my original idea and ask him about being a one-man cover band

Bad interview? You wanna bad interview?

All I had to do is see who it was with.

yeah he's made a career out of being a dick to people

Man, I had a terrible interview with Lyrics Born years ago when Later That Day was coming up. His publicist had failed to get me the album before I talked to him, he was on a cell phone in his car (despite the interview being scheduled in advance) and was giving me one word answers to everything I asked. I had a reasonable grasp on his Latyrx and Quanum stuff, but he didn't want to talk about it, and he didn't want to talk about working with his girlfriend except that it was "great." Everything was "great": the new album was "great," his collaborators were "great," he was doing "great," there hadn't been any problems, he liked working with everyone equally (equally "great")… Then his publicist hounded me and hounded me and hounded me over getting extra copies of the magazine, when I'd only worked in a couple graphs into my column because I didn't want to be all like, "Hey, he just basically blew me off and was a boring cock. Good luck with the Diet Coke ads."

On the other hand, a day or two earlier I'd interviewed Jordan Knight, after his publicist contacted us, and he was witty and humble and totally disarming and honest. I'd expected (because I was at the alt-rag) to do a sarcastic "Isn't this guy over OMG he called me" thing, but I was happy to bump Lyrics in order to get Knight in.

I wish the interview went like that...I screwed up on this one. We talked about his childhood, then I drew a weak comparison between his time in music school and the concert he is performing here (both revolve around competition), and he kinda understandably but still jackassedly asked me what my question was...then i continuted the connection w/ his love of soccer and asked if he was driven by competition, which is soooo stupid and mean of me. Then i asked him about something he has nothing to do with (oops!) and then asked him a question i had asked earlier and received a mini-groan. OMG THAT WAS HORRIFIC

For a full review I listen to it 3-12 times first, and then at least another 2-4 times while writing, switching between headphones and speakers. Not counting the preliminary listens, 45 min - 3 hours. No wonder I've pretty much stopped doing reviews.

On the other hand, a day or two earlier I'd interviewed Jordan Knight, after his publicist contacted us, and he was witty and humble and totally disarming and honest. I'd expected (because I was at the alt-rag) to do a sarcastic "Isn't this guy over OMG he called me" thing, but I was happy to bump Lyrics in order to get Knight in.

Worst interview ever was w/ r1ch cr0nin of LF0...i spent four months trying to get him for the high school paper, and he finally agrees to an email interview...i send him some really good, thoughtful questions and he sends back one-sentence responses to half of them and answers "I don't really know" to a third.

i need to write this story now so i don't have to revisit the interview

Ah, good ol' Lou. "So, Lou, how come you haven't made another album as good as Berlin? How's that for a question about the music?"

Oh, yeah, Tape Store, I had an interview like that with Detachment Kit. Luckily, through the one-sentence answers to the questions (and God, I hate email "interviews" but they refused to talk on the phone), all of the interesting lyrical themes that I thought were in the songs ended up just being coincidences and the real stories were terminally dull, which meant that after reading them, I just didn't like the music nearly as much, which meant it was easier to spike the article.

"I'm sorry I was a disappointing interviewer."

Oh, it's so tempting to call this guy back and say that.

xpost, i had a similiar experience w/ the lyrical theme question, but the interview was in-person and the reaction was actually sorta cute!

Man, I did an awful interview over email with a female performer recently and she was so lazy, she took two of my questions (which were TOTALLY different) and copy/pasted the same answer to both.

The questions were:

"Do you rule?"

"Do you not rule?"

One question was about her ethnic influences (she's got a whole bunch of musical influences in her music that sound related to her personal heritage) and the other was about the geographies she's grown up in, since she's something of a globetrotter. She gave me the word-for-word exact same answer for both.

And it was a lousy answer for both.

This was my worst interview to date. An awful, awful experience.

My two worst interview experiences were with the Melvins and Keiji Haino. The former because Buzz answered every question with sarcasm, which doesn't really translate to print very well, and the latter because it was going through a translator and my recording device failed, so all I had to go on was sketchy written notes and memories. I tried to recover as much as possible on the train ride home, but there was no way I could honestly offer "quotes" in the commonly understood sense of that word.