Today’s journalism lesson, for those of you following along at home, is how to write about somebody you want to write about even when his specialty doesn’t necessarily coincide with your “beat,” or area of coverage.
Let us take, as an example, a singer-songwriter named Robert Earl Keen, a Texan who was Lyle Lovett’s buddy in college and has had songs recorded by Joe Ely and the Highwaymen (Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson), among others.
Let us then suppose you are a newspaper writer — one, say, who covers television — who also happens to think Keen is one of the greatest things happening in popular music and his most recent studio album, 1994’s “Gringo Honeymoon,” a work of breathtaking power and beauty.
First, you would try to establish Keen as somebody to read about, regardless of the reader’s familiarity with him or of the writer’s expertise.
You could try to explain how his richly melodic songs tell harrowing, sharply detailed stories of outlaws, losers and lovers in a West on the cusp between its mythical past and modern times.
You could use the irresistible press-kit quote everybody uses, Iris DeMent, another rising singer-songwriter, saying, “Between the tickets and the beer, I have spent more money going to see Robert Earl Keen than any other artist I know. I only regret the beers.”
But an easier way to interest readers would be to drop some names early on that belong to celebrities better known than Keen, perhaps other artists who have recorded his songs.
Some would call that tactic cheap, but I disagree. Cheap would be something like mentioning that Keen was invited to Lovett’s surprise Indiana wedding to Julia Roberts and he was quoted in People’s article about the nuptials.
Next you would watch for an event that brings Keen in contact with, to follow our theoretical example, the sphere of television.
An example would be if he were appearing Saturday (9 p.m.) on the venerable public-broadcasting show “Austin City Limits,” which, in its sharp eye for talent from the folk-country borderline, is to country radio what Gorgonzola is to Cheese Whiz. You could grasp that as the “peg,” as we say in the business, on which to hang your story.
It wouldn’t even matter if the program were available only to a small segment of your readership because it airs on Merrillville, Ind.’s WYIN-Ch. 56, carried on less than a quarter of area cable systems. People have friends, and friends have VCRs.
Another good idea would be to call the “Austin City Limits” folks and try to arrange an interview with Keen and then, were he to call you on a Monday afternoon, ask him about the program.
“It’s most people’s favorite show to do,” he might say, an enthusiasm that would be visible in the way he and his impeccable band rip through a half-hour set culled mostly from Keen’s promising sounding new CD, “Picnic,” due in stores April 29.
He could tell you about how, as the first artist on the new Arista Austin sublabel, he’s happy to have his first taste of major-label marketing “muscle” and he’s hopeful to be able to get radio airplay via the new “Americana” format slowly finding a niche (though not in Chicago), or even on country radio.
“On the good side,” he could say, “country radio always changes. It will always homogenize itself into the sound of about one or two songs. But that period is usually short-lived. In the past it’s gone anything from pop-disco-sounding country to the short period where Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, whoever, were having their kind of stuff on the airwaves. I think it’s ready for a change now.”
From a quote like this you might segue into how Keen has shown up more often in your daily TV highlight column than have many TV stars, mostly in the context of contrasting good country music to TV-awards-show country music and country-radio country music.
If you felt the article getting too far from your area of expertise, you could ask him about his favorite TV shows, only to be disappointed to learn that he uses the set as a video monitor in his Bandera, Texas, home. “I was a really big huge TV addict,” he could explain. “I just kind of weaned it out of my life.”
In a pinch, you might quote a TV-related lyric from “Dreadful Selfish Crime,” his half-regretful, half-defiant anthem about failing to seize the days: “We spent our afternoons watching the TV / Findin’ things to do we could do for free. / When we split up she said, `You don’t do enough for me.’ “
But that’s a fairly tenuous link, and it may take a charming interview quote from him to win people back. Asked, for instance, about how his voice has been used to make the argument that you don’t have to be a “good” singer to be an effective singer, he might say that “I just feel like I have the most accessible voice in the entertainment industry. Anybody can sing my songs as well as I can, and I’m damn happy for it.”
One other thing: When you can satisfy all these requirements, and you’re writing the story up, be sure to write it direct. No matter what, do not use the conditional tense. Nothing kills a newspaper story like the conditional tense.
