Every now and again, if you’re lucky, you come across a piece of craftsmanship that lays it all out for you. For architects, it might be walking up to an old gothic cathedral and watching the lines and foundations intersect. For musicians, it might be hearing a song which stirs their hearts, feeling the melodies and meaning intertwine like strands of DNA. For people like me, the writers, it means laying your hands on a book which illustrates so clearly not only the beauty of words, but also how those words can be used to change people. That rush only gets better if those words are pouring forth from a career on a rise to not just stardom, but mythic status. This writer, this moment — this is something to be treasured.

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead is the latest in a growing list of “must read” books by Neil Strauss. This new tome is a culmination of years of interviews and all those magical moments that fell on the cutting room floor by way of verbal economy, relevance to the time, or the most egregious of reasons, editorial choice by the publisher. These snippets are peephole windows into the real people behind the fame and fortune, showing in possibly the truest form ever that celebrities are indeed normal people too, dealing with the same insecurities and same life choices as we do. That doesn’t mean they are all good people under the glitter, some are just as vain and superficial as we imagine, but at least we can now be sure they aren’t faking that for the creation of their persona.

The cast of characters span the celebrity horizon like a multi-billion dollar rainbow. Everyone is here and no one is spared from the charm and familiarity that Strauss brings into every interview. Snoop Dogg takes him along to get diapers for his kid, Lady Gaga goes to tears by her first question and Jewel snuggles up under the covers like it’s a high school slumber party. This book is filled with astounding moments of clarity from the people who spend most of their days hidden behind a persona, whether it be one of hard-edged aggression (like Marilyn Manson and Slipknot) or unstoppable humor (like Jay Leno or Stephen Colbert). Strauss shows in interview after interview his style of getting the subjects to relax, let down their guard and basically not feel like subjects. From reading these passages you not only learn some amazing factoids about these people, but you can also glean how to interact better with others in your own lives, with a sense of honesty and compassion.

As he did before in The Game and Emergency, Strauss has immersed himself over a period of time into a whole different world and come back with a roadmap to the reality he discovered. His choice of questions and how he allows himself to become part of the moment instead of just someone observing from the outside gives him the access and ability to truly describe and detail where these people are coming from. They are not just subjects or an assignment (although you can tell some he was more personally excited about than others). He gives each interview weight, respect and a sense of purpose often missed by the supermarket tabloid phenomena. You get the distinct impression that each person at one point or another looks over at him and thinks with internal surprise and joy, “Wow, no one has ever asked me that before!” So they get to tell their story in a fresh way and not sound like a broken record on yet another press tour, while we the reader get to see a little more deeply into the lives of these people who inspire, excite and often openly confuse us. ( )

Who's the real focus of an interview? The subject, who presumably has something interesting to say to the world? The interviewer, with their mission of drawing that out? What about the audience, the true reason for the interview taking place, who's expecting entertainment, connection, and insight? When it's done right, all three get a chance to shine. Neil Strauss, of The Game fame, went through some of his unpublished notes and transcripts for his interviews from his stints as a journalist and here presents some of the unpublished excerpts that "do justice to reality". He's edited 228 of them into a few well-connected streams of discourse, ranging from mildly interesting, to fascinating, to just plain odd, so this is definitely recommended for anyone who's interested in celebrity interviews, Neil Strauss' career, or what fame means to you.

Strauss was able to interview a lot of famous people, as you would expect for a journalist working for prestige publications like The New York Times and Rolling Stone. Most but not all are musicians. In general you only get interviewed if you're a hot commodity, but the subjects are all over the place - some are at pivotal moments in their careers (Snoop Dogg having just quit Death Row, Pink Floyd about to tour their last real studio album), others are are at various ebbs (seemingly every blues musician has just gotten out of prison), some are very cooperative (Lady Gaga, Chuck Berry), others need some kind of help (Brian Wilson with his wife Melinda), and some are just plain weird (Julian Casablancas from The Strokes, Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum, or Jonathan Davis from Korn). I can't imagine a reader who wouldn't be interested in at least some of these interviews, even artists that they normally wouldn't have a high opinion of.

Neil Strauss himself is a good interviewer, in addition to being an interesting guy. Obviously it's The Game that's made him famous, and I'm not sure many people would pick this up if someone else wrote it (this book was released in 2011, 6 years after The Game, and contains material from as far back as the 90s), but he seems to have a real talent for getting his subjects to say interesting things. He's very modest and self-deprecating about his own interviewing skills, and indeed sometimes it does seem like his M.O. is to flail around until the subject takes pity on him and gives him good material, but you can see where the guy who wrote The Game came from, as in the scene when he charms Britney Spears into giving him a decent interview with basic pickup techniques. While it's funny to see the members of Led Zeppelin talk all over him (he points out that interviewing a band all together is a rookie mistake since they'll just banter with each other), in most of the interviews he's able to lean back and get his subjects to open up in interesting ways.

And so as an audience member, I found myself very pleased. Strauss is great at making me feel like I'm the third guy in the room, asking many questions that I would have liked to, and some that I would never have thought of. For example, a few times he asks a stock question like "would you still make music if no one ever heard it?" This seems abstract, but what it translates to is "what is your relationship to your fans?", so it's interesting to hear how differently artists like PJ Harvey and Lady Gaga answer it, and think about what their answers say about their art. Strauss does profile a few genuine outsider artists, but for the most part these are people who are in some way looking for my approval, who are trying to speak to me. I read interviews because I'm always looking for something "more" from artists I like, but the questions of why artists put themselves out there and how they embody something I wish I could myself are endlessly fascinating. Even to hear some like Trent Reznor pour his heart out about his unhappiness and loneliness is revealing, to me.

After dozens and dozens of interviews (annoyingly, the Index is not sorted alphabetically but by cutesy "themes" and caricatures, so good luck flipping back and forth trying to find someone specific), Strauss closes with a very sad memoriam dedicated to Paul Nelson, a legendary critic and editor whose personal issues eventually led to a quiet death alone in his apartment, undiscovered for several days. As a meditation on how a lifetime of achievement and the admiration of your peers relates to dying alone, it will resonate most strongly with those who worry about their own legacy and how their work fits in to What It All Means, and so the book ends with 11 lessons drawn from the interviews. That some of them contradict each other is of course cosmically appropriate for the un-summarizable complexity of life:

- Let go of the past.
- Fame won't make you feel any better about yourself.
- The secret to happiness is balance.
- Fix your issues now, because the older you get the worse they become.
- Derive some self-esteem from within, not from others' opinions.
- Say yes to new things.
- Live in truth.
- Never say never.
- Trust your negativity.
- Be happy with what you have.
- Everyone loves you when you're dead. ( )

Amazing collection of interviews from one of the best. ( )

When I first started reading this book I felt disappointed. I know I expected something different. In the preface I had been promised snippets of actual conversations, not filtered conversations turned into interviews. But then the first snippets didn’t seem to fulfill the promise of better of the interviewees.

I’m glad I didn’t let that first perception (a perception after only a few pages) make me change course. Because I quickly realized that it was no one snippet that would make the effect; it was the compilation of snippets that makes this such a fascinating read. Strauss has managed to get to the movers and shakers (primarily of music) that are hard to reach. And even for the easier to reach, he has found a spin that makes them slightly different than you would expect.

And I will also add that, by giving the real transcripts - the actual words spoken over the particular moment of time – there is great insight in how to be a good interviewer. Strauss’s conversational approach to interviewing becomes evident. And it is equally as evident how successful the approach is.

No one quote, no one interview, makes this book. Rather, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. And that all comes together for a very significant sum. ( )