WTF with Marc Maron (it's a podcast)

Unless the interview was pre-release that's no excuse. Spend 30 seconds to find a legal stream on the net. Do the fucking work or you deserve to get called on it.

This is a problem now if he's interviewing people who are on any kind of publicity tour and are just there to plug something.

I'm not sure I really care if he's done the research - the unpreparedness is kind of his thing, no?

sometimes it's fine and just his style, sometimes it's like jesus at least read their wikipedia entry

the nick lowe one really suffered from that, i thought

It works fine when he has a guest who's up for talking about whatever or who can go for an hour with one question, or people he already knows. But as he branches into interviews with musicians who aren't that familiar with his steez it could become a thing. It didn't with, say, Huey Lewis because he was just a talker. Kerry Kinney called him out pretty hard in her interview for not knowing that she was in a rock band for years.

It's kind of a drag that he's getting more and more people who're there specifically to plug something.

i really liked the danny lobell one recently. i'd never heard of him but it was nice to have someone on who's still struggling and figuring things out, and a little bit frustrated by it. also fun to hear him (as someone who also had a comedy interview project) analyzing previous wtf interviews.

Listening to Cheech & Chong right now. I love that half the stories are about Bobby Taylor.

i've kinda skirted a lot of the musical/celeb ones cause of the negativity here but the couple music interviews i heard where he knows his stuff - cf the iggy pop one, which he's great on, ie just familiar enough w/stuff like we will fall & their detroit antecedents, &c - are really satisfying. iggy interview is so dope.

Marc does a great job of getting out of Cheech & Chong's way. Nice change from his dominant style.

Loved sedaris on bookstore employees

I've got Sedaris coming up next. Looking forward to it.

listening now and the intro is making me very uncomfortable. I do not need to know his bathroom habits.

"Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah, yeah." - Marc Maron

The Sedaris one was good.

I think that's the best ending of a WTF interview I've ever heard.

^ Sedaris

the Nick Cave was a bit more open and cheerful than I've heard him in other interviews, though of course Maron had to do an assholish intro.

One of MM's bad interviewing habits is his need to ask a question and then try to answer it before the guest can (one of countless examples: "What albums did you record in Berlin? Let Love In? The Good Son?") or to inaccurately finish his guest's sentences for them. It seems to come from a radio fear of pauses. It creates unneeded tension as the guest has to correct Maron and risk coming off as annoyed.

loved Cheech & Chong!

Cave had some funny Neubaten stories. I don't know what Maron's problem with him was exactly, but Cave seemed like he was having fun.

The Nick Cave one was bad. Marc needs to at least read people's wikipedia page so he doesn't blunder his way through their backstory. So frustrating that he won't do the minimal work he would expect from a host if he was on the other side of the mic.

I thought Cave did a good job of working gracefully around Maron's painfully obvious ignorance, which makes Maron's characterisation of him as "a bit difficult" doubly irritating. Cave would have been entirely justified in being very difficult indeed if he wanted to - it was seriously amateur-hour stuff from Maron, who's usually a bit better at papering over the cracks in his knowledge.

I thought Cave made the most of it. A couple of times he got peeved but never stopped Maron cold despite Marc's inanity. It's frustrating that Marc has reached a level of fame & influence that he can get long form interviews other people can't get but won't do the necessary work.

I'm not inclined to listen to the interview -- what kinds of things did he say, specifically?

Maron must have got in some trouble for that Cave intro, judging by what he said at the beginning of the new podcast

"I'm not going to talk about whether or not I thought it was a tough interview. It was pointed out to me that I was the problem but I can't accept that and am unwilling to change it so fuck that shit."

sad laugh

Nick Cave sucks

It didnt seem to go that badly except for when Marc made a dumb but harmless remark about Cave being "an existential cowboy" and Cave fired back tersely that "Im not a fucking cowboy" and both of them got embarrassed and Marc starting calling Cave "sir" all of a sudden. Anyway, agree with folks here that Marc should do more homework, better for his show in the long run obviously.

he's too busy sketching out his 15 minute pre-interview ramblings that I always skip

I want to see Cave's Gladiator sequel.

Maron is hard to take sometimes, even with a great guest - he just seems like a genuinely unpleasant person to be around.

I don't find that he seems unpleasant at all, actually--but I like his pre-interview ramblings so what do I know (his TV show is painfully bad however)

I wonder just what the demographics of Maron's audience are. I can understand a little bit of feigned ignorance on Maron's part if half of his audience are people who have no idea who Nick Cave, Stinson, etc. are...

Would have expected Maron to pick up on the Grinderman albums - talk about mid-life crisis rage.

You can find a synopsis of Cave's proposed Gladiator sequel online, it sounds fucking awesome.

it sounds quite a bit like that "Casca" series of novels by Barry Sadler, the guy who sang "Ballad of the Green Berets"-- Roman soldier who stabs Jesus on the cross is cursed to remain alive until the 2nd coming and fight as a soldier in every war.

I really have no strong opinions one way or the other on Jonah Hill, but he's a great guest on WTF.

I feel like that nick cave interview was a v accurate reflection of my interactions with a lot of America. Same language but different approaches to unknown people, maybe? Something gets very fucked up in sending and receiving signals or expectations of how the other person will respond or SOMETHING. I certainly don't think it's intentional from either side.

the interview with Open Mike Eagle wasn't as embarrassing as it could have been, though Maron kept throwing out Andy Rooney style questions: "Why are there so many people on the stage? What are they all doing up there?"

iggy pop ep is so good

"Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah, yeah." - Marc Maron

― Sufjan Grafton, Monday, July 1, 2013 2:21 PM (2 weeks ago)

Pamela Adlon ep is pretty good. I like her.

He made the Joe Rogan podcast bearable, I wish he'd talk about politics more (or maybe I just miss those eps of WTF)

No, I think he's been pretty explicitly disengaged from his political past. It is a pity.

So the Yorke interview was done back when the Atoms for Peace album was being recorded, but Maron waited until 5 months after the album came out to release it?

Yeah, I have no idea what factors dictate when he'll release an interview, but it actually way more fun to hear than I was expecting.

AFP are touring now, so maybe that was part of his reasoning?

I am surprised to learn that marc maron still doesn't understand "how the music gets on the vinyl"

^ schtick