All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists

The answer was something not even many of my colleagues and closest friends know about me, so I was a little hesitant to come right out with it. But I figured that as an interviewer myself, I had a responsibility to answer truthfully. I told the reporter I had wanted to be a lyricist. “No, no,” he said. “Tell me something interesting.” We might as

The interviews presented here were conducted on the run and are by no means “definitive.” But I hope you’ll accept them in the spirit in which they’re offered, as entertaining and thought-provoking conversations with people I believe are worthy of your time.

OF COURSE MY LISTENERS ARE INVISIBLE, too—at least to me. I’m always amazed by the diversity of the show’s listeners and the settings they listen in.

The best part of producing a daily show is knowing that many listeners come to consider you a regular companion. The worst part is hardly having a minute between one deadline and the next and doing everything in a hurry.

I also encourage them to take advantage of the fact that the interview is being recorded and will be edited for broadcast. If someone is in the middle of an answer before he realizes what it was he wanted to say, he’s welcome to go back and start again—we’ll edit out the false start.

It’s my job to help these people, the experts as well as the artists, focus and present their thoughts.

This experience and others like it have taught me that when an interviewee clams up, it’s sometimes out of fear that the journalist he’s speaking with won’t fully comprehend what he’s saying or simply won’t care. This was an important lesson: It’s one of the reasons I try to be well prepared for each interview, on the assumption that a guest is mor

You never know how the program fits into someone’s day.

That’s one of the reasons I love working on radio: You might be a public figure but you’re essentially just a voice, and this lets each person who listens form whatever image of you he or she wants—tall or short, fat or thin, sex bomb or schoolmarm, straight or gay. The invisibility of radio was something I took comfort in early in my career, when