Peter Terzian, editor of Heavy Rotation
Peter Terzian, a soft-spoken freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from The New York Times to The Believer to Slate, is the editor of Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives, now available from Harper Perennial. At a café in Park Slope, Decider talked to Terzian about the ideas behind the book, the curious gulf between literature and music, and James Wood’s moonlighting as an instrumentalist. Terzian will lead a reading event for the book at McNally Jackson today, July 14, with contributors John Haskell, Lisa Dierbeck, Martha Southgate, and Todd Pruzan.
Decider: What was the genesis for Heavy Rotation? How did all of this come together?
Peter Terzian: I like music writing a lot, and I like memoir. I wanted to find a way to combine the two. I worked at Newsday for a long time as deputy book editor and I got to know a lot of great writers. Daniel Handler, who contributed to the book, and I would write each other e-mails and swap mix CDs. Somehow we got on the topic of the Eurythmics’ Savage and it went from there. I thought, “Wow, I know all these talented writers.”
I tried to give as little guidance as possible. My only request was that the writers stay in the popular music field—not classical or jazz or anything. The prompt I gave was, “Tell me a story about an album in your life—about how life and music intersected.” That’s how it came to be.
D: Was it difficult to work with such a wide stable of writers and curate their selections?
PT: Not at all. They were all completely pro—most of the pieces came to me as you see them in the book. A lot of the writers had done journalism before.
D: It’s strange to imagine some of these writers in the throes of pop lust. New Yorker book critic James Wood, in particular, has such a highbrow reputation that it’s odd to read of his love of Quadrophenia versus, say, The Marriage Of Figaro.
PT: He’s actually one of my good friends and such a warm person—I don’t know where this idea of him as pretentious comes from. He’s very friendly. For a reading in Bryant Park [for Heavy Rotation earlier this month], when he heard John Jeremiah Sullivan’s band Fayaway was playing, he asked if he could join in on hand percussion. Turns out he’s a talented percussionist, too.
D: In your introduction, you mention reading Rolling Stone and then switching to “the much hipper Spin, which introduced me to the sharper, smarty-pants style of music writing that prevails today.” Do you think music journalism is in a relatively bad place? What do you read?
PT: It seems there’s an emphasis on news over criticism. I think criticism’s important, and I wish there were more of it. You see a lot of capsule reviews—a big graphic with the rating and then a paragraph about the verdict.
I read Pitchfork everyday, though I don’t always agree with what they say. I think they have great writers and really impressive coverage—they write about everything, and they give their reviewers some space, which is important.
In the ’80s and ’90s, I read the Voice and Spin, as I say in the introduction. They used to have more literary voices commenting—Mary Gaitskill in the Village Voice, Dennis Cooper in Spin. With this book, I didn’t want to take away from music writers, but I did want to get writers like that talking about music again.
D: What are you listening to now?
PT: I really like Bon Iver, and I think Liam Finn is just fantastic. There’s also a loose group or school of young British folk-pop I really enjoy: Laura Marling, Johnny Flynn. And I like that Red Hot compilation, Dark Was The Night—I think it delineates an aesthetic that’s been developing with The Decemberists, Iron & Wine, bands like that.
D: The Heavy Rotation project is reminiscent in a lot of ways of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. Were you inspired by those books? Are there any good books on music you’d recommend?
PT: I like a lot of the 33 1/3 books, especially Colin Meloy’s book on The Replacements’ Let It Be. I definitely had those books in mind. For an anthology, Kristin Hersh wrote a fantastic essay about Patti Smith’s Horses. Otherwise, in terms of books about music, I like Nick Hornby’s Songbook.
