Neil Strauss, interviewed by Andrew McMillen:

Firstly, I want to talk about the final chapter of the book [Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead], and the epilogue. I thought it was a very touching note to end on; it wrapped everything up nicely. It made me wonder; was that section about Paul Nelson always going to close the book?

No. I don’t think any book is ever planned. It always sort of just happens. I guess I knew I wanted the last section to be about family and mortality, and I felt I put so much heart and time into the Paul Nelson piece, it seems like a fitting epilogue for the book. And it rolled so nicely into the actual epilogue. I knew that each section was going to have a theme, and the last section was really going to look at mortality around different angles, in a parallex way. That got more appropriate there. It just sort of landed there.

I just received a copy of Strauss’s book, and may have more to say about it at some point. It’s not normally the sort of book I gravitate towards (hard to explain why, and I’m not being dismissive, just noting that I am very limited in my scope in some regards when it comes to music books), but I certainly look forward to the Nelson chapter, which Steven Ward and Kevin Avery both mentioned in our earlier podcast.