ht: Andrew Luck

Tonight the Faint are playing at the TK with Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. There's a not entirely unkind preview of the show in this week's Up & Comings. Originally, I had planned to run an interview with the Faint's frontman Todd Fink, only the interview didn't really go so well. Fink had just woken up on a day off from touring, and he was speaking to me via cell phone from a bridge in Shrieveport, La. (A side note: phone interviews always, always suck, the stilted, subtlety-killing awkwardness of a phone conversation multiplied by the awkwardness of interrogating a stranger.) Anyway, mayne Fink was groggy, maybe my questions were asinine, maybe both, buthis responses were terse and reserved ("I don't know...it's hard to talk about") in a way that I will now assume is typical of Omahans. Suffice to say, it was not going so well.

And then something happened that made it--for me at least--even worse. I realized I recognized Fink's voice from somewhere. Not his singing voice, of course--I was familiar with that from the Faint's albums and from seeing them live--but his speaking voice. It was familiar; I felt like maybe I'd interviewed him before or something. And then I placed it: I recognized Fink's speaking voice from the Bright Eyes song "An Attempt to Tip the Scales" on Fevers & Mirrors, which includes a fake radio station interview in which Fink pretends to be Conor Oberst being interviewed by an absurdly incompetent radio station DJ. That interview is hilariously, intentionally bad--the radio station DJ's questions are somehow both kind of dim and uncomfortably over-involved (attempting to ascribe themes and meanings to the record, for instance), and Fink's dodgy, insane answers as Oberst perfectly sent-up the heartthrob's reputation as a melodramatic emo crybaby. (This was also the moment I fell somewhat in love with Bright Eyes, knowing that he was happy to laugh at his own schtick.)

As soon as the recognition hit me, I started worrying that the real interview I was still conducting was going just as badly as that fake interview, only, you know, for real. I wondered if it was reminding Fink of that interview, too. Obviously, the bad band interview is common enough that it was worth parodying on that record; maybe he's had tons of interviews that bad. Things went downhill from there.

Anyway, I wanted to give the show a little extra shine, because the Faint's two best albums, Blank Wave Arcade and Danse Macabre kill, and they're still an enjoyable live act--but my interview? Fail.