It’s Thursday, and that means the new issue of Las Vegas Weekly has hit the racks around Vegas (and the ol’ intertubes). It looks like my article about Hal Savar’s Acoustic Soul is in there.  This was another situation where I had to cut a tremendous amount of meat from the story.

The piece was originally pitched as “an acoustic cover band’s struggle to break itself away from the ghetto pigeonhole of coverbandland.” But after starting work on the story, I realized it would never fit into 500 words. Hell, I couldn’t fit a profile of the band framed around one night’s show into 500 words. I had to leave out the story of the man who tipped the band $100 to stop playing Johnny Cash, as well as Hal’s origin story of the song veto process. And everything else: The band’s origins, more comments from the audience, etc.

This happens quite a lot. I did a 20-minute interview with Swedish indie-pop singer Lykke Li just to get one quote for a Coachella preview I wrote for Six Degrees, and never did manage to re-sell the rest of the interview. I probably have hundreds of pages of similarly unused interview notes with bands, artists, writers, architects and other subjects collected from these 15 years in journalism. One day I need to transcribe and organize these scraps and create a comprehensive archive. Who knows? Maybe someone will actually want to read them.

In other journalistic news, I’ve started getting back on track (somewhat) with my fine arts coverage at Examiner.com. If you haven’t subscribed yet, I highly recommend doing so if you have any interest in Las Vegas-spawned arts. If not, um … forget it, I guess.