So you shouldn't really flatter yourself that they want to be your buddy. They don't. Generally. They want you for some reason or other, and you just have to fend that off all the time. ↗
And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it. ↗
And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture. ↗
But music raises a lot of issues. Music is something that matters to people a lot, and they put a lot of passion into it. And I think when you have an area like that, you're gonna find a lot of issues coming up. ↗
It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them. ↗
Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor. ↗