Letter to a Young Music Critic

The easy answer: if you want your writing to be more passionate, write about things you feel passionate aboutOtherwise it can feel a bit forcedIf you feel neutral or indifferent about something to start off with it, it’s hard to not reproduce that – you can maybe get round it by finding something interesting in the larger phenomenon, or the question of why do people like this...It’s tricky one, passion, because it’s easy to overdo it and slather on the superlatives and "lyrical" descriptionsNothing worse than that sort of SHOUTING LOUD prose mode, or uncontrollably gushing , or overly poeticBecause gushing and superlatives can be quite vague – the praise terms are interchangeable, you could substitute a different artist or record’s name – the tricky bit is being precise in your passionI think the goal is a sort of ‘controlled passion’ or ‘controlled power’ – it’s actually more effective if you ration it out, have a little burst where some kind of excessive feelings cut throughHow you…