Unprepared for Interview

I like to think that I do a pretty good job of prep work before interviewing a band. I dig around on their Web site, read over bios and press releases, listen to the record a few times and occasionally troll message boards looking for recent rumors about, and online feuds with the band.

If the group is willing to give up 20-30 minutes of their time I can at least make sure I've done my homework. However, I do have a full time job that has nothing to do with interviewing bands, and a 3 month old and wife at home, so every now and then I forget that I have an interview lined until the phone rings and a 212 or 310 area code pops up on caller id.

Over the years I have learned to stall for a few minutes while I get online and frantically pull up the band's MySpace page, bio or Wikipedia entry.

Here's a quick list of good stalling questions I have started to collect (please feel free to toss out more in the comments section if you can think of them, because I probably have an interview tonight that I've already forgotten about):

• Tell me about the new album - is there a theme tying together the songs? Classic stall. Unless it's The Who's Tommy or Green Day's American Idiot, who gives a shit? Certainly not the person reading these interviews, but it never fails to illicit at least a three minute response. Plenty of time to Google the band and come up with a couple of questions.

• Any good road stories from the current tour? This one buys you about five minutes, easily. The answer, though certainly interesting to the person telling it, is almost always incoherent, rambling and never quite as funny as he/she thinks it is. Kind of like listening to someone describe a dream they just had.

• How did the band first get together? ... Or the reason why I always skip the first paragraph of any band bio. The answer is either: We all went to school together, but weren't really friends at the time; We played in different bands around the scene for years; or I placed an ad in [insert local alternative weekly]. Unless you found your bass player because your mom brought him home from a bar one night, the story is never really that interesting.

• What inspired the album cover? I have NEVER once printed this response in an interview, but it also never fails to bring about an extremely detailed answer filled with vague descriptions of symbolism and other weird shit that only makes sense if you're stoned.

Any others I should add to the repertoire?