I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently.

At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. Yet writers are never counseled against attempting to evoke paintings or smells or faces or feelings or buildings or the nonmelodic sounds of jackhammers, thunder, or snoring. What was so elusive about music that it couldn’t be captured by words?

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PHIL ELVERUM: Not really. Maybe. My family includes a lot of teachers. Not university professors, not super-scholars, but middle-school teachers. We read books. It was more like there was an awareness that there was a poet named Walt Whitman that I was named after, but, like, no big whoop. It’s not like I was read Leaves of Grass at bedtime or anything. But Walt Whitman is the voice that helped me find an acceptable version of “American Pride.” It was nice to realize that I wanted to live here and I am of this culture and it’s OK and we have a wild, fresh heritage that is tied to this amazing continent and that it doesn’t have to be totally fucked and destructive to be “proud” of being “American.”

BUN B: Well, the first thing I do is I try to listen to whatever rapping is already on the track. I listen for cadence and melody to see how the track’s already been written, and to make sure that whatever flow or flows I decide to run with, or patterns or melodies that I decide to put into the song, that they’re not already in there. Then I try to see if there’s a different part of the subject matter that I can talk about. If there isn’t, I try to see if I can analogize it, break it down, flip it another way. If that can’t be done, the best thing I can do is pretty much out-rap the guy. And when I say out-rap the guy—say, if he uses ten syllables in a line, I’m going to use fifteen. If he uses fifteen, I’m going to use twenty, twenty-five. If he’s rhyming two or three words within two bars, I’m going to rhyme four or five words in two bars. I’m going to out-skill you.

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