CATE PISARONI AND CRAIG TERRY

·1 hr 37 min·5 clips

The guests turn Clay Hilly’s bad reviews into material and joke about a 'voice like a meat slicer.'

It starts in Paris, naturally. The serious talk takes its time arriving, because first there are levels to check, guests to tease, and friendships to make part of the recording. The delay is part of the fun. After almost five years, Kate Pizzaroni and Craig Terry are finally at the table, and the mood stays loose, fond, and happily unpolished. Nobody is trying to turn this into a formal arts panel. That makes the turn into criticism and reviews feel sharper. Reviews are where things get tender. Performers can read a review through whatever emotion they carried into the room that day, which already makes the whole thing unstable. Fans complicate it too. Sometimes they send singers terrible reviews as if they were doing them a favor, and suddenly criticism becomes this odd little mirror. The bigger point is blunt enough: music journalism is still worth having. The art form needs people writing about it, and the guests clearly miss when that writing felt careful. But one adjective does not get the job done. A four-hour or three-hour performance cannot be waved away as threadbare, compelling, or powerful and then treated as understood. The audience matters. The host says almost any criticism would be easier to take if the reviewer admitted what the audience actually did. If people were on their feet screaming, pretending the room was dead starts to feel crooked. By then, the trust problem is out in the open. These are artists who still want criticism, just not from writers who seem to have missed the show in front of them. Then the conversation loosens again, landing on singers as a funny, generous tribe: story people, welcoming people, and maybe a little less dazzled by influencer numbers than by a smaller following that feels real.

As heard by us

A loose Paris sit-down that turns into a sharp defense of criticism with context.

The Paris sit-down with Craig Terry and Kate Pizzaroni opens in a bit of friendly chaos, then settles into a clear case for music criticism that does more than hand out a quick adjective.

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Why you'd press play

Paris banter opens into a sharp, useful argument about how criticism should work.

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