Mike Tierney

You were a mess, Viola. But you were so hot. "Nineteen year old lips and ninety proof breath." Beautiful and damaged, catnip for Brian Jones.

That was the last decent year in the music business, and the beginning of the end of a fifty year boom cycle. When we meet Brian on the verge of taking his dream job at major label, the gravy train is still rolling. In 2000, the majors set records for sales and profits. Business had quite literally never been better. But they'd also just lost a class action lawsuit for price-fixing. Their recording and marketing costs were out of control and unsustainable. The last Teen Pop wave was crashing on the rocks, like they always do, with nothing compelling surfing in behind it. They’d succeeded in their quest to shut down Napster, but filesharing and piracy were only getting worse. The campaign to sue consumers still seemed like a good idea to a lot of people. And then Apple rolled out a little device called the iPod.

Everything's changing, slowly and quickly. Brian sees a lot of it coming. But that doesn't mean he can do anything about it. It was this moment in time, where you couldn't invent the kind of tension that was building week by week. Oh yeah, and 2001 was pretty much when I started writing it.

Hey, "Chinese Democracy" had its moments. And I can totally relate to poor Axl. There's the crazy perfectionism that takes over. You just want to Make It Awesome. And then hey, who doesn't love a massive string arrangement?

Knowing when more isn't more anymore is so hard. Then there's this thing where, at some point, you know it's not going to be yours anymore. You spend so much time creating this world. Part of you is living in it, at least if you’re doing it right. And then you have to make a clean break and let it go. I still don't think I've wrapped my brain around the fact that I have to just stop. I'm sure I'll be copy editing it in twenty years. That's a big part of what the book is about: when things fade out or stop suddenly. And you've got to fill the hole.

Beyond that, nobody should ever start writing a novel with less of a clue than I had. I had no idea what I was doing, and was too stupid to realize it. Plot development. Character arcs. A major dramatic question. A sense of place. I knew all that stuff was important, but it felt totally beyond me. I wasted a lot of time -- fully five or six years -- building this foundation over a couple of drafts, before I figured out I just needed to blow it up. I can't even look at those now. It mortifies me that I ever showed them to anybody. I'm amazed I didn't just quit.