Stephen Perry conducts an in-depth interview with DP for CIUT’s Equalizing x Distort program. Listen to the whole EXD episode here or download the full 2-hour interview here.
Illustration by Rik Emmett.

“SP: Hi Don. Can you tell me about the title of your new book, Rough Description: Love Letters and Ghost Stories from a Life in Music?

DP: Honestly, the title was really hard for me to come up with which is ridiculous because I have an ongoing list of ideas that I keep for song titles, or just anything that I think of or hear, or mishear. I referred to it thinking there has to be a title in here and there wasn’t. I felt like the title was the hardest thing for me to do because there’s so much pressure about it representing everything. I cover a lot of different topics. I read the book through twice or three times specifically looking for… there’s got to be some words pairs or something that says something to me and that’s exactly what happened. When I saw that pair of words - Rough Description - I though yeah, that sounds like what I’m doing. Rough Description has this sort of allusion to rough trade, not the band, partly the record label, partly for it being a euphemism for a male hustler, so I like the sort of vague gay sexual connotation about it, and it also is an incomplete story as any kind of social history can be. I’m describing to you as best as I can some of the situations and scenarios that happened. Nothing is ever going to be complete in the telling of any story, as any story about any persons life, or scene, or experience can be because there’s always more things to add to it. “