She Brings Three Questions to Every Interview. They’re Not the Ones You’d Expect.

Alicia Matthew is not one of those artists who treats an interview like a courtroom deposition. She doesn’t arrive with a binder of approved anecdotes or a publicist mouthing “wrap it up” from the corner. But she does prepare. Her version of prep just happens to look like a notebook page with three questions on it—questions she writes herself, for the interviewer, whether or not anyone ever asks them.

The practice is simple enough that it sounds almost too obvious. Before a press day, Matthew sits down and writes the three questions she wishes she’d be asked about whatever she’s promoting, thinking through, or still figuring out. Not softballs. Not gotchas. The questions that would actually move a conversation somewhere interesting.

“It started because I was tired of giving the same five answers,” she says. “And then I realized the sameness wasn’t only on their side. If I wanted a different conversation, I had to know what a different conversation would even sound like.”

The ritual starts with a blank page

Matthew’s pre-interview routine is deliberately low-tech. No spreadsheet, no media-training deck. She uses a plain notebook—the same kind she carries on tour—and blocks out twenty minutes. The first ten are for writing. The second ten are for deciding what she will not say.

That second part matters just as much as the first. The three questions are not a script she tries to steer every interviewer toward. They’re more like a compass. If the conversation drifts toward familiar territory, she can use one of the questions as a bridge. If an interviewer asks something better than what she wrote, great. She’ll take it.

“The goal isn’t to hijack the interview,” she says. “The goal is to remember what I actually wanted to talk about before I got nervous and defaulted to the story I’ve already told forty times.”

What the three questions actually do

Broadly, Matthew’s three questions tend to fall into three lanes: one about the work, one about the cost of the work, and one about the person on the other side of the microphone—the listener, the reader, the fan who will encounter the finished piece later.

The work question is usually the easiest to answer and the hardest to answer well. It’s the “what are you making and why this way?” question, but sharper. Matthew says she tries to write the version she’d want to read in a profile, not the version that fits neatly into a headline.

The cost question is trickier. It might be about time, money, confidence, or the small indignities of making something public. Matthew doesn’t answer it in every interview, and she doesn’t expect to. But writing it down forces her to decide, in advance, how much of that story she’s willing to share on any given day.

The third lane is the one she finds most useful. “I try to remember that an interview isn’t just for me,” she says. “Someone is going to read it or hear it while they’re doing dishes or commuting. What would make it worth their time?” That question doesn’t always make it into the conversation, but it changes how she answers everything else.

The line between open and overexposed

Matthew is candid without being confessional. She’ll talk about the mechanics of a hard week. She’ll admit when a song isn’t finished. She won’t turn every press stop into a therapy session, and she’s learned that the difference between the two is usually a matter of editing, not honesty.

The three-question ritual helps her find that line before she’s in the room. By writing down what she wants to discuss, she can also see what she doesn’t. Some questions get saved for later—a different interviewer, a different project, a different year. Some never get answered publicly at all, and that’s fine.

“I used to think being good at press meant having an answer for everything,” she says. “Now I think it means knowing which answers are mine to give.”

That boundary isn’t defensive. It’s practical. Matthew points out that interviews are a weird kind of performance: intimate in tone, public in scale, and usually happening before she’s had time to process whatever she’s being asked about. The notebook page is a way of catching her breath before the recorder starts.

Why better interviews start before the recorder

The result, she says, is not a more controlled interview. If anything, it’s a looser one. When Matthew isn’t scrambling to remember what she wanted to say, she can listen better. She can follow a tangent. She can give a real answer instead of a polished one.

Interviewers have noticed. Several have mentioned that Matthew tends to volunteer the kind of detail that usually has to be pulled out of someone—the small, specific stuff that makes a profile feel human. She credits the notebook, at least partly. Not because it supplies better material, but because it quiets the part of her brain that wants to recite.

“There’s a version of preparation that makes you stiffer,” she says. “This isn’t that. This is more like warming up before a show. You’re not planning every note. You’re just getting your hands ready.”

For anyone who dreads press days—or job interviews, or hard conversations with family—Matthew’s practice is easy to borrow. Write three questions you wish someone would ask. Then decide which ones you’ll answer, which ones you’ll save, and which ones you’ll use to steer the conversation somewhere more useful.

It won’t guarantee a great interview. But it might guarantee a more honest one. And in Matthew’s case, that’s usually the point.