Bob Dylan came up right away. It was probably my fault. In fact, I know it was, though I hadn’t planned it that way. The general question was whether or not Bob Dylan embodies D.H. Lawrence’s idea that “men are free when they are living in a homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief.” Before we’d even received our Coca-Colas—his Diet, mine Classic—we found ourselves staring deep into the rabbit hole of the Dylan mythos. In a wonderful moment, marked by an admirable even-headedness and a bizarre fit of spontaneous imagination, Cross said, “In those interviews, it’s like Mitt Romney at that first debate, he doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed, so he says something that he knows is completely contradicting what he said before, just to be difficult.” He paused and then added, “But maybe I do that too.”

Leaving aside the curious implication that Dylan prefigured a particularly virulent strain of Republican doublespeak, Cross has a clear and concise point: Dylan doesn’t want to be defined. Definition would be anathema to Dylan’s genius, and lucky for us, he’s always found a way to avoid it. One of the great gifts of his music is its power in reminding us, that we, too, are ultimately inexplicable. Or, as Cross put it, “I think we all operate within a divided self, to some degree. One of the problems as music fans, is that we often see…whether it’s Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, or Kurt Cobain, we put this one self upon them that we think is there in the lyrics, or we think is there in the interviews, or what we imagine—and the real person is far more complicated than any one interpretation could be.”

(I would offer that there are two main types of music fanatics: the idolizer and the seer, and that we each contain these types in our divided selves. The idolizer is blinded by the confusion of the music with the distinct physical being of the artist, and in chasing the ghosts between, loses the living. But the seer sees himself being seen—he hears a true expression of his own existence uttered by another—and distinct being becomes Being. Ecstasy, if you will.)

Of course, I thought none of this at the time. All for the better, I’m sure. If I’d thought even a bit of it, I’d most likely have found myself blathering in a mess of words I would’ve ultimately had to eject myself from with the lame question “What do you think about that?”

Fortunately, Cross went on without prodding. “As a writer you struggle with that, because I have people ask the most asinine questions, and they want to assert…and with Cobain, so much of it goes to his suicide, and what his mental state was before his death. And so many people that want to believe that he didn’t kill himself, they go back and cite that he said in an interview only a month before he killed himself that he’d never been happier. They just can’t take the fact that he said that—and he did say it, it’s in an interview, it’s on tape—but just because he said it, one, doesn’t mean that he believed it, and two, it doesn’t mean that he believed it five seconds later, and certainly the stronger truth is that he killed himself. So there’s evidence that maybe he wasn’t the happiest he’d ever been in his life.”

He had just answered the question I had decided not to ask. I even felt a bit sorry he found himself impelled to bring it up. He’s obviously exasperated by the conspiracy theories. We chatted about the vexing persistence of the conspiracy nuts until, abruptly, he brought up another frustration.

“I wasn’t even supposed to talk about the Heart book until it was officially out. It’s crazy that they were talking about it in all these interviews, but I had a contract that said I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Ann and Nancy didn’t have that contract. They talked about it everywhere, and I’m like, I can’t even tell people what I’m working on.”

At some point we ordered food. Cross decided on the salmon burger with mixed greens. I got the fish tacos. It was a busy lunch at Hills restaurant in the sleepy Richmond Beach neighborhood of Shoreline. There was a considerable din of happy customers, and I wondered if the microcassette recorder would pick up our conversation. The restaurant had an air of fine dining, but there was a down-home quality too. There was a quaintness about the place, a warmth made especially evident by the familiarity between Cross and the owner, Chris, who made the rounds on the floor, offering refills of soda, delivering food, and inquiring about his guest’s satisfaction.

I asked Cross a question that one of my barstool ethnomusicologist friends always poses to fellow music fanatics: what album first made you realize that you love music? He didn’t cite any specific record, instead he rattled off titles from an extensive mental list: Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” Led Zeppelin’s “III,” Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” Neil Young’s “America’s Stars ‘n Bars.” I pressed him for one particular record, and instead he began to talk about one particular song.

“The first song that I ever heard that made me understand music was Carol King’s “So Far Away.” I heard it on the radio of my parent’s car. Back when I was growing up, even having access to a radio wasn’t an easy thing, so sometimes I would just go sit in my parents’ car and turn the car on, and listen to the car radio. We’re talking AM radio. But I remember hearing that, and I was a really young kid, and I hadn’t been in love, I hadn’t had any strong emotions or feelings about things really, and hearing her voice was the first time that I realized music was about emotion.”

Following the mention of emotion, I brought up Mendelssohn’s quote on the matter: “It’s not that music conveys emotions too vague for words, but rather, that it conveys emotions too precise for words.” I asked him if that made sense as a characterization for the difficulty of writing about music, and if so, how he positions himself in relation to that difficulty. As with most of my questions, it seemed to have only a glancing effect. “Mendelssohn made classical music that didn’t have lyrics, so his comment has much less applicability to Ben Gibbard, who in every line he’s creating, it’s very, very consciously thought to be precise, and convey emotion.” It’s a good point, and the argument is there to be had, that in the hierarchy of the arts, where music is superior to poetry, music with lyrics is superior to music alone. But I still felt that the essential question I was trying to ask was escaping me, and I tried posing it again in a number of different ways. I used the phrase “irreducible mystery” until it became embarrassing and quoted Yeats’ line about knowing “the dancer from the dance,” but none of my attempts seemed to take.

Perhaps following a suggestion in the Yeats line, he recalled the famous quip “talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” and then he said, “It’s still what I do.” He attributed the witticism to Joni Mitchell. (It’s also been credited to Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, Frank Zappa, Thelonious Monk and many others.) He also referenced Zappa’s definition of rock journalism: “People who can’t write, doing interviews with people who can’t think, in order to prepare articles for people who can’t read.” In his own way, he was answering my questions. He was answering them on his own terms. Where perhaps I was looking for an aphorism or a fine turn of phrase, he was acknowledging the difficulty, and simply stating that he continues to write despite that difficulty. When I asked him about regrets, he said that he wished he’d started writing books earlier—this from an author of eight volumes.

Cross has an almost stubborn matter-of-factness about him, a sort of hard-earned solemnity in talking about his work. As he pointed out, rather plainly, he hasn’t had a day job in thirty years. When I asked him about his time at the University of Washington, he said, “you learn to be a writer by writing and by reading, not by taking a class. That’s my opinion…of course, I say that until I start teaching a class, and then again, a contradiction.” Yet even when he admits his contradictions, he doesn’t dwell on them. It’s as if he simply doesn’t have the time. While it was obvious that he appreciates the humor in those jibes about music writing, I got the stronger sense that he always has an eye trained on the longer shadow that trails after every joke. “Writing is an attempt to put off our own mortality. It’s a failed attempt. We all die. Writing probably shortens your life. I know a few writers who died at a younger age than me. They died of a variety of things, mostly alcoholism, but you could have put down on their death certificate ‘complications of writing.’”

I inquired about a continuity or discontinuity in the Seattle music scene from the grunge era to the present day. “I hate the word ‘music scene.’ It makes it sound like there’s some sort of cabal of people getting together, and their plan, but I use it in my own writing. If you’re dating the Seattle Golden Era, just like the Silver Age Comic Book Era, I think you’re dating 1988 to 1995. I did live through that. It never was as organized as everybody wants to think. There was just a happenstance that we had a number of groups that were good at that point, but that also had a national following. Right now we have Death Cab for Cutie, Ben Gibbard, Macklemore, Pickwick, The Head and The Heart. We’ve got some incredible talent in the Northwest today.”

I asked him if there was a sort of fallacy about the grunge era, in the same way that it’s been argued that the Renaissance was invented a few centuries after the fact. “Yeah, I agree, there is a fallacy. I meet so many people who say ‘I wish I could have seen Nirvana in 1989’—well, the clubs stunk, there were twenty people there, people smelled, this was not glamour. The first time Nirvana ever played in Seattle—I wasn’t at that show—but you know, there were twenty people there, and none of them came away impressed, and anybody who says they did, they’re lying now—because I know what they said historically at the time, because I talked to them. But what happens is, sometimes the stories become apocryphal, or almost always they become apocryphal.”

At this point, our lunch is almost over and I’m scrambling to ask one last good question. The whole thing has gone too quickly, and I have the sinking sense that my inquiries have spanned the range from vaguely intelligible to simply boring. My fish tacos are long gone, Charles has finished his salmon burger, and he’s got a call to make before the five o’clock hour, east coast time. My last question, about why Seattle doesn’t dance, falls flat. When I suggest that perhaps, after the extremity of the mosh craze, there’s no logical extension for sincere collective response to live music, he simply disagrees with my premise. Moshing, he says, is not dancing. But then, maybe he’s just being difficult.