First, you need to fill your mouth with grapes. Try for 10. 6 would probably do. You can make room by tucking them under your gums, making little crowns of sugar. Once your mouth is loaded, walk up the stairs of your parents’ Park Slope brownstone and into the bathroom. Look in the mirror, into your mahogany eyes. Notice the bags, how they’re shadowed by purple exhaustion. Like any sort of exalted, categorizable figure, the look is part of it too. In collusion with the voice and the unwashed hair, the eyes should suggest a creative complexity. Look at yourself in all your glory: the tormented artist with a gold Amex and ill-fitting jeans. 

Clear your throat of phlegm, swallow the residual chemical coat from the bong hit you took earlier. Flex your angular jaw, make it warm and easily unhookable. Ready? Ok, now say your lines. No, I’ve never listened to Rufus Wainright. You should be able to hear it; a deep, anachronistic tone that flirts with precocity but doesn’t assert it. Say something else, something outlandish like I recorded my album at Guitar Center. A five-year-old played bass. Notice how that sounded like truth.