July 8, 2026

Greg Dulli, few years ago, talked about the title of the Afghan Whigs album How Do You Burn?. Mark Lanegan came up with the phrase during a session. “I think it just kind of popped out of his mouth,” Dulli says, and he asked to use it on the spot. His explanation of what it means: “It basically means what turns you on. What makes you go? What turns your crank? It’s almost like a jazzman term.”

I gave a talk at Università Cattolica a few weeks ago, and one point I kept coming back to was close to this. When you’re picking a project, or deciding who to work with, the question that matters most isn’t whether it looks good on paper. It’s whether it burns, whether it’s the kind of thing that makes you go.

Plenty of projects are reasonable. The scope is clear, the people involved are competent, nothing is obviously wrong. But reasonable isn’t the same as alive. I’ve worked on things that were well-organized and left me flat, and on messier things that kept me up figuring out the next step because I actually wanted to know the answer. The second kind is rarer, and it’s worth selecting for directly instead of assuming it shows up on its own once everything else is in order.

Dulli got the phrase as a hand-me-down from Lanegan, half-joking that “it’s not stealing when they give it to you.” I’m borrowing it the same way, for a different context: as a question to ask before saying yes to a project, a collaboration, or a room.