What's it like to spend a weekend in Atlanta with Killer Mike?

He laughed. He cried. I got sunburnt. Then we had one last moment of true vulnerability in his pickup truck. By Stuart Stubbs

Killer Mike on the shoot for his ‘Motherless’ video, by Matt Swinsky

In April of last year I flew to Atlanta, Georgia, to interview Killer Mike for the cover feature of issue 149 of Loud And Quiet. You can read that finished article on loudandquiet.com, and I’ll try to not repeat too much of it here. This is not a piece about Mike’s album Michael, which I went to speak with him about. Or the history of Southern rap, from Outkast to trap to crunk, which I swatted up on before I got on the plane. This is my memory of meeting the giant man himself, and in particular one moment over the weekend that’s stuck with me, just the two of us sat in his pickup, which didn’t make it into that cover feature.

My favourite journalistic profiles, whoever they’re of, all share one thing: getting across a sense of what it was like to meet that person on that day. What interviewees have to say is of course important (and the official business of being there), but a sense of the person is much more interest…