Interview: Stephen Malkmus
Stephen Malkmus has somehow turned into a picky Deadhead. “I had cousins who worked for them secondhand, and they tried to get me into the Dead when I was 12,” the 51-year-old Pavement co- founder says with a grin. “I didn’t get it. I was into Devo and thought they sounded slow and uninteresting. But now, I’ll listen to the Dead on Sirius in my car, and I’ll text my drummer a picture of what they’re playing and say, ‘You gotta hear this version.’” He pauses to offer a knowing look. “Of course, they upset me sometimes when they’re not playing a good show.”
It’s a mid-March afternoon and Malkmus is sprawled out in a fishbowl-like room deep within his longtime label Matador’s New York office, wearing a blazer, jeans and a baseball cap that conceals his long, shaggy hair. One wall is decorated with a painting by a member of Parquet Courts. “They sound like Pavement,” he says, casually, as he sips hot black coffee from a mug featuring the album art from The National’s latest release. He’s a bit tired. An avid sports fan, Malkmus took in a Nets game at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center last night—where he met UVA-educated Net Joe Harris—and he’s in the middle of a busy day of interviews promoting his latest release, Sparkle Hard, with his long- running solo group the Jicks. (He’s glad he was in Europe during the NCAA Tournament and missed Virginia’s particularly heartbreaking loss to UMBC.)
The New York winter dryness is also getting to him. “My eyelids are kind of droopy from the office heat,” he says, before closing his eyes, putting his feet up and thinking back on the genesis of his new LP. “There was some talk of having a name producer, someone who would leave an imprint or guarantee that you are going to get high-fidelity songs that sound like today. The people I asked were clever geniuses, but when I played them the demos they said, ‘These sound pretty fully formed; I wouldn’t really be producing it.’”
The Jicks ended up enlisting The Decemberists’ Chris Funk, crafting a song cycle that captures the loose swagger and creative wordplay that Malkmus has been known for since his Pavement days. Yet, they also added in some unexpected touches, including string arrangements, a Kim Gordon cameo and even some Auto-Tune. “I’m into new gadgetry,” Malkmus says with a laugh. “I get bombarded with spam from these companies once I order something, but it can be fun to play with—very much like video games, except you’re making songs. I listen to everything first without Auto-Tune and then, if I’m a little bored by the vocals on a song like ‘Rattler,’ I’ll throw it on there. It’s almost a guilty pleasure—‘Do you want to hear me talking some bullshit or a robotic version of me talking some bullshit?’”
You usually wait a while between albums, but it took you slightly longer than usual to follow up 2014’s Wig Out at Jagbags. Was there a particular reason for the lag?
Once you finish something—a tour, a record, a campaign— there’s a time for self-reflection and assessing, and then you’re on to the next one. I have a lot of records and I can just keep going headfirst but I thought that, while I was writing songs, I also wanted to take a little more time off to just watch and not play—let things come instead of going after them. Also, before the last record, I had been living in Germany since 2011 and moved back to Portland, Ore. about four years ago.
Another thing—and I’m not so proud to talk about this because it wasn’t a huge success—was that I was asked to make the music for this Netflix show Flaked and that took up a bit of my time and was a different way of thinking about music. In the end, I didn’t use any ideas from that on this record, but it still informed it.
This record could have happened earlier, but time goes by. Family vacations happen and, all of a sudden, a year has passed and your children are growing up. I was also working on some music that’s more abstract and electronic that might be interesting to release at some point. [Laughs.]
You mentioned that you spent time living in Germany. What led you overseas?
My wife, Jessica Hutchins, is a fantastic artist and she’d been having some success and was in the [2010] Whitney Biennial. Just like with a band, you have to strike when these things happen. She was also ready to get out of Portland and wanted to move over there. But, after a while, we reluctantly thought, “We have children. We aren’t going to stay in Germany forever.” It’s a typical story.
I’ve never felt completely connected to my local music ecology. I’ve felt part of it, but I’ve never felt like an Oregon musician. And living in Germany only made that more apparent. When you get back to America after living in Europe, you notice these socializing rituals—how people say hello and these pleasantries that are visceral senses. The Germans are very quiet, Americans are very loud. [Laughs.] You come back to America and it can seem like sort of this aural terrorism. But you get used to it just like a factory that has bad smells. Your nose adapts and you can’t even smell it anymore.
There’s a lot of that going on in our lives on all different levels, obviously. It also was nice to be back in Portland; we haven’t been rehearsing a lot as a band or developing an organic language. It’s been a little more goal-oriented, which is not a bad thing, especially when you’re trying to—at least slightly—retool your sound, which I was interested in doing.
Was there a moment you realized you were writing toward a record?
I had these songs in the back of my mind that were a bit more elegant and tourable in a band situation, with guitars and choruses, so I decided to focus on that. But all that other stuff had to happen before this. I was compartmentalizing— no one wants to hear about the old guy whose got all these records that you don’t really wanna hear. So I had to work through all this shit to get back to this relatively focused rock- and-roll thing, which is what the Jicks sound like, for better or worse. I put my demos in a Venn diagram, and these came together.
You worked with Chris Funk for the first time on Sparkle Hard and tried out a number of different approaches on this record. What led you to open up your sound?
I might have wanted a string player on a song or the band might have wanted to have Kim Gordon sing on a song, but I also might have just been like, “Whatever, I’m just gonna put out the song the way it is.” Chris made things happen. So, it was great to have somebody there to push things in another direction—a people person, a networker with good ears. That immediately changed the project. He obviously helped with any down-home, acoustic instruments, but he likes pedals, too. I’m fine with that because I like to pick up a guitar and be a child—just play as if it’s new to me. I don’t practice and I definitely just want it be fresh.
I messed with some of the plug-ins at home on my own dime because, when you’re doing some slightly vulnerable experimentation, sometimes it’s nice to do it alone first. I played around with Auto-Tune and some low vocal effects— the last song “Difficulties” is a string loop that I wasn’t sure anyone was gonna like. I don’t want to waste other people’s time, and you don’t want them to influence you negatively. You have to come to your own decisions about some things and then they can get shot down, but at least you’ve given it some time.
You started mixing in some diverse covers, from Steve Miller to Black Sabbath to Pavement, during your last album cycle. What inspired you to add those songs to your setlist?
I sound like the boss, but my band would do even more covers if I let them. I’m always at my parents’ house on New Year’s Eve, but my band does this party in Portland where they spend a month rehearsing for these decade retrospectives. I haven’t tried to conceptualize it that much, like a band like Yo La Tengo—covers are a fun cherry on top of a gig.
Doing Pavement songs, of course, is fun because people dig it. It’s fun for the band to play those songs. It’s a chance for them to take their foot off the accelerator and just play around and see what reaction we’re gonna get from it. We might have been a little more afraid to play those songs when we first started and were trying to make our own identity. I can imagine Morrissey’s band feels odd when they play Smiths songs.
Do you recognize yourself in your older songs?
I came to an opinion that when you look back that far—for me, I hate to say, it’s been almost 30 years—it’s like just another person or another time on one level. But then, if you look at the evidence—look at the lyrics like you were writing a paper— it’s still the same. I totally recognize that I’m in the same world, except older. It’s the same mental jujitsu that you’re doing. And, in the end, music is a chance for adults to be childish. And, by childish, I don’t mean that it can’t be intense or smart, but it’s like playing around or play-acting—things that adults don’t do in public so much, unless they’re in a band or acting or role-playing in their leisure time. Our work is your play so, hypothetically, we’re lucky to have that playfulness in our music. Now, the lyric writing—that’s hard work. But that’s what people value about music—you thought about it, you went back and worked on a song multiple times and, by banging your head against the wall, you came up with something.
For you, music is a chance to capture your childlike wonder. Where do your kids find that inspiration?
We have to try to be childish and, when we do, we are almost acting out against capitalism or something. But they don’t have to try. Everything is pretty new, whether it’s the most basic comedy channel show or something like Stranger Things. I think Stranger Things has a pretty good message in terms of gender and the story of the Upside Down being the internet or something. My younger one is only 10 so she can’t get that, but Eleven is obviously a relatable hero for a girl around her age. Music wise, she wouldn’t listen to the Stranger Things soundtrack. They’re really into showtunes; they love Hamilton. The younger one really likes that musical from the Oscars [The Greatest Showman]. Other than that, it’s Spotify and I can do some hip-hop light recommendations like SZA. That 13 year old knows [the music] isn’t really age-appropriate and she turns her mind off and the lyrics go by. Kids now have this self- preservation with darkness or sexuality that’s really interesting to me. Maybe its because they’ve grown up with the internet, but younger people will hear these “dings” and they will block those things out almost like with tinfoil. Or maybe they go into their subconscious in some Freudian way.
You’ve also paid homage to the Dead in recent years, both covering the band and nodding to them in your original music.
My story with the Grateful Dead starts in 1977 with one of my cousins giving me American Beauty. I didn’t understand it at all; I thought it was terrible and the album art was ugly. Then in ‘84, in high school, there was a bizarre crossover between punk-rock and the Grateful Dead. I was into punk and being an outsider high-school kid, and I started to associate them with drug-taking. It was about being a 15-or-16-year-old kid who could walk around the parking lot at their shows. I hadn’t taken acid yet, but I smoked weed and learned some of the basic songs.
But I was still a little afraid. Then, I went to college in Charlottesville, Va. and, lo and behold, the scene expanded to not just be high-school freaks and Deadheads in the classic sense, but preppy handsome fraternity guys that dated sorority girls and were into the laid-back feeling of the band and throwing Frisbees and just chilling. I started listening to live tapes, but I got a little angry at the band because of their fans. My mom even went to see them in the late-‘80s.
I basically skipped the Dead in the ‘90s and was into indie-rock and The Fall and, around 2005, I started listening again and getting deeper. I got into psychedelic music—guitar music—and I was so into obscure things and Bay Area bands like Moby Grape, Mad River, The New Tweedy Bros and the Airplane. And I realized that the Airplane or the Grateful Dead were underdogs—they just happened to get popular. I found some friends who were into them, and my wife always liked them—her favorite song is “The Golden Road.” Also, my new drummer Jake Morris grew up in Rochester and is younger than me. He didn’t have punk- rock—Phish is his punk-rock.
Phish introduced a new legion of fans to your music when they covered “Gold Soundz” in 1999 and they have worked with longtime Pavement producer Bryce Goggin.
Jake’s gotten us into Phish. I’ve seen Trey play solo in Florida at this Bonnaroo-type offshoot [Langerado 2007] and I liked it. Evidently, it was during his burned-out phase, but I thought it was really good. He sounded like a wounded Eric Clapton; kinda mean sounding, kinda cold. I liked it more than I like Phish. I wanna go see them—I was looking forward to going to Madison Square Garden when they were doing their bread run [the 2017 Baker’s Dozen run], but I couldn’t make it, unfortunately.
The indie and jam scenes have fused during the past 10 years, especially with the rise of festivals and the increased prominence of pop and hip-hop.
I also recently saw The Travelin’ McCourys, they’re sick. It was interesting to see them play. They weren’t with their dad, Del, and it was interesting to see them temper their set toward some little jammy things. They’re fantastic musicians and totally cool dudes. I got to meet them and took a picture with them. I have an appreciation for that kind of playing, obviously. They had seats for the old bluegrass people in the back, but it’s interesting to me that the bluegrass world has become the jamband world.
This article originally appears in the June 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.
