The VF Interview: Stephen Malkmus on Super Groups, Pseudo Documentaries, and Geriatric Guitar Gods

When I first see Stephen Malkmus, he’s lounging on a park bench in Chicago, gangly and relaxed in a Japanese Racketto t-shirt, tan Ellese shorts, and well-worn Adidas sneakers, looking like a country-club tennis pro from the 1980s. Thirty years after “Cut My Hair” hit MTV and very nearly but didn’t quite vault his band Pavement to Nirvana-like success, he remains boyish and vaguely collegiate despite the creases in his eyes and silver shag under his baseball cap.

The more things change, it seems, the more Stephen Malkmus remains the effortlessly cool slacker prince.

It’s a little more complicated, of course. He’s 58 now. In July, Malkmus moved to Chicago from Portland, where he’s lived for the last 23 years. His wife Jessica Jackson Hutchins, a visual artist, landed a new teaching job here. They’ve been raising two daughters, one now in college, while Malkmus churned out consistently interesting work with his second band, The Jicks, and a solo album without them, and conducted a couple of celebrated Pavement reunion tours.

But he’s been living a relatively insular life. “I see people when I come to town, but I have less relation with my cohort than some people,” he says. “It’s not like I’m private or anything, but I don’t drink that much anymore. I’m kind of an introvert.”

While Pavement is on an indefinite break from the reunion tour–a critical success that attracted a new generation of fans who made 1999’s “Harness Your Hopes” an unlikely viral TikTok hit–he was now preparing to launch a supergroup, the Hard Quartet, with veterans of the 90s indie rock scene: Matt Sweeney of Chavez; Emmett Kelly of Superwolf; and Jim White of The Dirty Three. The Hard Quartet is both inside and outside Malkmus’s comfort zone. Unlike with Pavement, he’s not necessarily the leader; it’s the brainchild of Sweeney. But the music, a double album’s-worth, is still thoroughbred indie rock–raw, fuzzy, chiming, lyrically-obscure guitar jams, ready made for a certain kind of Gen-X-er whose taste and outlook was formed in gentler, slacker times. It’s both a fresh start and a return to form for Malkmus, who never said goodnight to the rock and roll era despite singing so in 1995 (“Filmore Jive”).

Malkmus is having a moment. Along with the Hard Quartet album, there’s a cheeky demi-documentary about Pavement, called Pavements, directed by Alex Ross Perry, which screened at the New York Film Festival on October 2. When Pavement did its sold-out run of shows at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre in 2022, Perry curated a semi-fictional popup “Pavement Museum” in Tribeca and later staged a Pavement musical for the film. Like the other “moments” Malkmus has had over the years–the brush with MTV fame in 1994, the viral TikTok hit in 2020–he’s embracing this hiccup of fresh attention with a certain coy diffidence. A recent one-off Pavement reunion show in New York, possibly their last for a long, long time was a shambolic mess that seemed designed to flummox fans. And Malkmus has highly conflicted feelings about the Pavements film. But such is the Malkmus way. His artful dodge is his calling card and his meal ticket. And fans wouldn’t want it any other way.

The following Q&A was taken from a pair of two-hour interviews, the second of which was conducted over the telephone while Malkmus was getting the key fob for his Volkswagen Golf AllTrack replaced at the dealership after accidentally dropping it into the toilet. “The less said about that the better,” he said. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Vanity Fair: Full disclosure, you and I met 20-odd years ago. We had dinner in Tribeca for an interview. You had a wacky girlfriend with you.

Oh yeah, the introduction of the Jicks or something. In New York, we had our first show. And I had the “Who the Fuck is Stephen Malkmus?” t-shirt.

I still have mine. [It was based on the iconic “Who the Fuck Is Keith Richards?” t-shirt, worn by Keith Richards.]

Well, it’s probably worth something. And then I got to pretend I was Keith Richards in the video for the Hard Quartet. So it’s all kind of coming full circle. Plus, that’s my wife [in the video], who was just obsessed with him and Anita Pallenberg when she was a teenager.

She wants to be the Anita to your Keith.

Yeah. I mean, she carried Tattoo You around school in eighth grade.

When I profiled Beto O’Rourke a few years ago, he told me about his years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the mid-90s. He hung out at Mugs on Bedford Avenue. I told him I used to see Stephen Malkmus down there.

Playing Fishtales, yeah. I could be mistaken for [Beto] instead of Tony Hawk by somebody that didn’t pay much attention. What happened to him? Where is he, just working?

He’s registering voters in Texas.

That’s good. Yeah, that’s why I just don’t understand Democratic politics. That guy seems very electable to me. In 2020, I was still into Bernie and then all of a sudden, this amorphous entity, which was Joe Biden, that seemed to have no center or no power—and that was it. I don’t understand it at all.

Democrats didn’t want to take any risks against Donald Trump.

I guess. But it just shows how you can be in your own bubble and not know what the hell’s going on. My daughter saw Hunter Biden at a party. David Blaine was there, too. Maybe I shouldn’t say too much. It was in California and it was in the neighborhood that she was working in. She’s 19. She sent a picture of Hunter Biden.

I relate to that guy. He seems like he’s alright. I mean, I have lots of friends from the New York scene of the 90s, like Rob Bingham, that don’t seem too far away from him. And Rob was a great friend of mine. [Bingham, who died of a heroin overdose at 33, was heir to a Kentucky newspaper fortune and co-founded the literary journal Open City with Tom Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck.]

How long have you known Matt Sweeney?

I knew his ex-wife, who is married to J. Mascis now. I knew Matt at the end of the Max Fish era, just hanging out. He was basically one of the mayors of that place as far as I’m concerned. I knew if I wanted to see him during a certain five years, I could probably show up at Max Fish at one in the morning. That was a fun place.

I got to know Matt even better after I left [New York]. I realized we had more in common because he was friends with David Berman. When I first met him, I might have thought he was a hard rocker, like maybe he’s into metal or Smashing Pumpkins. That would have been my impression, just because he had long dreadlocks at that time. But then I realized he was in Endless Boogie with my friends, and he likes songwriting. To paraphrase, we have similar tastes.

When was the first time the four members of the Hard Quartet were in the same room playing together?

May of last year was the first time we rehearsed, played together. Matt played on one of my records called Traditional Techniques. And that was really fruitful and, like, risky. It’s all performed live, the vocals, too, and you need a certain amount of cojónes to do it well, and that worked well. And then we were like, “Let’s do it again someday.” And then the pandemic hit.

Matt had in his mind these guys that he plays with. He’s actually played with them. I have toured with Jim White from Dirty Three and I’ve watched Emmett play. [Emmett] was the most wild card to me because I don’t get out as much as some people. In a way, those guys are all in a certain cohort, which I’m also part of, which is like Drag City, Matador, those type of players. And Matt is related that, too. But Matt goes wider, into classic rock. He’s bros with Iggy Pop and played on Neil Diamond records. He’ll do anything. Run The Jewels. So he’s the nexus, he kind of holds it together, because I wouldn’t have asked those guys, I’m too shy. And I’m the one with kids and stuff, too. I’m just grateful that he arranged it.

Who named the band?

Matt, I would say. I had some names. I thought Quartet was a good idea, because we’re all individuals that have a name, and it’s kind of jazzy, too. So I was like, maybe something Quartet. Something confident and forceful. When I hear “hard,” I think of down there a little bit. Matt was like, “I don’t think that at all.” And neither did his girlfriend, so I just dropped that. Maybe I’m just a pervert or something. It’s hard to make a name for a band at our age. Not that it matters that much, you can poke holes in just about anything.

What was the most surprising thing playing with new people?

I guess it was just that everyone’s sweet, you know, and there’s just no …

Bullshit.

Not much. I mean, there’s bad attitudes probably in there somewhere, just from being beaten down by this game, you know? It will bring you down. It’s that AC/DC song: It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. I mean, that’s just one of the best songs because of how true it is. Some people stumble upon it brilliantly, or luckily, some viral hit, whether it’s Beck or Juice Wrld or something, when they’re young. But really it’s hard work and there’s fucked up people in it.

Have you heard of this new book called Band People by Franz Nicolay? He’s in the Hold Steady. It’s about the livelihoods of modern indie rock bands and one chapter is about democracy versus dictatorship in bands. Bands need a leader, even if some members are going to resent it on some level. I wondered if part of your interest in a supergroup was not having to be the leader of it?

I’ve delegated authority since 1997. It’s always been like a fabrique where people—[in Pavement] I did what I think is the fun stuff, which is like cover art and songwriting, and then other people did all this other shit that you have to do, whether it’s t-shirts or video or touring and accounts, and, like, glad-handing—that should be put in a nicer way—just showing up, you know? And that worked for us for a long time, because sometimes I’m not an asset in social situations [laughs]. Same with the Jicks.

Gradually music was giving more and more, and getting tired of your own voice and realizing that even when you think you did everything, someone was letting you do everything and that was part of why it was good. You know? There’s use in that, the situation you were in with people. It wasn’t some Boomer-ish thing where the creation was all done together in a flash, you know?

Now it’s really easy going. You’re edging towards death, you don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s pathetic if you do, really.

The album is classic indie rock in a way that feels familiar, like an old sweater. And it sounds like your personalities are there, too, in the room.

Yeah, it’s a jazz-style recording. It’s very spartan. You know, Matt [who produced the album] compares it to Rudy Van Gelder. He’s a New Jersey jazz producer.

Some people are gonna think it’s muddy sounding or something, or just unfinished. But we were like, this is just us playing and maybe it’s a little brutal for some people. I mean, Red Hot Chili Peppers tried to do the same thing but with even more compression, sort of dry and—not that we’re compared to them. I’m just saying it’s that kind of sound.

Yeah, it sounds just like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Yeah, right. [laughs]

Sidebar: Is it true that you don’t actually like jazz?

No, I like jazz. I have a lot of jazz records. I mean, I don’t listen to them much. I like Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, Our Man in Jazz. I like certain records. I mean, if I turn it on to the jazz radio station, it just sounds like jazz, just like it does to a young person who hears our rock music. They’re like, “Oh, that’s just rock music.” They probably don’t determine the difference in our [music] and, like, Grand Funk Railroad. Unfortunately.

I was driving around with my teenagers and out of the blue one of them plays “Harness Your Hopes” and I look over and the kids are singing along to every single lyric. I had a moment of shock.

I know. That happens to a lot of older Gen-X dads. It’s happened with my friends.

They have no context for liking the band, but they like that song. How did that happen?

I didn’t know what happened. I heard the song in a gluten-free bakery in Portland in 2015, when it first got put on the [Spotify] playlist. It wasn’t on TikTok yet. And so I thought that was weird. But I was also naive enough to think that that was a fan that was just playing their own music instead of all the restaurants paying by the month for a Spotify playlist.

They say that it was algorithmically made, but I think [Spotify] have their meetings and somebody has to decide to listen to some of the songs and, okay, maybe he was a Pavement fan, I have no idea. But then it took a life of its own. And then my daughter, who’s really into TikTok, would tell me about it, and then I wouldn’t really understand. I assumed it was a micro thing. But it wasn’t.

It must feel weird to get recontextualized like that.

Weird stuff happens. It’s always cool. Even this morning, I was looking at YouTube and it was recommending me things, because I watched the video of the Hard Quartet and it had this song—I did the soundtrack for this TV show called Flake that starred Will Arnett. It was 2015, it was on Netflix, it was not really a success. It was about a privileged white man in Venice, California, stumbling around having hot girlfriends just falling into his bed all the time. But he’s depressed. It’s Will Arnett, he’s famous, but it just didn’t connect. So I made all the music for it.

And there was one song that I did and now it’s just called, like, the “Will Arnett Bottoms Out Song” or something. It’s an instrumental, 30 seconds, but people found it on YouTube and are like, “What is that song? I just love this song.” The song connected in a weird way. They don’t even know who I am. And now I want to release that song! What can I do with this? Because “Harness Your Hopes” went pretty well.

What’s the impact on your bottom line?

There’s hypothetically money when you make it to that level, like Drake, anyone that’s got 128 million streams, if it’s Gold or Platinum, there is money. But it’s not as much as it should be, and you have to split half with the label, and some with the publisher, maybe chip in a little to your band. You’re left with a couple months rent, you know? For all that. It’s kind of sad.

When my kids hear a song, they don’t care about the artist. They just listen for a week and go on to the next thing. But after “Harness,” one of my daughters pulled up Slanted and Enchanted and the next thing I know she’s playing “Here.”

Aw, sweet one.

I told her I can sing every single lyric to this and you have no earthly idea what this song means to people my age. That surprised her.

It’s probably some subconscious osmosis. One of my daughters is making music now and she was sending me some of her demos, and I was like, this kind of sounds like a song that you don’t even know that I played. Or this reminds me of the vibe of this really obscure song. So, there’s definitely, whatever it’s called, the Jungian effect. The sound is there and they pick it up, right? That’s when you have to strike while the iron’s hot because the next generation is not going to care.

I attended those Pavement reunion shows at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn in 2022. I was surprised at how people were jumping up and down and singing along. That is so not how it was in the 1990s, when people just faintly nodded their heads with ironic detachment. My friend David Gilbert and I talked about that and he sent me a text this morning: “Did the irony resolve into something almost strangely earnest in the songs after all these years? Did the songs themselves grow up without ever changing?”

Yeah, maybe. There’s some of that. I mean, I wasn’t only acting cool with the irony. I just think [in the 1990s], you took it for granted when there was just a lot of bands. It was a $15 show and there was probably going to be another one around the corner. Sonic Youth or Sebadoh were gonna play.

But now this is a rare moment and it’s not gonna be here again. Or these guys could die or they could just not bother. You have a relationship with the music over all this time. And your own life has taken its turns. Of course, there’s young people there that are psyched, but the spine of the thing is people that you know who are like, “What did my life mean? What does it all mean? And in retrospect, this means a lot. Yeah, I’m psyched.”

I wondered if it was true for you on the other side, too, on the stage.

Yes, because it does mean something. I mean, the feedback you get and all the band members and the whole package. It didn’t necessarily have to work out that way. It’s like everybody plays a part, not just the music. You could play a reunion tour and it could go bad, and you wouldn’t feel that, but this worked out. It worked out because everyone was fit and up for it. The right time, I think. There was a reunion of Pavement in 2010. That was good, too, but this one was better.

To use the expression of the times, there was a vibe.

There’s a vibe. And the younger people that were into it were—it was pan-generational in a certain way, which is nice.

For me, it felt like a high school reunion of people who were in New York in 1995. Like a demographic solar eclipse.

That’s true, yeah. The old heads.

Somebody said to me, “I felt like I was in a funhouse mirror and everywhere I looked there was a different version of myself: a tall version, a fat version, a skinny version…”

Right? That’s how I feel when I look out, too, for better or worse.

And I mean, people like to see really geriatric people play their guitars and stuff. They actually seem to like it. So that’s surprising to me and I’m grateful about it, because I see some of these reunions, like AC/DC. Like, whoa, holy shit, people are paying so much for this.

When we played in Seattle, Metallica was playing in town for two nights. And it’s Labor Day, the hotels are jacked up, $700 a night to stay in these shitty hotels. And I don’t know how much Metallica costs, but people flew from Florida, they’re so psyched. They’ve just been totally abused by capitalism, playing on their feelings, their love of something, with all these predatory co-businesses, let alone Metallica, that’s fine, Ticketmaster—and they’re fucking psyched.

I rarely see people so psyched, which is pretty nice. Really enjoying your leisure, I just like to see that.

I must say, I think you guys are better now than you were in the 1990s. Tighter.

Yeah, we were on this tour. I give that to Steve [West] the drummer, besides me. He really had something to prove. He lives out in the woods of Virginia. He has a farm, but he’s not working much. He’s drumming a lot. That’s all he likes to do. He would practice behind stage. A lot of bands have drum kits in the back and they like to warm up, but I’ve never been in a band that did that. He would just be back there listening to the records, practicing. So he was metronomic. And there was really nothing I had to say.

Everyone played real good, for sure. Scott [Kannberg], too. On this tour, I had Scott learn some more parts that are on the albums that he had never played. And we had the keyboard, which, sometimes the sound wasn’t turned up enough but it was there, and [keyboardist Rebecca Cole] held the egos, the fragile egos of the back line in check. She was a good personality match for the rest of the band, me included. It was my idea to hire her, and everyone really liked it.

You did an interview with Matt Sweeney for Matador’s Revisionist History podcast and I was struck by your confession of how insecure you felt when Pavement first started. Because Sonic Youth and that whole scene was so monumentally cool and intimidating and I guess you were intimidated, too. But to me, you seemed cool and intimidating.

Everybody’s precarious, you know. The art world’s that way. Maybe that’s why Sonic Youth was tailor-made to be the leaders. You just don’t know where you stand. You just see the image, you don’t know people, they have tough exteriors. I think everyone can’t believe their luck that they actually get to make music, people from my generation. Kids now seem to take it more as, not a birthright, but something you can do, just throwing stuff right down on SoundCloud, or the cheapness of recording. But we came from the time of big rock stars and I wasn’t a nepo baby. I didn’t have any family in entertainment, so it just didn’t seem like it would ever be possible. So I think that plays into it. Some imposter syndrome going on.

At the time, nobody making indie rock believed they could be famous making this music that was raw and almost indecipherable on purpose.

Yeah, pretty much, although Nirvana kind of blew the doors off that. I remember Pavement played at Roseland. That was the moment when I was sort of like, holy shit, we still don’t really know how to play and we have no crew and no manager and no backdrop, and I’m just wearing the same shitty clothes. I was like, this is getting pretty weird. So for me, that was a time I thought was crazy. Obviously it was different for a band like Nirvana, selling six million records in five minutes. But everyone has their moments.

People still believed there could be a generational figure in rock and roll, a Dylan, an “it” band. I remember seeing you guys at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill in North Carolina in 1994, the Crooked Rain tour, and thinking, “This is the guy.” Because I wasn’t a fan of Nirvana. I didn’t relate to it.

I wasn’t so much either. But yeah, I dig the songs. Obviously, now. Might have been competitive with it or whatever.

In retrospect, you guys were a more considered, well-adjusted version of that generational voice.

I mean, we were maybe just skeptical of that possibility. And, you know, not ready to be the president. It’s okay to be governor of Rhode Island. We were ready for that.

That is the most Stephen Malkmus answer ever. Did you enjoy playing in Pavement more this time than the original times in the 1990s?

I enjoyed it more than the first reunion. But the original times, I mean, there’s plenty of highs that would never be achieved now, because it’s the first time.

Describe one that sticks out in your mind.

There’s a lot in England and Japan. It’s more like travel things, seeing the world. Australia. Or, like, some of these British shows when we first started were really off the hook, just classic stuff that could be in a documentary, even if you’re going to recreate it. Like the five young boys backstage before they go out to this London crowd that’s just gagging for it because you’re the popular thing right then and you’re good, it’s going to be good. Everyone’s primed for it because John Peel liked it on the radio and so you just get to go out there and do that.

And there’s even sillier ones, the same idea, but before we were famous, filling smaller clubs in the suburbs, in small towns, like warm-up gigs. This time you don’t even know that John Peel hyped it. The kids already knew what it was before you got there, and then you go on stage, and people are doing this, like, lurch dance to songs you can barely play but they already know. I don’t even know what they’re hearing; they’re not hearing what’s actually being played.

And then after that gig, it’s a bar, it’s like a pub gig, and they had an upstairs where there was a hen party for a woman who was getting married. And there are all these ladies up there–they’re like fem, real fem, made up. And they’re like, “Who are you?” And we’re like, “We’re the band.” And they’re like, “Oh my God!” and they’re kissing Bob [Nastanovich], you know. “It’s the band!” It’s actually PG, it’s not like a Van Halen backstage thing. But we’re just like, “Oh, this is how it’s gonna be for the rest of our lives now.” And then that never happened again.

The new Pavement documentary is described as an “experimental musical biopic.” I understand you screened it before it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. What was your reaction?

Um, it was an early take. I thought it was, like, not ready for public consumption.

I understand you were upset by it.

Yeah, they had to re-edit it or whatever. Unless it was a prank. Or maybe it was intentionally bad. It’s that kind of movie. I’m not even sure. It was all too bloated. And stuff that shouldn’t—but that’s not in it now, so that’s good.

Were you pissed off?

No, I was just embarrassed. It’s not that I wasn’t completely surprised also. I think it was just like a prank. Or it was not the real film. It was just like a digital dump. What he showed, the guy showed, I thought it was pretty weird. Other people have seen it and it’s getting a good response. So that’s good.

Pavements” class=”external-link external-link-embed__hed-link button” data-event-click='{“element”:”ExternalLink”,”outgoingURL”:”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/pavements-exclusive-clip-venice”}’ href=”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/pavements-exclusive-clip-venice” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Watch Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman Butt Heads in PavementsArrow Pavements” class=”external-link external-link-embed__image-link” data-event-click='{“element”:”ExternalLink”,”outgoingURL”:”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/pavements-exclusive-clip-venice”}’ href=”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/pavements-exclusive-clip-venice” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>

Some members of Pavement attended the Venice premiere of Pavements, but you didn’t.

No, I’m moving to Chicago. I didn’t have time. I’m selling my house in Portland. I’m showing my face in New York and stuff for it. So, that’s it. [Malkmus attended the film’s US premiere at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 2.]

Have you seen the movie since it’s been edited?

I’ve seen parts of it. It looks good.

It’s hard to be Stephen Malkmus.

Doesn’t matter. I mean, we create our own realities. In my reality, the movie’s great. I haven’t seen all of it, but it’s going good. I get feedback. You just want everyone to be happy, just like a parent. And you want the movie to have a good, healthy life and get into the festivals that it wants to get into. [laughs] I don’t really want to talk about the movie in the interview if it’s okay.

We can move on.

Don’t say, “He didn’t want to talk about it.” I’m just not interested in it.

I get it. But it goes to a larger theme here, which is the burden of having been successful with music that has different meanings for different people. You can’t control how it’s perceived. You’re happy it’s well received and people like it—

Definitely.

—but then their interpretations of it can probably be embarrassing, or you don’t want to be responsible for their take.

I don’t know. Musicians, we have to give a lot of fucking interviews because it’s free press. It’s like maybe we’ll sell our fucking worthless music. Obviously I wouldn’t compare myself with Picasso, but he didn’t have to give so many interviews, right? He just did his shit and that was rad. So yeah, it just sort of ruins it to talk about it too much. There’s these bands that just stay quiet, like Daft Punk or something. They’re so fucking cool, no one knows them. They might be fucking fascists. We don’t even know, but no one cares. We just think they’re great.

That’s just the belly-aching musician rant. [laughs]

Maybe it’s hard looking back. I’ve heard that you didn’t actually enjoy your time in Pavement in the 1990s.

Yeah, I mean, some stuff was fun, but it was a bit of a roller [coaster]. It all happened too fast, I guess. Look, I was really grateful, totally grateful, when people liked the first album. And I knew I wouldn’t have to do anything else for a while, on the real basic level. So there’s that. But then we didn’t have a manager, and there was some, like, “You’re gonna be big or you’re not.” There was some hype behind Crooked Rain and it didn’t really explode.

It totally did well, it was a total success aesthetically and critically, but there’s some stress around that. And then I was just mainly touring and interviewing and overworking. That was all. Just too much touring, being too grateful that we got these offers, and it seemed like lots of money and stuff, so we just kept going. And I just got worn down being the leader of everything. That’s all it was.

Were you disappointed you didn’t break?

Not really, because we did break enough. But, I mean, I was still grateful, but there was some pressure. There’s just some stress about it. “You should do this thing and keep doing these interviews.” And then at a certain point, on the last record, I did all these regional interviews in England and people didn’t know who I was. I was trying to get it into the mainstream, I guess. But the record was really fucking weird, so I wasn’t expecting it. I mean, we deliberately made a weird record. And then we had to go on that tour. And then imagining there’s going to be another record and [having to] pull everyone together and do that again—I just couldn’t imagine doing it. That’s all.

But in the end it all worked out because we’ve had these nice reunions. Everyone’s healthy. Most people have a decent roof over their heads. You’d have to ask the other guys. But for me, it’s worked out pretty good. I got to jam with the Jicks and we had a pretty great time working a little more under the radar. And then the reunions come and go. The music’s timeless. So it worked out.

And you didn’t fuck yourself up or blow all your money.

No. I mean, it’s still stressful with all these schools and stuff. Schools are so expensive for the kids.

Relatable.

And we don’t quite qualify—we’re in that in-between area where you don’t get free tuition, but we don’t have steady jobs. But you can’t tell that to the school. They look at your bank account and they’re like, “You can afford it.” You’re sort of trusting more will come in.

That’s the plight of the working artist.

Yeah, my wife’s working now. That’s why we’re here [in Chicago]. I have two kids, a 16-year-old, and my other one’s at Pomona College. She’s a sophomore, but she’s probably gonna drop out because she wants to be a musician. She’s met all these people.

I guess you’re in no position to dissuade her.

I do not see her going into academia or the corporate world in any way, and definitely not in “environmental blah, blah,” which half the kids are saying they want to do. They’re all just worried how they’re gonna make money.

She’s gonna be in the arts. Some people know if they want to be an oceanographer, but she wants to be in music so I’m not going to hold her back. She can definitely take a year off. And she’s smarter than I was and more mature than all of us were. I needed those four years [at the University of Virginia, where he majored in history] to figure myself out. I was a bigger fuck up.

In retrospect, the slackness of the pre-internet 1990s was kind of a virtue, even if we resented the legacy we inherited from the Baby Boomers. At least we had time to think about it.

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, your kids probably don’t feel that way about your generation. I have a tighter [relationship]—I mean, I’m just a friend to my kids the way I never was with my parents. Absolutely spend way more time together. We like to hang out.

And she’s already 20, so I don’t foresee that changing. And to the point where I was like, “You should go out. Why aren’t you going to that party?” Like, when they lived in Portland. “Is there a party tonight?” But it was not only the pandemic, it’s just the way her friends rolled.

I just thought [college] was chill, it was definitely just fun. And maybe she thinks that, too, but she seems to be more driven. I’m like, “Just have fun there. I mean, learn, grow up a bit.” I think she’s more like, “I want to do something.” So I don’t know if school is gonna last. It’s okay to save $160,000 if she doesn’t go two years.

When you were her age, you were this suburban punk rocker from Stockton, California, who was discovering art at UVA. That was an important transition, from punk to art.

That’s true. And yeah, that’s a defense. You always make a virtue of your deficiencies. I learned that working [as a security guard at the Whitney Museum of Art] pretty quick. Because there were plenty of artists that couldn’t paint, that had no technique. And they would be considered modern primitives. Or it looked like that to me.

Like Julian Schnabel. I was like, “This is garish.” There’s plenty of people that can paint, and they’re beautiful, like Peter Doig, he came after Julian Schnabel. But I would see some of those guys and say, “This is ugly, man.” But then the docent would come in and say that I sound like a Philistine. It’s all in how you spin it. You know what I mean?

That’s reminds me of something a contractor told me once, “If you can’t fix it, feature it.”

That’s true. Do it twice. If you do a bad note on a solo, just do it twice.

I think Miles Davis said that.

He’s good. Fellow Gemini, like me.

I remember people examining your lyrics and saying, “Oh, he’s reading John Ashbery.”

I like him, yeah. I like Wallace Stevens. I didn’t really know the poets at UVA. There wasn’t a good poetry department there. There was one poet named Gregory Orr, I went to one of his readings with a girl, and it was too classic. He was reading this kind of romantic [poetry] and there’s all these women out in front of him and I was like, “This is kind of gross.” I learned later on that John Ashbery is so incredible. I love reading that, it’s so weird. And some of the Beat Generation guys, and post-Beat, like Lew Welch.

And that leached into your music writing?

John Ashbery, for sure. I mean, so great. And some other language poets later. Other than that, it’s probably going to be what I came up with, or music-related [influences], whether they’re Bob Dylan or Mark E. Smith [of The Fall] or people like that. And it’s not even them, it’s more like their band, or just the whole thing, that’s a vibe. I feel lucky that I’m not that good at imitating things. I actually don’t read music that closely. I never got obsessed with Bob Dylan, because that could be really dangerous. You can really end up—

You don’t want to be overly influenced.

Yeah, it’s not like I intentionally did it. It’s just that I’m either autistic or a narcissist or something. I can’t fully go that deep into it. Neil Young—you can say, “I want to do these sort of beautifully stoned lyrics,” but I’m not going to read them that hard. I know the “burned-out basement” song [“After the Gold Rush”] is perfect, but I have to do something else like that but without doing that.

Also, some artists look at Top 10 lists and Desert Island Discs when they’re young and they really are fucking obsessed. Some musicians are really obsessed with a particular artist to a point that it’s so in them. And I just like David Bowie; I don’t want to be like him. I just like him. And it’s not anything intentional. It’s just the way it is. I’m not trying to avoid it or anything. It just doesn’t happen.

There’s always been the sense that even if you don’t intend to say anything specific in your lyrics, that there was some emotional expression happening between the lines.

Yeah, definitely. That’s how I listened to music anyway. I’m looking for like a little hum under it more than—I’m not a close listener to lyrics. I’m sorry, I like a great line sometimes, but I never knew what “Get Off of My Cloud” or “Satisfaction” was about. I like some of the lines; I didn’t think about it too much.

It’s more like, “Look at those guys, I want to be like those guys, that sounds tough. Those guys are fucking cool. Yeah, this is cool.” So that’s how I still am. That’s just how I do it. I don’t listen to Dylan for that either. I listen to it for the fact that it’s so loose and he doesn’t give a fuck, in a good way. Yeah, I want to be like that. I don’t really like to deconstruct the lyrics.

Even though you weren’t intending to address anything specific, do certain songs or albums represent things that were happening in your real life, even if they don’t say that directly?

I mean, inevitably they would. But I was just kind of drunk and high and trying to make up shit. I was just psyched, having fun with it.

That’s a little hard to believe. You’re just a conduit for whatever comes out of your subconscious, I get that, but—

I don’t know. It’s really all a blur. We worked so hard and toured so hard that I don’t …

What is the most personal Pavement record, as far as you’re concerned?

I don’t know. They’re all pretty much the same as far as I’m concerned. Sorry to say. Maybe like Crooked Rain. It has some emo songs on it, but it’s more self-aware after the fame or something. Like, yes, there’s that theme. But that’s also revealing or human in a way, too. I can spin it a lot of ways. I feel like it’s all putting yourself out there.

I know when we did Watery, Domestic, we were touring with Sonic Youth and it was coming out after our other albums. And I was like, “This is so wimpy, I’m afraid to play it for them.” You know what I mean? There’s that kind of stuff, too. Like, “They’re gonna hate it.” But they didn’t. They liked it fine, or they said they did.

It’s one of the best records you guys ever made.

Exactly. You never know.

Did you ever get your heart broken?

Not really. I mean, I’ve been … down. But I don’t think “heartbroken” is the right word, the way they show it in the movies. I mean, I’ve been depressed about failed relationships. It wasn’t where I was completely in and the other person was like, “Fuck you.” That hasn’t happened. Have you?

Yeah, for sure. I probably listened to some Pavement songs.

I got unrequited crushes, like people I thought were really hot. But I was just like–I moved on. I didn’t obsess.

Robert Christgau once described your songs as “calculated shows of feeling.” I always felt your songs were coded to say something privately emotional for specific people.

Yeah. That’s good. But you’re putting that in it. I mean, I’m sure I was trying to do some things. That’s a sign of a healthy art, that it was able to be a frame for people’s thoughts and dreams. I would always want that to happen, but I can’t say that I’m so conscious about that or such a successful—I would like that, but I don’t study how to do it. You know, musicians aren’t like artists, who have a lot of crits in art school, where you really have to defend yourself.

There’s a lot of just loose, not-airtight shit in our music. That’s a good thing though because the music side is the most important side. The words go with the music; it’s doing a dance together. So that’s what I tried to do.

Nicely put. Despite that, I am going to ask you about the meaning of specific Pavement songs. Like “Shoot the Singer” from Watery, Domestic. What’s it about?

What’s it about? [sings] “Someone took/In these pants.” So, “someone took” and then you wouldn’t think that someone would say “in these pants.” And then “someone painted/over painted wood.” I can imagine some furniture that you just keep doing it. And then “where he stood,” and then I just say, “no one stands,” you know? It’s just like—it’s a word game.

The part that always stood out for me was the end: “Don’t expect, don’t expect, don’t expect.”

That’s just vamping, like Mick Jagger and Tina Turner. I mean, that was just riffing. There’s nothing—I obviously wasn’t writing that down, I was just singing at the end of the song, just trying to give it some vibe.

I always thought it was a perfect encapsulation of the Gen-X attitude. Because being in our twenties in the early 1990s, during a recession, before the internet, you thought the party was over.

Yeah, that’s true. I mean, it’s also more universal. Sort of “Don’t ask me any questions, I won’t tell you any lies,” right? Is that what it is? Something like, “Hey, man, tough love” or whatever.

“Zurich is stained and it’s not my fault.”

Let’s see [sings riffs]. There was some band I was thinking it reminded me of, maybe it was a New Zealand band. It was sort of like Mark E. Smith mixed with— what’s her name? She was friends with Graham Greene and she’s a British woman? She wrote, The Sea, The Sea.

Iris Murdoch.

Iris Murdoch. She sometimes would have this kind of Graham Greene-y world that was spies or MI5 people having an affair in Zurich or something like that. That’s just a vibe. I don’t really know what it was. I think that’s what I was doing.

“Here,” also from Slanted and Enchanted.

Yeah, that one had corny lyrics, I thought at the time.

What do you think now?

No, I like it now. “I was dressed for success …” I mean, I was taking a line that already exists, that’s a little sad sack-y or something. And [the song] didn’t have any distortion on it.

“Come join us in a prayer. We’ll be waiting, waiting there. Everything’s ending here.”

It all rhymes! Obviously “come join us in a prayer” is totally hackneyed or whatever. So that’s definitely the first thing I wrote on that one and we just kept it. And the other stuff is more my old-fashioned obfuscating stuff, “all the Spanish candles…” There’s a thing where it says, “a run-on piece of mountain,” but that doesn’t mean anything.

I think a lot of people, certainly me, felt that song was specifically geared to what we were feeling maybe collectively at the time.

I don’t know about that, but like, it does connect with people. And it has the part that’s kind of emo, like— “and all the Spanish candles…dah dah dah”—it’s very sweet sounding. It’s very tender and emo. I’ve seen a video of us playing it in England, like, louder, and then this band Coldplay made the song “Yellow” that seemed like it was based on that live version. So I was like, “Oh yeah, that song’s got some power. That’s cool.” And it was an outlier on the record in that it didn’t have any distorted guitar and it had reverb on the drums, little things like that that made it stand out on Slanted and Enchanted.

For me, I’m just trying to fill out an album. I’m like, “Okay, done. That one’s good.” I think most musicians you would talk to are just happy to make something out of nothing.

Did you ever write a song that was about something?

Yeah, there’s like, “Jenny & The Ess-Dog” that one’s narrative. “Give It a Day” is sort of about Cotton Mather but, you know, it gets weird. There’s other ones, I’m sure.

Did you ever write a love song to a girl?

To a specific girl? I’ve written some, yeah.

Did they make it onto albums?

The songs? I mean, there’s this one on Face The Truth. There’s breakup songs that definitely channel that feeling into song, and inspire you. I tend to go more towards disaffection and, like, I’m channeling bad vibes and uncomfortable things, often more than like, “Oh, it’s so great.” Yeah, you can write a peon to a person or how they’re great. And it’s almost not even about you, it’s just about them, how cool they are, why you like them. I’ve been there.

“Trigger Cut.”

That one’s got good lyrics. “Lies and betrayals, fruit covered nails.” My wife really likes that. “Electricity and lust.” That all works good. I don’t know where it came from, but I was just singing like, “eeeee-lectricity.” Yeah, that was a Captain Beefheart song. But I don’t know, fruit-covered nails is sort of like, oranges have razors in it on Halloween or something. That was sort of the idea. Apples with razors in them, fruit-covered nails. It was that sort of idea, I thought.

And you’ve got “a heavy coat filled with rocks and sand.”

Yeah, that’s sort of like “cats and bag, bags and river.” When I hear that, I just imagine a really heavy water-logged fur coat or something. Someone’s been kicked off the edge of the galley and is going to drown. But also metaphorically. I just see it visually. I don’t know about you.

Well, I wondered if it had metaphorical meaning to you.

Not really. I mean, it’s just vibing, trying to make something about frustration or holding you back, that’s just a rock and roll way to say, “Don’t try to hold me down, man, I’m so sick of it.”

Did you feel like something was holding you back?

I mean, not really. As soon as I got a little confidence, like other people were telling me I was good, I didn’t feel like I was holding back. I felt like people were helping me. And I was just a white dude with the world at his fingertips. l had to will it into being. And there was lots of other white boys that wanted to do it, so I’m not saying it was easy. But when Bob Nastanovich was saying, “You’re good at that, Steve,” I just need a little bit of confidence building from people.

So many things are about confidence in life, and where you find it. It’s silly because people like to say this is a millennial thing, where “everyone’s a winner.” It’s so stupid that these conservative people are [thinking] “[I have to] slap my child down,” because that’s not gonna get you fuck-all. You’re gonna get way better results being positive, noticing somebody doing something. You can imagine all the failed careers from people saying one bad thing about you or something. I’m just sensitive. My daughter’s really sensitive to criticism, too.

I don’t know what your upbringing was like, but did you feel like you had to build your own confidence from scratch?

It was not an artistic family I came out of. I’m noticing this nepo world way more than I used to. I don’t think it was as big a deal [in the past]. I mean, I don’t think a lot of musicians, their parents weren’t in Hollywood or rock stars or something. Now it seems like everyone is and it’s okay. Everyone’s like, “Okay, don’t be a hater, you can’t blame them for it.”

Of course, if my daughter wants to be a musician, I don’t want her to be like, fucked over. I’m from the suburbs, land of real estate agents and insurance brokers and doctors. That’s the way it goes. There weren’t too many creative people in the arts.

When Pavement disbanded in 1999 and you were going to start your solo career, did you feel liberated?

Yeah, I did. It was because everything outside of the creative thing in Pavement was not liberated. It was too much. I mean, there were some things we had to work out amongst each other creatively, but that wasn’t like a deal breaker. It was more just the constant—like, okay, we’re gonna do another record and we’re gonna do these interviews and make a video and it’s gonna be incrementally bigger.

It’s just hard to stick out that middle part of a band, I think. You have to have already failed three times or something, and be so grateful that you got it. Or you’re Irish. Because it really wears you out emotionally—spiritually. Yeah.

You were letting go of the burden of expectations.

Yeah, it was kind of restarting, and lower stakes.

I mean, I am always working for the next [thing]. Making up the next record in my head was always the most fun part. I conceptualize things in my head to make it bearable. You know what I mean?

So you have new people, a new band, some benefits of having a name, of course.

New people–it really feels good to do that. There’s some people who think there’s a 10-year limit on how good individuals can be together. And of course it’s not true but it’s just hard.

When I was a kid, I didn’t really like most bands’ later work. I always liked their first few albums. I would always think they’re getting old and slower, you know? Now I don’t mind that so much.