A conversation with Stephen Malkmus from 2001
On the eve of his debut solo album's release, the indie-rock icon spoke about the demise of Pavement, that time Justine Frischmann nearly joined the Jicks, and hosting Temptation Island theme parties
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!
THE OPENERS
On Monday, I got to see Mogwai play for the first time in 22 years, and it was a truly religious experience. First, they wish you a merry “xmas”…
…and then they hail “Satan”…
…before bidding you shalom with “Avinu Malkeinu,” a.k.a. “My Father, My King” (just in time for Passover!).
Opening for Mogwai were Dayton, Ohio’s finest robo-punk freakazoids Brainiac, a band who nearly blew headliners The Jesus Lizard off the stage (not easy!) when I saw them at the Opera House in 1996, and who I never thought I’d get to see live again, given that they broke up after original frontman Tim Taylor died in 1997, and I missed their reunion-tour stop at the Horseshoe last year because I was out of town. And I never would’ve imagined they’d someday mutate into the world’s gnarliest Nirvana cover band—all hail Breediac!
American friends: the Broken Social Scene documentary It’s All Gonna Break will soon be screening in a town near you, provided you live near one of these towns:
This week at Commotion, I produced Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s interview with Montreal-based singer/songwriter Bells Larsen, who recently had to cancel his U.S. tour due to new Trump-administration restrictions on visas for trans artists:
I also put together this segment with Sheldon Bruce, a.k.a. Muscle, the Toronto dancehall archivist whose collection appears in the Canadian chapter of Major Lazer MC Walshy Fire’s wonderful new coffee-table book, Art of Dancehall: Flyer and Poster Designs of Jamaican Dancehall Culture.
RIP Henri Sangalang, a Halifax indie MVP who played bass in Matt Murphy’s post-Superfriendz jangle-rock outfit, The Flashing Lights. The band released their debut album, Where the Change Is, through SpinArt Records, the New York label that was also home to Apples in Stereo and Frank Black, among many others. Henri was 56; no cause of death has been reported. My condolences to those who knew, loved, and rocked out with him.
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
Kilynn Lunsford, “Nice Quiet Horror Show”: For all the stylistic reinventions PJ Harvey has undergone throughout her career, she’s never really made a concerted play for the dancefloor—and until that day comes, this Philly DIY dynamo is more than willing to fill the disco-goth hole in your blackened heart.
Joe Godard (feat. Suku and Dynamite MC), “Image and Style”: In which the Hot Chip co-founder plots an alternate early-2000s trajectory where he doesn’t become an indie-sleazy synth-pop star and instead emerges as the godfather of grime.
Gwenno, “Dancing on Volcanoes”: After spending the better part of the past decade crafting avant-garde psych-pop sung in Cornish, the Welsh singer offers a distant echo of her Pipettes past, with a swinging serenade that would’ve fit snugly between Stereolab’s “Ping Pong” and Saint Etienne’s “Nothing Can Stop Us” on your ‘90s Indie Cocktail Hour mixtape.
Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto, “Electric War”: The latest collaboration between UK journeyman guitarist Barrie Cadogan (Primal Scream, Liam Gallagher) and Heliocentrics drummer Catto imagines Can if they were absorbed into the late-’60s British blues-rock canon.
Bells Larsen, “514-415”: In a better world, Bells would currently be less known for getting caught up in anti-trans travel-policy hell, and more for pedal-steeled indie-folk pleasures like this tune, a poignant portrait of long-distance romance that frames Bells’ own post-transition reconnection with an old flame through lyrical details easily understood by anyone who’s been in a relationship governed by geography (“Do you think that it’s strange?/ The weather of your city’s saved in my phone”).
Raf Reza, “Mirror of Love”: On his upcoming debut for Telephone Explosion, Ekbar (out April 25), this Toronto producer merges vintage ‘70s dub, Kraftwerkian futurism, and Bengali devotional music into dizzying, 360-degree sound designs.
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Stephen Malkmus
The date: January 19, 2001
Publication: Eye Weekly
Location: I was at the Eye Weekly office in Toronto; Stephen was calling in from Portland
Album being promoted: Stephen Malkmus
The context: This was my second time speaking to Malkmus, and my contextual observations from our first conversation still very much apply here:
He’s exactly who you’d want him to be: charming and cheeky, but also honest and opinionated—an island of such great complexity bordered by a real chill beach. (In fact, Malkmus is such an easygoing conversationalist that it’s easy to lose sight of your prepared line of questioning and just casually shoot the shit on a number of topics that have little chance of factoring into your final piece.)
This is an extremely 2001-coded conversation, complete with then-timely discussions of Justine Frischmann, At the Drive-In, and Temptation Island. (Fun fact: Malkmus’ solo debut was the first record I ever downloaded illegally from Napster when it leaked prior to its street date. Those were the days!)
So you're in Oregon?
Yeah. Where are you?.
In Toronto.
Okay. You guys broke the story on sports radio that the New York Giants were cheating in the playoffs.
I didn’t hear that. What's going on?
Yesterday, they were, like, “the Toronto Sun reports that the New York Giants are cheating in the playoff games”—they were stealing signs or like radio signals from the other teams. I haven't heard anything about it—it's only a Canadian rumor. Anyway…
So when are you heading over to the UK? You’re launching your tour there, right?
Well, we're playing one show in New York City on the 25th. And then we're going over there on the 2nd. We're going to, like, Brussels. We've been rehearsing in my basement for, like, a few days, getting ready.
Is Justine Frischmann there with you in Oregon?
No, we sacked her. Well, I wouldn’t want to say that in the press… we didn’t really sack her. She called about a week ago, or less than a week. We're playing our first show on Thursday in New York, and she called… I had been trying to get in contact with her, like, “Hello? Where are you?” And she calls, and she had been in Saint Lucia, or some kind of island in the Caribbean, and she was like [in fake British accent], “I just got back, I understand if you don't want me to come—I know it's a bit late in the game but, you know, I’m ready to do it, I want to do it if you let me. And, I was like, “look, you know… you're going to stand out, basically, musically, if you come now, because the songs are easy, but we've got them down and it took some time… She's a good player. I went through the songs with her when I was in England and she could do it. But being able to do it and being able to sound like you're a band are two different things. Basically, she didn’t call until it was too late, and our bass player couldn’t rehearse the weekend that she could come, she couldn't have played with our bass player…
So I guess you have to cross the Wire covers off the setlist.
Yeah… She's an awesome person and she might still play on the American tour if she wants to. Because I have another guy playing and at the time I asked her, I didn't know this guy would do it or I hadn't met him. And it's turned out that he's good, he's solid and a really nice person.
Who’s that?
His name’s Mike Clark—he’s a local guy who plays in this indie band called The No-No’s. He's really good at playing piano—that’s his first instrument, so he's kind of doing half-keyboard, half-guitar.
So have you played the songs live yet?
No. We have a secret show on Tuesday in Portland, and then we're off to New York for a Thursday gig.
Has the Jicks name been retired?
No, it’s in there.
So it’s officially Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks?
Pretty much. If it was just the Jicks, people would say my name anyway, you know? So I decided: maybe if they say my name, they'll say the Jicks, too, you know?
Are you afraid that if you just use your name on its own, it’ll have a James Taylor connotation?
Yeah, I guess you’re right. I was thinking more along the lines of a lot of other cooler people that will have their name on there—Tom Verlaine, Bob Dylan, he's cool.
I just saw your press shots and they have a very sunny California vibe to them.
Yeah, the Dennis Wilsony thing. I don’t know, I'm just trying for something different than what was before. I really, you know, combined with the fact that I couldn't come up with any decent cover art. And I brought the photographer out for the promo photos before the album came out and I never could do that in Pavement because everyone lived in different places. So I was on holiday and he came there and shot them. And they came out pretty good but I look like I sort of have a mullet in this one, which in the end, unfortunately, became the cover photo for the album.
So is it a shock having a band that actually lives in the same city you’re in?
It’s not shocking, but it's good. We can just go down and do things that normal bands do—go in the basement and play for two hours and say, “I want to quit now.” And it just doesn't have the boot camp vibe that Pavement had at the end, where I was trying to cram in all this stuff for a band that was supposed to be taken seriously. I was cramming in all this stuff to make it sound like a band, you know?
People used to make a big deal about Pavement being sloppy, but it sounded like you were really coming together toward the end—I guess the geographic distance cramped your growth…
Yeah. We had some real successes, and I'm proud of everything we did—well, I'm not proud of everything, but most things we did. But the effort required to get to whatever we got to was just extensive, and a lot of headache, you know? It's like, “fly here and rehearse for a few days, and then we’ll go here and try to record,” so all five of us fly there… it just gets to be a poorly managed company. You know, if there was a Carl Icahn or some like corporate raider came in, he would break it into pieces and say, “I'm going to sell out these assets!,” because it was so poorly organized. And of course, that gave it some of the charm—that “ramshackle charm” that people really love about Pavement, but that also brought around the end of it, just because it just gets to be so difficult.
I guess “ramshackle charm” sounds better on paper than actually living it.
Yeah, exactly. And you have to be a really on-the-ball communicator to deal with these sorts of relationships that aren't in the same town. And I'm not. Most men aren't, and I really am not. So that made it hard—the communication lines just kind of get buried.
And does your current situation help your songwriting, in that, if you get a burst of inspiration, you can bring it to the band right away?
I think it well, I mean, for this album, there wouldn't have been a point because I kind of had everything done on the tape machine, and my digital thing, I was pretty ready to go. I had a pretty good idea of the kind of record that I wanted to make with a new band. I thought I should do a record kind of like this—I wasn't going to go way off into Prog Land on the first record. I'm going to keep it relatively no-bullshit and straight to the point. Get to the verses and whatever version of the chorus is. In and out quick, you know?
Are you going to be busting out any golden oldies?
We haven't rehearsed any yet, but I think we should probably. We'll see. It truly doesn't cross your mind when you're doing this, because you're just having fun learning the new songs,
But you know there’s going to be some dude yelling out for “Summer Babe” at every show…
I know that, and I don't think anyone's really averse to doing that in the band. They want to give the people what they want a little bit, you know, combined with what we want—there's a give and take. But we haven't done that yet… we probably should. I figured we could just wing it, you know, because everyone's a pretty good player. I can wing a song like “Here” at any time.
Do you find your playing improves the more beer you have onstage?
I think you get looser and probably your inhibitions go away more, so that would be a good thing. I don't think it really matters—as long as I'm warm, I think I play well. But I think you have to learn to play sober because you can't be drunk all the time.
It’s funny, I was just listening to the Funhouse box set, and in between the takes, you hear Iggy having very calm, clear-headed conversations about recording his vocals, but then once the track starts rolling, he’s like “YAAARRRRGH”...
He's acting all straight and then all of a sudden he goes crazy. He can turn it on like a pro, instead of just being primitive guy. My voice would be shot, but then again, I could do that when I was 20. There’s plenty of screams on old Pavement B-sides but now, I can't be bothered with a scream. I try to scream on “Jenny and the Ess-Dog”—there’s this little tiny, tiny circle of air that comes out, like [makes a high-pitched shrieking sound]—it’s pretty funny. Old people don’t yell. Maybe that's some evolutionary thing where they don't want them to be able to be saved, you know? Once you're done reproducing, and like a Brontosaurus is going to come to eat you, you can't yell as loud as you did when you're a kid. I just heard that Oasis satellite album that just came out, man, Liam is fucked, pretty much. Is he gone now? Because he had a great voice? It's certain. Like raspy. Shut up. Yeah. It's just like, I guess it's broken.
We did an interview when Terror Twilight came out and at the time, the big code words for you were Sabbath and the Groundhogs—those were your totems of inspiration. So I’m just wondering what classic-rock deities are lurking in the mix for you now….
A band called SRC from Detroit, Michigan—they’re a code word. Pentangle, this band from England. Those are some good code words—might as well use them. SRC are good—they're kind of The Stooges but lighter, they got more melodic. They made two albums for Capitol in the late ’60s and ’70s. I actually sampled them in this song for the Groovebox compilation. I sampled it uncredited.
Is the coda on “Discretion Grove” a tribute to “Heartless” by Heart?
Yeah, it should be. I wish it was. I think it was more Thin Lizzy meets Wire with that song. Do they have a thing that goes like that?
Yeah, just that part at the end. I guess it’s kind of T. Rexy too…
We thought that it was Dave Edmunds. [He starts speaking to someone else in the room] I’m sorry Heather—can you turn that down? My girlfriend is watching The Dating Story. She loves it. It’s on The Learning Channel.
Is that like Blind Date, but more legit? Do you watch Temptation Island, too?
Yeah, Heather had a party for it. It was so corny. She made barbecued pork and daiquiris, and dressed up in Hawaiian clothes. I can't believe how corny it was. It was fun, though.
I heard they had to kick a couple off because they had a kid.
Yes. I heard that, too. Oh, he's trying to keep it over. That couple didn’t seem very well-adjusted. I worry less about the kid than them. So I guess the show is trying to protect the kid—they don't want to be homewreckers.
It’s funny that Fox suddenly gets a bout of morality about that.
Yeah, it’s such a corny show, I can't believe it. I've seen both episodes, though. But I'll miss the next one because I’ll be in New York. I'm gonna go out that night. But here in Portland, you know, that's a Wednesday night.
I did an interview with Michael from Silkworm recently, and he was saying that playing with you in The Crust Brothers really helped them lose the self-conscious artiness and just get more in touch with their classic-rock roots, and I’m wondering if that experience had a similar effect on you.
It’s hard to say, but I do like doing it. I also did the Silver Jew album, American Water, which was also done in a certain way. It was only done in, like, nine days and my album took three times that long. But just the way of working on it was really free and more like what I like to do. I like Pavement albums, but they become somehow just bloated in a slight way. It just didn't flow in a certain way. It just didn't roll down the hill and there was never any momentum that was really being captured.
It seemed like each Pavement album was like a reaction to the one before, as opposed to…
…just doing it, you know? So I was like, “I want to just get free of that,” and get some momentum going in the studio and we managed to do that. And I don't know if it's a better album for it, but I know that it was made in more of the way that I like to do it, where there's just flow of stuff. We did the Crust Brothers again this year, and it was fun…
What was on the setlist?
I sang the Cars song, “Let the Good Times Roll”—that was probably my most fun moment. There was some Dylan and “Ramblin’ Man.” We did Led Zeppelin’s “Down by the Seaside.”
Did you pull off that funky break in the middle?
Yeah we did—”so far away, so far away”...we kind of shortened that part. And we also fucked it up that night. Andy kept saying, “That's a song that could have been on Wowee Zowee!” I wish it was on there.
Silkworm do a really good “Ooh La La” on their latest record.
Yeah, I know. Yeah. We didn't play that for some reason, but I like that. I like that album too, it’s a really good record.
That's what Michael was telling me—making that record felt really natural for the first time.
Yeah. I mean that might just be about getting more mature and confident and also knowing that there’s not as much riding on it in some ways. They’re all getting jobs and not trying to live off the band anymore.
Do you feel liberated now that you're not attached to any sort of zeitgeist?
I don't know,,, I definitely don't feel any real expectation or stress about that kind of thing. I feel just in the moment about it all. I'm happy to go on tour and just be one of da boys and in da band. So what, my face is on the cover—big deal, you know?
In Toronto, there’s a new wave of indie rock kids now. The people who would’ve bought Slanted and Enchanted when it came out are now in their 30s and aren’t going to as many shows. There’s like a whole new crop.
Yeah. For what kind of bands? Do they like Godspeed and stuff?
There’s that element, and then there’s the Belle and Sebastian/Magnetic Fields kids. But mainly I’m seeing the emocore kids. Emo seems to be the new lexicon for indie rock these days…
Yeah, I know, that At the Drive-In-type thing. I think that's a good thing to have a sort of high-energy thing happening. I don't know where I would fit in that, but that's good.
You have to start screaming again.
I know, but you can't really do that when you're my age, like I said. I was going to make a song called “Old People Don’t Scream As Much Anymore.” I guess Iggy tries to do it, but he's just wound up tight. I just don't have that rage anymore.
Did you ever though?
Well, I was listening to “Baptist Blacktick”—I was trying to pick a Pavement song for us to do, and it's like a B-side, and I'm like, “I'm just waiting, waiting for the baptist, arrrggghh”—I'm just totally screaming. But I guess not as that At the Driving [sic] guy, but not too bad. I heard they got, like, a million-pound publishing offer. That's a lot of money I know for some punk guys from El Paso. They’re rich now. Lucky them.
Well, you can always try to get a song in a Volkswagen commercial, like Stereolab did. Is Matador still trying to get you to court the Trustafarian market?
I hope so.
On Terror Twilight, there were hints that you could crossover to the jam-band crowd…
I don't know. First of all, we were unable to jam in Pavement. To be a jam band, you have to be able to really jam.
Well, you can always pull out “Ramblin’ Man” again…
I could do that—I guess that would be my version of selling out: to go jam.
ENCORES
Before I dusted off this interview for this week’s newsletter, I had totally forgotten that it referenced Silkworm’s Michael Dahlquist, who was killed in an awful car accident along with two of his friends in 2005 by a driver who intentionally struck their vehicle in a suicide attempt. (You can read the late Steve Albini’s eulogy to Dahlquist here; the driver survived the crash and ultimately only served three years for the offence.) That tragic incident spelled the immediate end of Silkworm, a group that sadly never rose above the realm of being your favourite indie-rock band’s favourite indie-rock band. But after reissuing their 1997 lost classic Developer in February, surviving members Andy Cohen and Tim Midyett recently revealed they were reuniting the band for a slate of shows in September 2025 with original guitarist Joel R.L. Phelps, Songs:Ohia drummer Jeff Panall, and Matt Kadane of Bedhead on keyboards.
Even though Malkmus has long retired from screaming, we’ll always have this:
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