A Good Year for Stephen Malkmus

Stephen Malkmus had a good year. It was also a busy one for the singer, songwriter, and guitar deity as it included the launch of a new band, more reunion tour dates with foundational 90s indie band Pavement, high-profile interviews, and the premier of a movie which featured his younger self. What follows are 10 highlights from Malkmus’s 2024. These aren’t ranked in order of significance because, despite Malkmus’s notable love of sports, this isn’t college football.

“Hey”
Malkmus’s new musical endeavor is The Hard Quartet, which released a self-titled album on October 4. In addition to Malkmus, the band consists of the catalyst of the project Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Superwolves, the Guitar Moves interview series, numerous session work), Emmett Kelly (The Cairo Gang, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), and drum wizard Jim White (Dirty Three, countless great albums over the last 30 years).

It probably goes without saying that the debut album of an indie rock supergroup with three guitar slingers would include lots of guitars, often loud guitars with suitably sick guitar harmonies. But the throng of guitars ascendancy is offset by quieter moments, such as the song “Hey”:

Malkmus doesn’t get enough credit for his acumen as a writer of ballads, and this is certainly another sterling example. “Hey” has a pure, gorgeous melody that’s hooky enough to stay in one’s brain for days. At times it contains whispers of young love — “Hey, someone likes you” — but grows into a tale of lust: “Hey, I want a little part of me in there.” Naturally, “Hey” is laced with beautiful guitar harmonies while showcasing the prototypical Malkmus-ian impish wordplay: “You kiss me like a quaalude” and “I would like to surrender to your confusion.” Timeless stuff.

Malkmus Interview Moment #1
For years, interviews with Malkmus have been required reading because they are hilarious, insightful, generous, and, it bears repeating, hilarious. Here’s one bit from an interview with Malkmus and Kelly in The Quietus:

“I had some intuition about people’s inherent goodness in this band…Not only in music but the way people are. There’s probably been some corny stuff like letting go of egos and listening to others. Also, there’s being prepared to throw out the preparation and all that hippie shit…They had a turntable at the studio for vibes…There’s a lot of hanging out in this band…Sometimes I imagine this is how hip hop records are made because there was a lot of weed and a lot of chilling. That’s the feeling I got from my friends who were engineers at hip hop sessions. So we really got to hang, joke and do old man stuff.”

“Easily Fooled”
The most recent Pavement reunion started in 2022 and continued into 2024 with a tour of South American and a handful of dates in the United States, culminating on October 1 at Sony Hall in New York. Buzz about the show was great. Malkmus even tweeted about it:

Wylde pave show last night in the west 40’s of manhattan …

Loose early 90’s aggregate

— Stephen malkmus (@dronecoma) October 2, 2024

There were comments from the stage and in subsequent interviews that this current reunion may be winding down, but not before this show, which presented a setlist of hits and rarities alike, including “Easily Fooled,” a B-side from the Rattled by La Rush EP that Pavement hadn’t previously performed since 1997:

This delightfully weird performance could be described using all of the typical adjectives usually associated with Pavement, including shambolic, and ragged, yet it’s also breezy and punctuated by a falsetto-fueled chorus. Perhaps the band hoped that “Easily Fooled” would be picked up by a TikTok user like “Harness Your Hopes” was a few years ago, thereby continuing Pavement’s adoption by younger generations. One clue supporting this theory: “Harness Your Hopes” was the next song played at Sony Hall after “Easily Fooled.”

“Thug Dynasty”

This cut sounds like a surf band’s slow song with the kissing guitars and doo-wop background vocals, but it’s turned inside out through Malkmus’s DOOM-like rhyming prowess (“Order of merit / Why can’t we share it / Pour me sone claret”), priceless colloquialisms (“No Debbie downers allowed on the spaceship”), and barely overheard, spoken word jazzbo directives (“Yeah, you go on your way man. Take your jet ski mindset with you. We don’t want you here no more”). An instant classic.

Pavements
Conceived as a “semiotic experiment” by filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, this film is a documentary/fiction hybrid, combining actors playing members of the band in scripted scenes with actual 90s Pavement concert footage. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival but hasn’t had a wide release. Perry has shared one scene, depicting the Matador Records team (played by Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker) trying to convince the Malkmus character to play Saturday Night Live:

“Eh, nah, I don’t wanna do that.” Insouciant king shit.

“Rio’s Song” Video
Speaking of movies, The Hard Quartet released a music video:

Of course, this is a re-creation and tribute to The Rolling Stones’ “Waiting on a Friend” video:

Though it’s Sweeney’s tune, Malkmus gets to play the Keith Richards part. It’s the most sought after role in the video, but the hardest to play since Keith comes across as effortlessly cool. Malkmus makes it work, commanding a green polo shirt/sport coat/khakis combo and a weird, orange trucker hat, which he doffs at someone off-screen. He recreates Keith’s smirk and his long pull from a bottle well (though he does forgo the cigarette since no one can hold a cigarette like Keith Richards). The highlight is Sweeney and Malkmus’s execution of the awkward Mick/Keith hug. Additionally, Malkmus told Vanity Fair that his wife is in the video and that she was obsessed with Keith and Anita Pallenberg when she was younger. Fulfilling dreams for his wife surely must have earned bonus points for Malkmus on the homefront!

Malkmus Interview Moment #2
The aforementioned Vanity Fair interview is epic, delving into many aspects of Malkmus’s career and getting him to comment on specific Pavement songs. Most of all, it clears out space for Malkmus to cook, playing his singular interview game of delightful insights, curveball answers, and random spiels. It’s hard to pick only one moment (especially when one contender is when Malkmus says that Pavement wasn’t ready to be the voice of a generation but was comfortable being “the governor of Rhode Island”), but the high point of the Vanity Fair interview is his meta-commentary on having to do interviews:

“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].”

Pie Festival Entrance Photo

The quartet each totes a container of pie, looking, indeed, hard as shit.

Announcement of A New Pavement Song
Pavement guitar player Scott Kannberg let slip on Vish Khanna’s essential Kreative Kontrol podcast that there’s a new Pavement song slated to be included on the Pavements movie soundtrack:

“Gripping the Riptide”
Appropriately the last track on the album, “Gripping the Riptide” is a perfect title to a perfect Stephen Malkmus song.

There’s so much happening in “Riptide,” including expert connective tissue drumming by White, the aptly timed presence of a piano, and a guitar solo that’s ripped out midway through the song. All of these elements build a gripping tension that Malkmus releases through his lyrics and vocal expression. He sings, “Baby, I could share / My Chinese chair.” And also: “Your supervision drew me back there.” And: “I got my rattlesnakes run,” a callback to a rattlesnake lyric earlier in the song. These statements don’t mean anything outside the context of the full song but make absolute sense when Malkmus sings them in tandem with his guitar. They make you want to tattoo them on your chest so as not to forget them.

In the Vanity Fair piece, Malkmus shares his description of Pavement’s sound:

“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.”

This quote serves as a unifying theory for all of Malkmus’s music. This dance is certainly exemplified in “Gripping the Riptide.” Everything is in complete alignment, the melding of the guitar line, the melody, and the sound of the words. Looking back at Pavement, his solo work with The Jicks, and now with The Hard Quartet, Malkmus has been presenting this beautiful music-and-words dance for more than 30 years. He makes his command for this type of songcraft look effortless, and we take it for granted.

Here’s to a great year of Stephen Malkmus in music, interviews, videos, and movies; may he continue for another 30 years.

Image: <a href=”http://Julio Enriquez, CC BY 2.0 Julio Enriquez, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.