Stephen Malkmus Series: “Water and a Seat”

When Matador Record released Stephen Malkmus’s first album in 2001, there was a concerted effort on their part to establish Malkmus as a solo artist and offer this new stage of his career as distinct from Pavement. Most of the contemporary reviews of the album couldn’t help but push this same narrative. Though there’s some quirkiness and a few experiments in alternative forms of songwriting, Stephen Malkmus often feels considered and a little careful. It’s not exactly tentative, but there’s a sense that Malkmus tried hard to make a tidy, indie rock record that’s not loaded with production tricks and effects like Terror Twilight, the last Pavement album that he made in partnership with producer Nigel Goodrich.

All of that changes with Malkmus’s next album, 2003’s Pig Lib, starting immediately with the opener “Water and a Seat”:

The song begins with a repeated instrumental figure that’s decidedly West Coast in feel, sounding as if it could be an unreleased Grateful Dead jam from the Blues for Allah sessions. This gorgeous guitar and cymbal intro is buoyant with just a hint of foreboding. Its repetitive nature makes it feel as though it could be on a loop, limitlessly renewing itself over and over again. Suddenly, there’s a pause and then an abrupt about-face as Malkmus then rips into the central riff of the song, which is triumphantly distorted and deeply strange. Joanna Bolme’s bass and the drums by John Moen are in perfect alignment with Malkmus in this oblique, off-kilter riff. Barely more than a minute into the opening song of the album, it’s clear this is a band prepared to lay waste to all contenders. 

And who is this band? Pig Lib is credited to Stephen Malkmus and something called The Jicks, rather than solely Malkmus as with the previous album. He commented about the band’s origin in an interview with Spin: 

“I just made it up…I thought it sounded like a nervous disorder, like the bends. It turns out some writer used it as the term for aliens or replicants in some story. The label insisted we use my name to sell more records, and I was like, Ok, fine. But we’re really the Jicks….We’re a band. I think people like bands more than they like control freaks like Billy Corgan. I’d rather jam with friends than session guys.”

Putting aside the reference to Malkmus’s favorite target Billy Corgan, it’s evident in the beginning to “Water and a Seat” that this is the work of a band in lockstep and able to not only weather unexpected musical changes but elevate them beyond the creator’s original idea.

In keeping with the unanticipated musical changes in “Water and a Seat,” there are also plenty of lyrical surprises in store as Malkmus begins singing:

How far you go and what you say
Will never keep the tides away
The sea or the wind or the fog
Cut a window through a wall.

With that, Malkmus repeats the word “hello” over and over again, overdubbing multiple voices who are screeching the word in a bizarre and creepy falsetto. Seemingly in answer to the question of “What the hell is happening here?” Malkmus and the Jicks provide a response with the song’s rousing, synth-soaked chorus: “If madness comes so much the better, touché.” If Malkmus’s crazed hellos represents madness, the chorus tells us to welcome it and, in fact, embrace it. This also brings clarity to the lyrics in the preceding verse. The insanity of life is always present — “never keep the tides away.” The act of trying to “cut a window through a wall” is a breakthrough of sorts. It allows the narrator to stick his head through the wall and screech “hello” as if he’s Jack Torrance in The Shining, yelling “Here’s Johnny!”

The song continues to present examples of the types of absurdity that the narrator confronts all the time like the “logic creed” that results in “a wicked week,” causing him to reach for “water and a seat.” It’s too much for the “snowflake kid” as he is truly going “off the grid.” The title phrase is curious; it could mean a yearning to be reclining on a beach chair in the sand next to the ocean. But “water and a seat” has a more rustic and rural connotation from 19th century England, evoking a John Constable painting.  

But as the song progresses the ridiculousness that the narrator is trying to come to grips with actually seem to be less craziness and more about the accepted commitments that come with a long-term relationship. Because of this partner, the narrator is forced to “[hang] with the brown rice clique, Tennyson and politics.” (Quick aside: How about that quintessentially Malkmusian rhyme between “clique” and “politics”? What a master.) This situation sounds like the type of bourgeois crowd that the narrator has been able to avoid until now since he “cannot dodge your draft.” “Water and a Seat” concludes with the narrator coming to grips with the predetermined course of this relationship — having a kid. He sings in the song’s final line, “I know you want that spawn just to your liking.” If he wants to stay with this partner, then he needs to come to accept this fate: “If madness comes so much the better.” All he can really say is, “Touché.”

This interpretation could be a complete misreading of Malkmus’s intention with “Water and a Seat.” He’s one of the best at infusing meaning into words that otherwise could be considered gibberish. Malkmus’s skill comes in making his words sound significant within the context of the music, not only in the way he sings the words but the sound of those words in combination with each other. In a 2005 interview, Malkmus talked about the origins of his songs:

“I just wait for things to come. I think it’s just about looking at the page. Getting things misunderstood in your mind. That’s how I like to do it — the brain slurring, words bouncing. It’s these weird John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens moments — things sort of cracking and breaking. I like that woozy, psychedelic poetry style — a couple of words that go together in a weird way. Yin-yang, black and white — that’s usually the way it works. That’s why so many album titles are two words. I just try to put myself in a place to catch all the good things. I listen to a lot of records, read books, and just try to be there.”

What makes the lyrics to “Water and a Seat” work is how they fit within the music, the constant changes in time signatures throughout the song helps convey the unsettled nature of the lyrical content. Towards the end of the track, Malkmus and the Jicks return to the repeating West Coast instrumental intro. At first, it provides a bit of relief from the madness felt during the rest of “Water and a Seat.” But as it proceeds, Malkmus adds layers of sound and searing guitar harmonies for emphasis (a technique he returns to often throughout Pig Lib) that builds musical tension towards the release of the big ending.

A few years after Pig Lib, the opening guitar intro on the first track of Matt Sweeney & Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Superwolf album bears a resemblance to the instrumental intro to “Water and a Seat”:

They are certainly two distinct pieces of music, but there’s a similarity in the repetitive nature of the riff, the tone of the guitars, and the loose, Deadish vibe that also holds a twinge of apprehension. Sweeney, who wrote all of the music on Superwolf, is an old friend of Malkmus’s. He would eventually play on Malkmus’s 2020 album Traditional Techniques and then unite as two of the members of the indie rock supergroup The Hard Quartet. Is it too much to ask for The Hard Quartet to perform the intros to “Water and a Seat” and “My Home Is the Sea” back to back for comparison?

Malkmus has a fondness for “Water and a Seat.” In 2020, Fader asked Malkmus to comment on his favorite songs from his solo albums and “Water and a Seat” was one of the selections:

“There was a lot of hype around my solo career. God bless Matador, and what Pavement opened a door to. Things like The Strokes and The White Stripes were just starting, as well as millennials putting their footprint onto indie rock, but I was still there and I was doing good. [Laughs] I’ve always done alright. So we were playing a lot of shows, and we had more time to rehearse than we usually do now, so we developed a sense of time and rhythm that was our own and generated a specific sound for that album, which I liked.

Not all of it was successful, but ‘Water and a Seat’ has a rhythm that isn’t a real time signature. If you tried to put it on a grid, it wouldn’t be possible. But the drummer broke through the grid. I think it’s a really interesting song that we came up with. Sonic Youth curated All Tomorrow’s Parties at UCLA, and we presented Pig Lib alongside Television, Boredoms, and Sonic Youth. We played a really good show, in our minds — not that history will even care — and this song reminds me of that show.”

With his first solo album, Malkmus — and certainly Matador Records — may have been thinking about the commercial possibilities of his music. “Water and a Seat” demonstrates him putting those concerns aside. The song is a call to embrace the weirdness of life — “If madness comes so much the better, touché.” It’s a challenge that Malkmus takes up again and again on Pig Lib, from maintaining bizarre lyrics for the coulda-been-a-hit chorus of “(Do Not Feed the) Oyster” to the extended jam on “1% of One.” There’s no cobweb clearing with “Water and a Seat,” but rather an insistence on more cobwebs; drape them all over the room and all over one’s person, in fact! Malkmus puts the weirdness of his music front and center once again. With it, he’s able to revel in the understanding that he has his own working band that is able to support him and follow him at every turn.

Image: John Constable, 1821, The Hay Wain, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.