Stephen Malkmus Series: “Xian Man”

From the perspective of hindsight, March 6, 2020 turned out to be a bad time for Stephen Malkmus to release an album. Within weeks of the record’s release date, Malkmus’s beloved NBA suspended their season, schools in the United States began closing down, and individual states started to shut down bars and restaurants. Travel bans and venue closings meant that Malkmus was forced to cancel his planned tour to support the just-released Traditional Techniques. 

Staying home during lockdown meant finding things to do in between doomscrolling sessions, such as learning to bake bread, adopting puppies, and obsessively listening to the latest Malkmus solo album. And it was indeed another solo album, this time credited to “Stephen J. Malkmus” on a striking, red and white, spider spinning a web cover. This would be the second release in a row to not include any signs of his long-time backing band the Jicks. In fact, Traditional Techniques was a different type of about-face for Malkmus; instead of another collection of I’m-going-to-fuck-around-with-these-keyboards-until-I-can-make-them-work-for-me songs, he embraced a new sound as he explained best to Rolling Stone before the record’s release:

“I suppose I was thinking I wanted to sing music in a quieter and lower range to see how my process would relate to that…Well, there was Chris Funk, who’s produced The Decemberists, as you probably know. I got to know him when I was making Sparkle Hard, our legendary album from way back in 2017 or whenever it was. I was just getting to know Chris and his situation. He likes all kinds of music but he’s a Fahey-type guy, he curates a thing at Newport Folk Festival. Anyway, I’m talking to him, and he’s like, ‘I would like to do something like that with you.’ Maybe he heard me absentmindedly playing a banjo or something. So that got it in my mind….It was a little bit of a risk to play like that naturally. Also, to not make it ‘unplugged,’ you know? Certainly, I like Nirvana Unplugged.  But I had to get my head around actually doing acoustic music that’s not just unplugged. That took getting other people I didn’t know, like a stand-up bass player, some world-music jammers that you hear on there, and Chris with the interest in resonating guitars and slide and things that I don’t know how to do myself. I don’t know if I always wanted to do it, but once I did, I was like how can we make it like some of those records were done? There’s a little cosplay of 1960s and ’70s recording. A lot of those boomer signifiers, like live takes and two-inch tape. You know what I mean? I decided to embrace that and see where it would go.”

The cosplay actualized into something closer to a method actor approach for Malkmus that he further delineated in the Rolling Stone interview:

“I’m a little bit like the guy they brought off the street who has the songs. The music is popular, but no one knows why or if it’s still going to be, they just know that Bob Dylan sold some records. And they found this guy. He’s kind of raw, and maybe he’s playing at a beach in Malibu or something, and Dennis Wilson saw him. (Now I’m sounding like Manson.) They’re all sitting around, and the sexy girls like it. So, they throw all these really good musicians behind him and a producer, and they make a record in like four days. That’s the concept, at least. When you have a little concept to hang yourself on, it can lighten the load.”

What are these songs that the “sexy girls” like? One example is the second track from Traditional Techniques, “Xian Man”:

The song starts with Malkmus intently strumming the 12-string guitar that he employs throughout most of Traditional Techniques and immediately begins singing: “You don’t need headlights to see.” It’s the type of New Age and West Coast dictum that one would expect from the character that Malkmus created and described in the Rolling Stone quote. In fact, it’s easy to imagine those words printed in all caps on a posterboard on the Malibu beach where this songwriter/wannabe guru is waiting to be discovered by one or two potential followers.

The second line continues with more of the guru-talk: “Open your mind back to the love of a Xian man.” The last two words are the title of the song, and that second-to-last word is pronounced “Christian.” But in presenting the song titles on the album, Malkmus substitutes “X” for “Christ” in the same way that some shorten “Christmas” to “Xmas” in an attempt to separate the secular celebration from the Christian tradition. However, “xian” is a word from Taoism, which, according to Wikipedia, translates into English as “immortal” or “wizard.” Furthermore:

“Traditionally, xian refers to entities who have attained immortality and supernatural or magical abilities later in life, with a connection to the heavenly realms inaccessible to mortals. This is often achieved through spiritual self-cultivation, alchemy, or worship by others.”

With his clever pun of supplanting “Christ” for “X,” Malkmus is able to connect to an entirely different type of spirituality. It further accentuates the portrayal of this aspirant at the center of the song and the concept that Malkmus has adopted for all of Traditional Techniques. Quite a feat by Malkmus! 

Knowing this, the entirety of “Xian Man” opens up and each line is revealed to be aphorisms imparted by the hopeful immortal. Examples include “The wheels do stop / Minus your neighbor” or “Backwardization make you amend” and “Exquisite features drive you home.” It’s difficult to parse the meaning of these teachings, which of course is the con man trick played by potential gurus. He shares just enough intriguing wisdom to hook innocent seekers, who will join him on a life-long search for enlightenment that may or may not include gifts in the form of payment or even more nefarious deeds. 

Of course, “con man” is an abbreviation for “confidence,” something that this Xian Man is not lacking. In fact, he boasts, “I’m Miles Davis better than any of you.” This is a singular type of claim and we as a society should have picked up Malkmus’s invention of using Miles Davis as an adjective. The swagger of the Xian Man is further emphasized in the song’s chorus:

Fall into my act
You will never take flack
For my blackjack stacks no more.

With these words, the Xian Man comes right out and says that everything about him is a performance and even a schtick, but it works. He imparts that he can provide protection in this collective quest for knowledge and truth. His pitch is alluring because of Malkmus’s dizzying array of rhymes — “act,” “flack”, “blackjack,” “stack” — just one more way that the Xian Man attempts to seduce. It’s quite effective. 

The assurance of the Xian Man is part of the song’s delivery as well as Malkmus told Pitchfork in a 2020 interview about each of the songs on Traditional Techniques:

“That one’s got a strut. You could imagine it in a Tarantino movie—the hot girl putting it on the stereo, she’s got a bikini on and she’s gonna dance. It’s kind of a confident dude song, as it turns out.”

But the confidence of the music within “Xian Man” turned out to be a surprise for Malkmus himself as he further explained in the Pitchfork interview:

“I thought it was gonna be more like Gordon Lightfoot. Then, once the band played, and Matt [Sweeney] played this afro-desert riff, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m in a Velvet Underground song.’ I didn’t know I was. That’s the power of listening to others.”

In this quote, Malkmus acknowledges the work of guitar player Matt Sweeney, who was an integral component for all of Traditional Techniques. Sweeney is an old friend of Malkmus’s, a fellow traveler in the world of indie rock as a member of Chavez, a long-time collaborator with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, host of the Guitar Moves web series, and a lengthy, unorthodox list of session work credits, playing with everyone from The Dixie Chicks to Run the Jewels to Neil Diamond. Sweeney is a connector, an instigator, and a good conspirator. A few years later, Malkmus and Sweeney would form The Hard Quartet together, a project born during the Traditional Techniques sessions. 

Sweeney’s “afro-desert riff” shows up after the second line of “Xian Man” and is quickly established as the musical through-line for the entire song. This musical figure by Sweeney is reminiscent of the guitar playing of Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar, notably “Kamane Tarhanin,” which is a turbulent whirlwind disguised as a rock and roll song. The guitar solo from that track could have served as inspiration for Sweeney’s blistering solo on “Xian Man.” Further cementing the link between the riff on “Xian Man” and Moctar is that Moctar played on Superwolves, the Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy album, which came out the year after Traditional Techniques. The “afro-desert” riff of “Xian Man” also brings to mind the band 75 Dollar Bill, who center their music on a Mauritanian sound, heard clearly on “Cummins Falls” from their 2016 album WOOD/METAL/PLASTIC/PATTERN/RHYTHM/ROCK.

“Xian Man” is an outlier on Traditional Techniques as it is decidedly the loudest track on the album. A record of mostly quiet songs and recordings was something new to try for Malkmus as he states in the same 2020 Pitchfork interview:

“Just on a basic level, I like louder music. That’s my bias: the things you put on a record player that start rumbling the house, and a whiskey bottle falls off the table. Those are the good times. Growing up in the ’70s, there was a lot of touchy-feely James Taylor stuff. I might have been a little mad at that, thinking, That’s not rebellion music. But then again, there’s tons of great music in that style. You have to admit it.”

“Xian Man” does share similar qualities to a few other Traditional Techniques cuts, namely a hint of the arabesque. It’s heard in the opener “ACC Kirtan,” which, if Malkmus’s vocals were wiped off the mix, could be mistaken for a release from the Water Lily Acoustics label. Malkmus was well aware of this tendency in his songwriting and musical production choices on Traditional Techniques, acknowledging it in an interview with Vulture:

“There’s a hint of colonial … you have to get on the hump of being a raider of other people’s traditions. I don’t want to do that, but if it’s even Led Zeppelin III or something, if you’re influenced by that, are you less guilty or more? You’re already playing something that white dudes already copped. I don’t know. And obviously there’s nothing wrong with getting totally stoked by some different melodic combinations.”

Beyond Led Zeppelin III, Malkmus cited a number of “60s/70s weirdo folk” albums that influenced Traditional Techniques. But as with the previous genre exploration of Groove Denied, there were experiments in Malkmus’s body of work that pointed towards an eventual album of (mostly) quiet, acoustic-based songs. One example is “No One Is (As I Are Be),” a breezily sexy, 60s-sounding track from 2011’s Mirror Traffic that ends with a modest fanfare adorned by horns and even a harmonica. The acoustic opening of the 2018 tune “Kite” could be mistaken for something off of Traditional Techniques as Malkmus plays a 12-string guitar in open tuning and laments about “intellectual wolves” before the wah-wah-powered, big Jicks sound kicks in. Even the synths-centric Groove Denied contains “Boss Viscerate,” which, despite its drum machine beat, features double acoustic guitars bobbing and weaving and playing off each other.

During the press run for Traditional Techniques¹, many interviewers asked about his run of two consecutive single-genre albums without the Jicks. Malkmus provided one revealing motivation to The Creative Independent:

“I think I just stuck with the same Gen-X mindset of doing things. It’s more of a personal thing, a more personal choice. Like, just in terms of making all these different kinds of records, that’s actually more of like… I’m not going to say it’s a mid-life crisis, it’s not, but it does have something to do with taking stock of what you’ve already done and then just trying new stuff. In my case, I don’t think it really has anything to do with the music industry. It’s more personal. Like, I’ve done the same thing a few times with the same people, so maybe now I should do something else. I was not thinking of things in, say, some of the buzzwords people use today. I was not thinking about how I should do something more ‘risk-averse’ and make a record with loose, folky guitars or something.”

First of all, this is an incredible Malkmus quote, from parading his “Gen-X mindset” to pissing on phrases such as “risk-averse” to shooting down a theory linking his genre explorations to “a mid-life” crisis when no one was saying that. But it seems as though Malkmus is explaining too much when he doesn’t have to. As explored in this series, the sounds on Groove Denied and Traditional Techniques don’t seem all that outlandish; they’re still part of the Malkmus continuum. A good analogy for these albums is a novelist working in a new voice in one novel and then trying a completely different voice for the next book. Clearly, it’s still the same writer. And besides, isn’t experimentation what an artist is supposed to be doing? We’ll take “Xian Man,” Traditional Techniques, Groove Denied, and that Gen-X mindset any day. 

With the end of this Recliner Notes series on Stephen Malkmus, it’s good to take stock of his status in 2025. He has seemingly brought his long-time backing band the Jicks to a halt, recorded two true solo albums, survived a global pandemic, and then joined a new band, The Hard Quartet. What’s next for Malkmus? More genre experimentation? Reuniting the Jicks? More albums from The Hard Quartet? Only albums from The Hard Quartet? Whatever his next moves are, we will fall into his act, and we will never take flack for his blackjack stacks no more.

1. QUICK ASIDE: Malkmus did a ton of interviews for the album, which is one reason why there are so many Malkmus quotes in this post. Not only do they provide necessary context, but, frankly, Malkmus has gotten better at interviews! He’s self-aware, willing to play if the journalist has a game or an angle, and, well, he’s hilarious. ↩︎