Xiu Xiu transcript

Here's the unedited transcript of an interview I did with Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu a couple of weeks ago. I'll post the link to the finished article when it's published Sunday week. He was very nice and I was quite intimidated. At the end I gushed to him about how his music had helped me to stop holding back with my own songwriting, and he was very gracious.
The interview ended suddenly because he got another call, but we were heading into uncomfortable territory anyway so I think he was glad to get rid of me!

Why are you so prolific?
A couple of reasons that I have any idea of, I mean I don’t know what the actual full answer is, but partially I spent a much larger part of my life being in bands that nobody was paying any attention to whatsoever, and weren’t putting records out. It’s only been since I was probably 30 that I’ve had the opportunity to really do anything that anyone could possibly hear, so I think part of it is partially making up for lost time and partially feeling like I’ve possibly fooled someone and I better take as much advantage of it as possible, for as long as its possible to do.
And also since I was 11 I’ve wanted to play in bands, so it’s been the thing that I love to do more than anything else anyway, so it’s not like it’s a hassle or anything. I feel incredibly fortunate to get to make as many records as we make.
You’re a touring demon these days.
Yeah, pretty much. It makes it impossible for me to have any kind of social life, so I don’t really have anything else to do other than work on records. Everyone in the neighbourhood forgot who I was cause I was gone so long.
You’ve said writing songs is not cathartic for you. Why do you do it then?
I don’t really know. I’m not really exactly sure what the personal benefit is for me, or what the underlying personal psychological benefit is it, in lieu of catharsis. It’s funny, I certainly feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction from working on music, but not enough to really explain the overwhelming compulsion to do it. I’m certain there must be some regular reason, but it’s not necessarily how easy it is to do it. I’m sure the reason is really boring.
Are your records slowly becoming more accessible?
There’s nothing that we did when we started that’s really different to what we do now insofar as attempts to be accessible or not accessible. It’s not really something that we think about particularly. We certainly since we started are more popular than when we started but I think that has more to with just that we tour a lot, and are on a supportive record label, and have put a little bit of work into people finding out who we are, and that generally equals the by-product of accessibility, which is people knowing who the band is. With different records we’ve been more interested in pop music and more interested in experimental music, like with the new one that we have, we were very interested in pop music and we made a conscious effort to be more accessible, but with the previous one we were more interested in experimental music, although there was a lot of pop on it. It wasn’t that it was tremendously less successful than the one before that which was more pop oriented, but it was a little less popular. Just in terms of the number of records we sold. There wasn’t a big difference but there was a little difference.
So now you’re trying to win back fans with a pop record?
I think I just said we weren’t doing that with this record. I would expect it to probably be a little more popular than La Foret because it is more pop oriented. But I don’t think it’s a better record than La Foret, I just think it’s a more pop oriented record.
What about the moods expressed? Are you more cheerful now than you were?
Probably, I mean fortunately my life has gotten better and the life of people around me has gotten a little better. But then again, things in politics have gotten worse, almost the worst imaginable. It’s interesting, feeling that happen, an incredible relief as well. I actually could not have gone with life if things were as bad as they were during the making of the first three records. It was an unbearably horrible time of my life, and I thank God that it has improved.
Were the improvements of your own making?
Mostly circumstantial, leading to not feeling so overwhelmed by negative events that it’s possible to make some decisions that are not completely saturated in intense depression and complete tragedy.
I’m not sure how willing you are to talk about the actual events...
My dad went through a really intense mental illness and ended up killing himself. A very close friend of mine…it’s so dramatic to say this, but really betrayed me in a really horrible way. A lot of drinking and drug problems with people around me and personally, just dealing with suicidal issues personally. Now I fortunately live in a safe neighbourhood, but before I was living in incredibly dangerous neighbourhoods, in different parts of Oakland and San Jose. I’m not teaching now but at the time I was teaching at an incredibly difficult school to be at, and the student population coming from most economically depressed areas in the united states. It’s difficult to see that all the time. All these things were happening, all at the exact same time, and a bunch of other boring stuff. I think if any one of those things was happening, it probably would have been difficult enough, but it was just really all that stuff happening all at once. It lead to a pretty severe and violent nervous breakdown on my part, which thankfully things have cleared, because apparently I don’t deal with stress very well!
I was having a rough time, but fortunately things are a little better now. My father’s in a better place and my family clung together during it, I moved to a safe neighbourhood. But the kids at that school, their lives are still a wreck.
What did your dad have to do with Pro Tools?
He worked at DigiDesign on a different program than ProTools. Actually the setup that I have is all just from pieces that he, I will say ‘borrowed’ in quotes. It’s all like weird prototypes and stuff. I actually had to take it in to get serviced, and the guys who worked at the DigiDesign place were like flabbergasted at the setup I had. Half of it had never been released on the market. They were really amused by it and ended up giving me some stuff for free. But he had been in the music business before that, since the 60s. He’d been a record producer and a musician, he taught me a lot about music.
I have a single by one of his bands, We Five. Did you have Tom Jones and Billy Joel in your loungeroom when you were a kid?
I was pretty young when all that stuff was going on, so I don’t remember.
Were you close to your father?
When I was growing up, no, not at all, it veered between never seeing him at all because he was working, or him being in a severe depression and unavailable. It wasn’t until I was probably 25 or 26 that we spent any time together at all. We actually played in a band together, which was really incredibly fun.
He had a nickname in that band, didn’t he?
Mittens. He wore mittens when he played bass.
Tell me about playing music in the 90s with stars from the 80s LA rock scene.
It was just totally by chance. I guess it doesn’t really exist now because of the internet, but at the time people just met each other musically through classified ads in terrible rock magazines. I was really into trying to become a real bass player, and answered an ad from a weird drummer named Barry Schneider, who I’ll never forget as long as I live beause he was my landlord for a while. He’s a very big hulking heavy metal looking guy, and it turned out that he wore a wig, I came into the house one day and he was totally bald, and then he put his wig on me, which totally grossed me out. So he very very briefly played with this producer named Geza X, who was in the Mommymen and produced Black Flag and the Germs and stuff like that. So anyway he introduced me to Geza and through Geza I met people from Devo and (?) and Paul from the Screamers, (?) and people like that. They were all super super nice to me, I kind of didn’t realise until after I moved away what a big deal all those people were. They really snapped me out of playing really wanky fusion bass, they were like ‘quit fucking around!’ I was very very fortunate, I would probably be on a cruise ship playing a six string bass had I not met those people.
Were you writing songs all that time?
I think I was trying to write songs but I didn’t really know how to write songs. Basically writing a random verse and a random chorus and then taping them together and pretending they made a song. In fact, one of the people named David Kendrick, whom I owe my life to, he used to play in Sparks and Devo, he listened to a tape I made, and told me that it wasn’t songs, it was just pieces taped together. Of course my ego was bruised, but thankfully at that point I started listening to music and paying a little more attention. Had I not, I’d probably on the cruise ship, as I said.
There seem to be some aspects of the cut-up aesthetic remaining in your music.
That certainly didn’t go away entirely, I’m still into juxtapositions of stuff, but hopefully it’s a little more coherent.
When did you stop holding back in your songwriting?
Probably right before I turned thirty. I’d been in a bunch of bands that nobody really gave a shit about, they were ok but not great, and I told myself that if nothing happened by the time I would turn thirty, I would just accept music as a hobby and go to grad school. And so it was actually my aforementioned Dad…I spent a whole lot of time working on promotion with the other bands and not that much working on the records. Cause I was freaked out I didn’t know what I was doing, but that obviously lead to not very interesting records. And my Dad told me not to worry about that at all, and just try to make the best record that you could, and then the promotion aspect would take care of itself. So then that record ended up being the first Xiu Xiu record, which is not by any means a total genius masterpiece, but it had the kernel of everything I’ve worked on after that.
It’s often seen as immature, the domain of teenagers, to express such intense emotions.
It is a funny thing, I’m 34 and very very definitely approaching things from a kind of teenage obsession and lunacy about some of the subjects. But it’s certainly not intentional, largely a part of what we’re trying to do is write about things that are going on in our real lives. At the time that the band started and currently a lot of those things have been kind of overdramatic and crazy, so that commitment to writing about real things lead to it being overdramatic and crazy rather than me deciding arbitrarily to write about dramatic things.
Is is strange to inspire such intense reactions from younger audience?
I don’t know if it’s strange, I feel fortunate that people have any kind of reaction whatsoever.
It seems you inspire either intense obsession or aversion.
That seems to be people’s reactions to me as a person, generally, in our out of music. So it’s no big shock.
What does your sister think of Niece’s Pieces?
That was kind of bad news, it did not go over well. At the time that it was written no-one in my family was really paying any attention to anything, so I figured I could write about anything really directly and not have it affect anybody, but that was definitely not the case. Since then we still write about whatever we want to write about but are maybe a little more elusive about the specific person that it’s about, just in an attempt to spare the subject matter’s feelings. We definitely don’t want to make anybody feel bad. That was a big traumatic mess in my family.
If so much of your music is about intense family trauma, why are you in a band with a cousin?
I’m not really sure how to answer the second part, but just when things were falling apart she really helped me out a lot. It seemed like stuff was kind of falling apart with her also, so it was good to have somebody who was cool and who cared about what was going on, and it seemed like she needed some kind of focus, a reason to get out of bed in the morning. So it was definitely a very mutually beneficial arrangement. And totally just by chance she happened to be a fucking badass musician, so it’s all for the good.
Is she Little Panda McElroy? Where does that name come from?
Yeah. Just being drunk
What happened to Sex Life Of Destruction?
I don’t know. One story recently got published in a zine. But the person literally begged me for it, and I kept telling him – and this is why Sex Life Of Destruction is now banished – he told me that he wanted four stories for it, so I sent him four and he only liked one. I kept telling him they weren’t very good, and then he told me they weren’t very good.
Are they really not very good?
I mean it’s funny. I think if I just told someone the premise of each of the stories, then it would be funny, but I’m not a good enough writer to actually make it a compelling read.
Can you tell me the premise of the published story?
OK. In 1996 or 97, IBOPA (Indestructible Beat Of Palo Alto) had some major label interest, and there was this A&R guy who I became friends with. He came up to Santa Fe to hang out. We were halfway friends and also I was halfway trying to get him to sign my band. I didn’t know how independent record stuff worked at all, and now that I’m a little wiser I would never in a billion years take this route, but then I didn’t know any better. So anyway, long story short, he ended up wanting to do it with me but I didn’t want to sleep with him because I didn’t want to be in that position. We were also incredibly drunk, unbelievably drunk. While we were halfway messing around, I tried to breakdance and I cut open my chin really badly and blood was streaming down my chin, and he started giving me a blowjob on the corner, and then all this blood was streaming down my chin into his hair. The climax of the story, so to speak, was when I came there was this incredibly disgusting mixture of blood and come all over everything. And then we went back to my house and reenacted the entire thing. Some of the details of the story which make it more funny are a little bit lost in the retelling. Unbelievably, he and I stayed friends for a couple of years after that.
Round the time of The Promise, you said Xiu Xiu only had a couple more albums in them. Is it an indefinite project now?
My pat answer to that is that we’ll keep doing stuff until we start to suck. I mean, until that time, it seems like the setup that we have, we could probably continue to do it and not have it become dull. And hopefully we’ll know when we suck. I’m at the point where everybody who’s involved with me has other outlets for music, so it’s not like we have this incredibly monolithic, overwhelmingly dull thing. If somebody wants to do something else, they can do whatever else they want.
Has Xiu Xiu always been your band?
Never consciously, I think people’s perception of that probably has more to do with the fact that I’m the singer than anything else. Radiohead is not really Thom Yorke’s band, and the Smiths is not really Morrissey’s band. It’s not a clear subject because I am the only one who has been in the band since the beginning, but there’s no way on earth that anything could have successfully happened if I was just by myself. And the lineup now is pretty regular, Caralee and I have been touring together for almost three years, the people on my recordings are pretty set. We have a new person joining, who has actually been playing on recordings since Knife Play, but he’ll be joining for touring and recording all the time.
In a Pitchfork interview you said The Airforce was about making other people feel bad. Can you elaborate on that?
Although I don’t imagine anyone who was involved would read this in Australia, I don’t know if I can elaborate on that. I was not necessarily a good person to a lot of people last year.
Have you been to Bishop, CA?
Yep.