Surely it’s a mortality-awareness milepost to wake up one day only to find one of your generational icons has become a mortgage-paying, middle-aged dude just like you. I wish my dad was still around so I could ask him how he got his head around Blood On The Tracks (the first time it was obvious that the vicissitudes of life were fucking with the Jokerman and that he was vulnerable to attack), because that’s what it feels like to confront Face The Truth (Matador). In some ways, Stephen Malkmus’ third solo album since leaving Pavement is a return to his youthful inscrutability. “Pencil Rot” may or may not concern the darker side of sexual desire (with Malkmus lecturing his better self that the song’s devil persona, Leather McWhip, “must be stopped”). But that still doesn’t explain the eight-minute sprawl of “No More Shoes”—complete with a Rush-grade, trigonometric guitar solo—or the punk-cum-laude of “Baby C’mon,” with Malkmus exhorting his slacker peers at the top of his vocal range, “So you say that you’re too old to yell, but too young for hell?” Ultimately, Face The Truth is unmasked as a grower in the Wowee Zowee vein, too stylistically diverse, willfully weird and lyrically cryptic to be anything more than an acquired taste but too damned true to be anything less than another stone in the pathway to Malkmus’ designation as his generation’s catalog artist.

I understand you’re a father now—congratulations. Not to sound like a Shoebox greeting card, but that’s such a huge, life-changing event. Anything you’re utterly shocked to find out about yourself now that you’ve achieved parent status?
I am, thanks. Um, nothing too shocking yet, it’s just that she’s so cute and all that. That’s pretty shocking.

Are you getting any sleep?
Yeah, it’s not too bad, maybe the first few weeks were a little nerve-wracking, but lately, just a little bit of that cabin fever, maybe, from staying home a lot. And sore arms. [laughs] I move around a lot like that even when I don’t have her now. It’s weird, who knows, everyone will tell you different things. Like, ‘Wait until they’re crawling, or walking, then you’re really busy.’ Some people are like, ‘The start is really hard.’ Hell, I don’t know. I’m just a sponge now.

I hear nothing on Face The Truth about “my child coming” or a weightier consideration of all worldly things in light of this different perspective. If anything it sounds like a smart-assy, mid-period Pavement album.
There’s not too much of that going on, but I started it before we were going to have a kid or knew for sure that was happening. I was just running with the music, but not really lyrically about babies or anything like that. Primarily I was doing the music here alone in the house, anyway, with the drummer. He helped with the engineering and plays on almost every song.

John Moen, right? Now you have to share him—he’s a Decemberist, he’s been inducted into their army.
He’s committed to them for at least a year. I don’t know what his real thoughts are on it, but that’s what he’s done. I don’t know if he’s a member or anything.

Well, if Colin Meloy has got him in a costume, it’s pretty safe to assume he’s a member.
Yeah, he has to wear an outfit. That’s what he gets. I wouldn’t do that to anybody, though—that’s not my thing. [laughs]

The last time we talked, you told me, “Pavement was less a democracy than it might have appeared.” And I hear you describing this process of creating music and lyrics largely by yourself in your basement and the connection between this and Wowee Zowee seems rather complete.
Yeah, I can see that. Sometimes, on four or five of the songs, Joanna Bolme (one of the Jicks) plays bass, but the other ones I did all the music to. There’d be songs I’d play bass on with Pavement. I don’t know if it’s me reflecting back, or like you say, working in the basement. Some of the Pavement stuff was done that way; if no one else was around but the drummer, I’d just do everything myself.

You read stories about when the Stones were making records in Keith’s basement in France and maybe Mick would forget to show up for a day or whatever, and all of a sudden half the record’s done.
That happens! [laughs] The Beatles, too! That’s it, really, the big three: Beatles, Pavement and the Stones.

Your influences are really broad; there are moments on the album such as “No More Shoes” where I can distinctly hear—and I think I mean this respectfully—Alex Lifeson from Rush creeping through your solo.
That’s cool, I like that. [laughs] I don’t get compared to Rush much, but I was a big fan of theirs, I like them still. This guy was doing this progressive-rock thing in Entertainment Weekly—he’s trying to bring Mars Volta to the masses or something—and was asking me about it, and I couldn’t come up with any really good American or even North American progressive rock bands I liked. I should have mentioned Rush. But that’s pretty good. 2112 was a huge record, and a lot of kids heard that within the context of the Devo/Van Halen nexus. It was somehow weird enough; you needed those weird bands with that one thing you couldn’t understand about them, exactly. Which was kinda like Devo, then the more straight-ahead stuff like KISS or Van Halen: larger-than-life cartoon music.

Last time we talked, you mentioned that you’d been thinking a lot about the war in Iraq but that knee-jerk pacifism hadn’t always been the most successful strategy in the past. I wondered if you still felt the same way and if any of that had leaked its way into the record.
Well, it’s hard to tell. I just wanted to have something I could do with conviction, or whatever. Something that could be strong when I was singing it. I don’t know what was really behind it. It would just come out, with a bit of that John Lennon “bitterness” sound but also some sincerity, too. I’m always looking for that but don’t always know what kind of words are going to end up being assigned to it. But it can’t have a “softie, sissy” edge. Kinda tough, but not like posing or anything.

“Baby C’mon” is practically punk, a Troggs-type primitive thing—toughness as mental state as opposed to whether it wears a leather jacket or sneers at you.
Yeah, I agree, totally. But I can’t say what specific things are coming up these days to make me wanna do that. It’s more looking out at the landscape and thinking of what you can say or what needs to be said at any one time.

Next Page >>