Embracing The Uncertainty

For some reason it seems incongruous that Stephen Malkmus and his family are living in Berlin these days. Nothing against the German capital, far from it – it's almost bohemian in vibe since the Berlin Wall came down and an incredible place to visit, fast becoming a tourist mecca – but maybe that's the conundrum. Ever since his days fronting slacker indie legends Pavement, Malkmus has seemed almost contrary in nature, preferring to swim against the tide of popularity instead of going with the flow, inadvertently setting the pace for the indie hordes rather than reacting. He moved to Portland way before it became the hipster enclave of today and now he's decamped to even more exotic climes, yet whatever his reason for uprooting he seems perfectly content in his new adopted home.

“It's nice this time of year for sure, it's really a laidback summer place,” he tells of Berlin in his trademark semi-wasted drawl. “It's a big city like New York or London, but it's less crowded and just kinda laidback in a certain way. You probably wouldn't think that – a lot of Australians have been here so you might have been here – but in my mind I assume that some people think of it as some upstart party town where there's a lot of graffiti, but it's not really like that – it's all wide roads and parks and bicycling everywhere, it's great.”

With his band The Jicks having just completed a European tour – still on the promo trail for 2011's Mirror Traffic, the fifth long-player of his post-Pavement career – it must have almost been like a hometown run for the newly-minted European resident.

“For me it wasn't so far to go, but the other people were pretty worn out,” Malkmus continues. “It was a fun tour. We went to Israel – I'm wearing some Israeli underwear right now, but I'm looking at them and they're already decaying. They're cheap – they were a gift. I hadn't been there since the '90s, I've never been there with a band. People were really psyched at the show – they were really nice and really wanted to interact with us, it was great. Thinking back on it the energy that some people give, I wish I would jump around more or something [on stage], but I can't really pretend to jump around. It was great trip though.

“We went to Sicily – that was great, we played some boutique festivals – and going to new places is cool, but also you're working and you want to be back with your family too at times. If we could just play shows in Berlin only, that would probably be the best for me technically, but that's not how it works. But we get to go to nice places and we don't abuse ourselves too hard with the touring – it's a reasonable amount – and we want to play and we want people to have a relationship with us still, and that's the best way. This is our version of direct marketing – we just go to your town and you can see us play.

“You need to [tour] just to keep a band going. I think if you're just a bedroom artist you can just release stuff and play a couple of shows now and then, and you can have an existence and be part of the dialogue and have people hear you, but if you're going to have four or five people in a band then you have to tour to keep the musicians employed – otherwise everyone's going to go broke,” he laughs. “That's the business.”

In recent times The Jicks have undertaken a line-up change – former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss left the group to reunite with Carrie Brownstein in Wild Flag, being replaced by ex-Joggers skinsman Jake Morris – but Malkmus believes that the change has been beneficial. Plus he comes up with a patentable idea in the process.

“He's perfect for us, it's really fun and I'm really happy with him,” he enthuses of Morris. “We were hitting our stride at the end of this tour just now, last week the place where we played one of our shows was really hot – it was a club and I guess that makes you play more intensely too, when you're completely drenched in sweat. It's been really hot in Europe the last couple of weeks, that's something to remember – you should probably put heating pads all over you and you'd play better, although your clothes would get soaked and that's a problem if you're travelling light like the modern traveller does today.”

According to Malkmus the songs from Mirror Traffic are translating well live, even if some feel that its producer Beck may have been sabotaging the size of the project's sound from within.

“It's the kind of thing where we liked the record fine how it is, but now that we've played them live a bunch it sounds way better now – friends of mine who saw us in Cologne the other day were, like, 'I'm starting to think that Beck fucked you up!'” he chuckles. “Everything's just more powerful-sounding now. The record was kind of purposefully medium-small in a way. I was hearing this band The Black Keys in a cafe the other day – everyone loves this band, and they're really cool guys and I like them too – but then also it's this small, Danger Mouse sound; small but cool sounding. I think Beck was doing something like that. It's not like some battle to get to the biggest sound. But live it's just a bigger sound, it's more in-your-face. But I like the Mirror Traffic record, it's cool.

“It was cool working with Beck, he's great. He's just a straight-up person – he's very clear about what he's doing, and he doesn't turn up to the studio wasted or anything. He's ready to work and he's level-headed. He was present – he was listening and he was into his duties as a producer. It wasn't like he was just stamping his name on the back of the record or something, it was cool.”

And in great news for fans of Malkmus, he declares that The Jicks have a heap of new material ready to go.

“We've got tons of tunes, they're just waiting to be recorded really,” he shrugs. “I mean there's already a million of them, and they're out there on YouTube if you're really interested – they just don't sound that good because they're recorded on hand-held tape recorders at shows and stuff. ”

The songs on Mirror Traffic were shorter and hookier than the Jicks material which directly preceded it, which had a predilection for longer, jammier songs – which way is his muse dragging him this time?

“There's a couple of potentially sprawling ones,” Malkmus ponders. “There's some energetic numbers and there's some trippy numbers and there's some catchy ones too. I think it's in the same boat as Mirror Traffic, except I expect to record it differently so it'll just naturally sound different. I expect maybe even more jammy performance things, at least from the drummer's side and perhaps even the guitar, but we'll see. I've got to just get in there and see how it sounds.”

Malkmus' post-Pavement body of work is now basically as large as his work with his former outfit – is he proud of what he's achieved since Pavement called it quits back in 1999, and is he happy being a Jick?

“Yeah, I'm proud of it. I just keep plugging away,” he tells. “I think the band is a good live band and they can hold their own. We don't have any major hits really – or even any big dumb songs that we can play at festivals where everyone loses their shit – but we do have solid songs and good jams, and it's always different when we play, so that might be interesting. I think those are the benefits, but we could use a couple more festival bangers. Although not a lot of people have more than one of those, unless you're like a legend.

“But I feel like it's a band, totally. It's a band with a songwriter, but it sounds like these people and I willingly want it to be that way. A band's more than just its songwriter, and they enable me to do that stuff in a way where it comes easy – musically and in all facets of being in a band – and that's what you're hoping for at the end of the day.”

Even spending most of 2010 on the road with the Pavement reunion basically reinforced his love for The Jicks.

“The Pavement thing was really fun, but it didn't feel like it was the present for me and I don't really like to feel as a musician as if I'm just going through the old motions – I wouldn't want to do that forever,” he ponders. “It's hard to say though, I loved playing some of those old Pavement songs and the guys were great, but there was no forward creative motion in it anymore, so I guess it's nice to be in a band that's just about new songs and the questions and uncertainty of what might come next. And I just work efficiently with this group – we have a mature relationship I think which is nice. The divisions of labour are good, we all have our roles – on stage and off – and it seems to work.”

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks are playing the following shows:

Tuesday 25 September - Brisbane Festival, Brisbane QLD
Wednesday 26 September - Brisbane Festival, Brisbane QLD
Friday 28 September - Rosemount Hotel, Perth WA
Saturday 29 September - Wave Rock Weekender, Hyden WA
Tuesday 2 October - Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine VIC
Wednesday 3 October - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 4 October - Transit Bar, Canberra ACT
Friday 5 October - Factory Theatre, Sydney NSW