Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
'Silence Kid' starts with a broken classic-rock intro. It's funny to hear us do that. Obviously, we weren't skillful rock stars. Then it's spinning through a lot of hooks really fast, and all of a sudden, it's over.
It's sort of irritating now - people always ask me, "You're a dad, and how's fatherhood?" If Bob Dylan or Neil Young had a kid, it didn't seem like it made them a different person. It didn't make you old right away.
It's just a compulsion to create something new and stay busy. I don't know how to do anything else. It was never exactly right. Those records came out in spite of their flaws. And because of their flaws they were good.
Everyone wants to be loved, generally. If you released a record and nobody said anything, if you didn't get any feedback from people you don't know, i.e. the press, you'd be sort of upset. To me, any press is good press.
When I was in high school, I was a late bloomer. And just like all those supermodels who said they were gawky and no one liked them, that was me - metaphorically. And so I was ready to rise like a phoenix in later times.
[As a frontman ] I'm going to wear leather pants and get blowjobs in the studio. That would be nice. They are definitely not cool, but I like them. I don't listen to them, but I like them when I hear them on the radio, normally.
Well, you know, it's a younger person, and it was maybe an effort to be a little more sincere and adult about the lyrics occasionally, which is a good thing. It's nice that it's not too self-conscious like some of our lyrics could be.
I'm sort of socially inept, so music is my way to connect to people. It's a means of socializing and having a life. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. I would just make home recordings and play them for myself. And that's not really healthy.
I just don't think people listen. I mean, they can't listen to a whole album closely without checking their iPhone or wanting to skip to their favorite song, or putting something else on, practically. That's why the zone out is a good thing.
Things tends to often [consolidate] like Disney. It's the same with music. There's Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young and Patti Smith. There's these three people that everyone seems to agree on. No matter what they like, they seem to like those three.
My wife says that I changed people's lives or ways of thinking and that I should always be proud and grateful. If I'm dismissive of what we do sometimes, a little bit, she's like, "I was a fan, you changed my life," or whatever. That's what she says.
I had another version of 'We Dance' that was kind of glam-rock. It was a little 'Taking Care of Business' mixed with Simon and Garfunkel. But on the album, I did it in a down-and-out way, like the Frogs or David Bowie or something - a little torch song thing.
Maybe I don't have the patience to make a virtue of necessity - the patience to carry something all the way through, and to actually say something. Lately, the songs are more jagged and they don't really lend themselves to that. I just take it one bit at a time.
In this achievement-based lifestyle, most of us have certain boxes we're checking to make us useful humans. But a lot of things you do as a parent are kinda invisible. There's a lot you achieve - just getting dinner on the table - that are more than making a song.
When you do a cover it's a way to get attention clicking on something. At the Quiet Music Festival, The Jicks did this Nirvana song, very unrehearsed and not important, but then all the websites were like, "They covered Nirvana!" People like covers of famous people.
If someone's really busy listening to other CDs, and worried about what's new and what's truly relevant for discourse now, maybe it isn't that interesting. To me it is, because I'm tuned into that and that's what I like, so it's interesting to me. It's all I can do.
I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.
I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
There's probably a certain confidence in your voice, or something, that is validated. You know what I mean? I'm just imagining if people didn't already say that you were cool, that you'd [have] more doubt in what you're doing. That's not so conscious, but that's part of my cosmology now.
I would just imagine there's a criticism for just about everything, if you want to take something down. No one's invincible. The Jicks are a work in progress and we don't think everything we do is the bee's knees or something, we're just trying our best to get turned on by what we're doing.
Like the song "Stereo", to me that's like, kind of hip-hop in that slacker way. There's some slackerisms mixed in with that stuff, but it wasn't really conscious, I guess. When things would get more typical rock'n'roll that was my fallback to go to those kind of lyrics instead of the alternatives.
What we're doing now, it's usually more based on records that I've bought or a projection of what I can do well now and the inner dynamics of playing with the people I'm playing with, Janet Weiss and Joanna Bolme, what we come up with. What works for us doesn't, like, have that much relation to the past.
Every song has a different genesis, or feeling. Usually the lyrics, I don't really know what it's all about, I just kinda do it. I mean, there's a combination of, like you're saying, that kind of lyrics about commitment or vaguely relationship lyrics mixed with jokey 90s Beck-style non-sequiturs and stuff.
In the early '90s, it felt like there was space - there was like an empty feel. There was nobody really doing this. Maybe the Pixies were, a little bit. Their lyrics were also disjointed, more psychosexual or something. That's part of youth, too, maybe, that you just feel like you're doing something different.
The earlier stuff is more like "this is happening to me," but now there are more songs that are accusatory or something, or more declaratory. I don't know where that voice comes from, like, "I've been down the road, we've been there and done that." That's sort of like a tougher style, or a less vulnerable style.
I know the world doesn't need maybe another of [a particular type of song] - the same thing again - but you can't help yourself. And some people like it, but you kind of know in your heart that it's a lesser version of what you've done before. But maybe it has a good tempo, or it feels fresh, but it's still not.
You know, it's people's lives, so as you get a little older, your own life narrative, I guess, invades a little more. It's not like we're traveling in separate buses to each show. It's a labor of love, so we just do it because we like it. Maybe someone's gonna move, or not want to go on a tour for some reason - that could happen, I guess.
I have a thing for Baltimore: the word itself, the place - I don't know where it comes from; it's just a weird city. I have a song called 'Baltimore,' but I'm not from there. I've driven through there a lot. We've played a couple of shows there, but it's not a big market. Some good bands come from there, though. Animal Collective and Beach House.
I was a kid, I loved music, that was our social thing. That's what we bonded on. That's what my Saturday nights were, looking to see what bands were playing. And some of those people were the coolest people ever. I want to participate in that. And I hope other people feel that and they're like, "Yeah man, this is part of it, this is why I love music."
Traditionally, when we lived here [in Portland], we have a record player in the living room, and there's lots of stuff playing, all different kinds of music. I don't listen to any of those Internet radio things. I have iTunes on my thing, but I've never bought a single thing on it. Except for "Call Me Maybe," for the kids or whatever. Carly Rae Jepsen.
Yeah, on the records, the guitars are made melodic, and I try to make it memorable. There's not much just wanking, to be honest - it's mostly melodic parts. I try not to play too many notes. It's just more instrumental music. It's a totally valid criticism if you don't like that kind of thing. It also is maybe a little anachronistic or unnecessary in a certain way.
We care if people like what we did. If you're just making records for yourself, why put them out and do all these interviews and do touring? I'm a huge music fan, and this is what I do with my artistic time. It's all I really do, except hang out with my family. I value human relationships, and it's a way for me to interact with the world and feel like I'm part of something.
It's hard to think back. I didn't even know I was going to do it, make actual records. But I was always making up songs, once I figured out that you could do it. I think it's pretty much the same, but there's less urge to get it moving out there. There was a time when it seemed like it was really super important to the audience and now it's just medium-important for people to like us. But that's okay.
With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.
One time I went to Berlin and, for some reason, everywhere I was going they had fishbowls. Like a fishbowl by your bed or a fish tank in the bar. They seem obsessed with this IKEA version of nature, which a fishbowl kind of is. They had that going on. I just don't really like having a goldfish by the side of my bed. I feel kind of sad for it, rather than happy. But I thought that was really weird. Maybe they have human fishbowls.
I hated it so much as a child. I just didn't like it when punk bands went metal, it really bothered me. It was happening left and right in the 1980s. It started I think with D.C. bands - G.I., Soul Side, they went metal. Right at that time, R.E.M. was coming out, these more kinda feminine bands, and I was more drawn to that than to go metal. And you remember MTV, with the bad metal. But even Metallica, it just wasn't my direction.
I'd like to ghost-write Liz Phair's novel. But I don't really know about that. It seems like a dignified thing to segue into as I approach the other side of 45. My hands are just full right now. There's the potential to try to write some kind of biography of Pavement - sort of a cryptic, nonfiction/fiction blowout. The story's never been told well. But that's a lot of inward-gazing that I'm not sure I want to do. I like to look out.