*Article by Adam Barnett — buzz Music Editor*
“Pop music” represents a great deal of sounds pumping out of computers, radios, headphones and even Gameboys these days. Xiu Xiu is what some might consider “avant-garde” pop music, and it makes complete sense. Deep, wish-washy vocals full of emotion, synthesizers twanging and swaying all over the sound spectrum, and an overall addictive quality that’s difficult to shake off, not that you would want to. Almost two years after the band’s seventh studio LP Dear God, I Hate Myself, Xiu Xiu is back on Polyvinyl Records with a new 7″ (“Daphny” b/w “Only Girl” – yes, “Only Girl” by Rihanna), and an album in the works with Zac Pennington of Parenthetical Girls and Sam Mickens from the Dead Science added to the lineup. Frontman Jamie Stewart along with Pennington and Mickens are heading out on a US tour (sadly sans Angela Seo), and one of their stops includes the Polyvinyl 15th Anniversary Showcase at Pygmalion Music Festival. Jamie was able to talk to buzz a little bit about the new lineup, the 7″, and a bit about orangutans:
buzz: Where are you right now?
Jamie Stewart: I’m at home. We haven’t gone on tour yet, so should be leaving in a few days.
buzz: How has that been?
JS: Good. We’re just practicing with a new lineup. People I’ve been friends with for a long time, but we haven’t done shows together, so we’re just working out a bunch of kinks right now.
buzz: That’s actually a great segue into one of my questions. You just got together with Zac Pennington (Parenthetical Girls) and Sam Mickens (The Dead Science), but you’ve all been friends for a while. So why did you decide to start playing together now as opposed to earlier?
JS: The answer is actually fairly boring. The timing just worked out. Angela Seo, who had done the touring for the past year and a half, she and I both knew that she could only do it for a year and a half because she was in law school, and that was as much time as she could take off. And Parenthetical Girls were having lineup issues, so Zac was more available… and I needed people I could trust emotionally, and whose musicianship I had respect for, and they were available. We’ve known each other forever, and we all used to live together at one point, and it would be a relatively painless transition for all of us, and we enjoy each other’s company, and have all the same influences, and have each other’s best interests at heart. So it all seemed pretty natural.
buzz: You just came back from your European tour, so they weren’t with you for that?
JS: No, Angela was still available for that, so she and I did that one. And this US tour is the first one that Zac, Sam and I will do together.
buzz: So what are you looking forward to with this new lineup as far as touring goes?
JS: I suppose what I look forward to with every tour is us trying to do our best and having a chance to play a lot of shows.
buzz: Makes sense, it’s a good answer.
JS: It’s a little boring, a little dorky, however, it’s unfortunately true.
buzz: You were recently signed to Polyvinyl, and now you’re a part of the 15th anniversary showcase. So how’s that working out for you?
JS: They’re great, really. Excellent staff. They’re very hardworking, focused, super organized, really nice and funny people. Very, very responsive, very into people being themselves musically, very supportive of people being creative and having less-than-everyday types of ideas. I feel very, very lucky to get to work with them.
buzz: How did you end up getting hooked up with them?
JS: Kind of by chance. We’re really good friends with the band Deerhoof, and they had just signed to them. And we were doing a tour with Deerhoof, and we were doing a small show… in Indiana. And the guys from Polyvinyl came out to meet Deerhoof, because they had just signed to them and hadn’t met yet, and they saw us play, and Adam who works at Polyvinyl bought our most recent record and talked to me over the internet, and said that he liked it and was wondering if we would send him anything new that we were working on. And we sent it to him, and luckily for us, they liked it and we started working together…
buzz: I was over at Polyvinyl, and they were playing the unmastered, unsequenced version of the new record coming out a while from now, and it sounded a lot more toned down from your previous releases. What stuff have you done consciously or unconsciously on this new record that differs from past records?
JS: Well, if I’ve subconsciously done it, then I’d have no idea what it was.
I tend to not think about that so much, and just let the songs evolve in the way that they’re going to evolve at the time.
Once in a while, we’ll begin a record and make some conscious choices about how we want to approach it, but for this one we just tried to write the best songs that we could write based on what was happening in our lives right now, and where are interests were musically, and try not to argue with the preverbal news, and just let it be itself. We had no plans for this one other than trying to do our best on it.
buzz: It’s always a good thing to do your best. With this new lineup, what is the songwriting dynamic like…?
JS: The songwriting dynamic is incredibly different than how it used to be. Before, I wrote most of everything, and Sam and Zac and Angela all write songs, so now everybody’s working on lyrics for different songs, everybody is bringing in beginnings of songs or completed songs . The focus is much broader than it was before, which I appreciate.
buzz: With “Daphne,” I saw that you put the lyrics to the song on the back of the 7” sleeve, which I feel is not that common these days, especially given the heavy subject matter. Why did you decide to do that?
JS: Well, considering what the subject matter was, I wanted to make sure that it was not obscured at all. The song is about a friend of mine who got arrested and was raped by the police that arrested her. It was something that we didn’t want to be missed. So, by having the lyrics in the most obvious place, we’re attempting to keep her experience in the open as much as possible… I would like to say that the friend of mine who the song is about is completely on board with us doing this… I want to make it clear that she wants people to know about this…
buzz: I was cruising around your website a little bit, and it seems like you put news articles about Libya and stuff like that. Do you do things with political advocacy often?
JS: Not directly. After every tour, we take some of the money we made on tour and donate it to a particular cause…
buzz: What different causes have you donated to?
JS: The last one we did from this European tour was for the famine in Somalia and in east Africa. We haven’t decided what we’re gonna do for this next US tour. In 2010, all of our donations went to this organization called “Free the Slaves,” which works against human trafficking. In the past we’ve done other things for different environmental groups and for planned parenthood.
buzz: Also on your website, there was a post with a bunch of different pictures of primates, and I was just wondering what that was about.
(Typically I don’t include laughs in my interviews, but this was a good, hearty laugh.)
JS: I just saw Planet of the Apes, and they looked kinda cool. The movie was super terrible, but I thought how they depicted the different primates as being emotional beings was interesting, but that was it…
buzz: They look cool.
JS: They’re beautiful creatures. I hadn’t really ever thought of them that way as being beautiful before. But that terrible movie opened my eyes to the wonders of primates.
buzz: Do you have a particular favorite kind of primate?
JS: Probably the orangutan. They’re so unfathomably strange-looking. Gorillas are great too. I think they’re all pretty wonderful-looking.
buzz: If you could hang out with an orangutan for one day, what would you do with it?
JS: I’d give him a back massage, probably, I guess.
buzz: Do you think the orangutan would give you one back?
JS: I would be terrified to have an orangutan give me a back massage. He’d probably accidentally pull my arms off or something. Maybe it could cradle me in its arms or something.
buzz: I would love to see a picture of that. Maybe it’s a future album cover.
JS: I’ll see what I can do. I’ll go to the zoo and talk to them tomorrow. Or I could go to Borneo and organize it myself.
buzz: Back to the 7”. Sorry I went on a tangent.
JS: I’d much rather talk about orangutans.
buzz: Well, we could just forget about the 7”
JS: Either way.
buzz: In contrast to Daphne, your cover of “Only Girl in the World” is pretty dance-y and awesome. I’ve shown it to a bunch of my friends. Why did you decide to cover Rihanna, and why that song?
JS: I live in kind of a stupid little down in North Carolina called Durham, and there’s one queer bar in town. which is a queer bar, but it’s essentially a dyke bar, or mostly just dykes hang out there. They have pretty decent dance nights there on Friday and Saturday, so I go there regularly. That song came on, and when you put that song into the context of a southern dyke bar, it takes on a very different meaning than if it’s in a general context, if you hear it at Sears or whatever over the loudspeaker.
And all of the women in the bar ran onto the dance floor and became completely elated by it. And it was this really wonderful moment of the most mainstream possible song that there is being completely recontextualized by this smallish and oppressed subculture. It was beautiful how sort-of naturally and freely this was occurring. I think it’s a cool song and everything, but covering it was essentially about trying to honor that moment more so than it was about the song itself.
buzz: What’s your favorite release of the year so far?
JS: (Clicks tongue) I like the new Prurient record a lot.
buzz: What do you like about it?
JS: (Pause) This is why I’m not a music journalist. (Pause) It’s extraordinarily harsh sonically. You can even say it’s brutally harsh. It has a really sort of terrible and awful beautifulness to it as well. And Dominick and I are friends too, so it’s always particularly pleasing when a friend makes a really excellent record. You have a small amount of insight into it, because you know the person who made it. But when you make something that’s objectively, totally beautiful, it makes it that much more exciting to listen to.
Who: Xiu Xiu, Braid, Deerhoof, Japandroids + More – Polyvinyl 15th Anniversary Showcase
When: Saturday, Sept. 24 @ 2:30 (Xiu Xiu @ 6:40)
Where: The Highdive – Outdoor Stage
Ages: 19+
Cost: $25 in advance ($30 at the gate); free with festival wristband
Buy tickets here
Xiu Xiu – “Daphny”
buzz Magazine: Music 
Posted on September 14, 2011
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