The Thousands

Jamie Stewart’s band Xiu Xiu are intense. Actively experimental yet equally rock, they juxtapose noise and industrial sounds with hooks and riffs making music that’s disorienting, heavy, intoxicating, and beautiful. With lyric matter pulled from real life events – in the band member’s lives, or people close to them – their songs alternate between creepy, sad, cryptic, poignant, and funny.

ROOM40 and Popfrenzy are bringing Xiu Xiu and High Places to Australia. YAY! Here, Wilfred talks with Jamie about jealousy, humor, and Ivy League brats having phony shamanistic experiences.

Wilfred Brandt: I read that you cry every time you hear ‘Fast Car’. Are there other songs that make you cry? (pause) I cry every time I hear, ‘Do You Realize?’.
Jamie Stewart: That’s a good song. It’s funny you should say that because, I never really got into The Flaming Lips, but I was filling my bird feeder last night and found myself inadvertently humming that song (both laugh). ‘New Dawn Fades’ by Joy Division hits home in a pretty intense way. A friend of mine really loves the Leona Lewis hit, ‘Bleeding Love’, and she sings it in this very sweet voice – I think she doesn’t realise how fragile her voice sounds. I don’t know if it makes me cry, but it chokes me up.

WB: What’s your latest obsession?
JS: I’m just mostly obsessed with feeling like a self-pitying failure.

WB: (laughs) Why does that seem like a recurring theme for you?
JS: It’s so f*cking annoying! OK, basically lately I’ve been obsessed with being – this is so f*cking dumb and embarrassing – I’ve been obsessed with being super f*cking jealous of people. Which is not something that I really ever dealt with before. I usually just didn’t care. I was just thinking about it today, I was like, ‘oh my God, I’ve been in this annoying headspace for months!’

WB: Why are you jealous of other people, what are you jealous of?
JS: I don’t even wanna tell you (laughs)…

WB: (laughs) It’s just interesting, other people would be very jealous of you. Because you have a career, you can travel the world, you make amazing music. Has it gotten better as you’ve gotten older?
JS: NO! I’ve gotten worse – which is totally preposterous. I’ve gotten better about not caring what certain groups of people think of me and I’ve gotten infinitely worse about what I think about certain groups of people.

WB: You’ve talked about striving to make music that’s honest and open, and "keep that tradition going". Who are some of the bands that you’d site as inspiration?
JS: Certainly The Smiths. And Russian composer Shostakovich, a lot of the pieces of his that I really love were about his experience during World War II. With Shostakovich it was wonderful to find out somebody who was so far away culturally and historically was approaching music in the exact same way – and instrumental music. That was really an incredibly huge inspiration for us when we started.

WB: I think it’s that much more poignant when you find somebody from a different era that is doing something similar.
JS: Yeah… it’s funny, the same friend who sings the Leona Lewis song called me two nights ago. I was INSANELY drunk, and I recently got this book of Japanese haikus. There was this one haiku that was so f*cking funny! It was really remarkable that something that was written 400 years ago was still insanely funny – and the person meant for it to be funny. It was wonderful to know that there’s this eternal strain amongst humans.

WB: I love when you watch an old 1940s or 50s film that has deadpan or black humor. ‘Cuz you sort of think, like, ‘they didn’t make jokes like that back then’. I wanted to ask you about humor. You use humor in your music. And thinking of The Smiths using humor too…
JS: Oh yeah. That was a really big influence for me as well. In addition to writing truthfully, they were writing about the most miserable human experiences but realizing it was so miserable that all you could really do was… not make a joke of it, but make a joke about it. We’re writing about real experiences that we’ve had not because we want people to connect to us but because we want people to connect to just music in a general way. I mean when I have listened to Shostakovich and been really moved by it, it wasn’t like I felt as if I somehow knew Shostakovich; I was moved because I knew he was writing about something that was a real human experience. And humor works in the same way.

WB: What are some musicians or bands currently making music that really drive you nuts? Or a certain trend?
JS: I don’t like that it is about having a sort of phony shamanistic, spiritual experience. I don’t like that it is about sort of insipid, uneducated appropriation of Latin American music and of African music. I really am fucking blown away at the sort of semi-racism of the tribalistic face-painting aesthetic. It just makes me wanna f*cking kill somebody, I can not believe that people are really doing this sh*t!

WB: Yeah. It’s very postmodern that people are like, ‘but I think it looks cool – why does it matter what culture it came from?’
JS: Because f*cking white assholes have been taking stuff from other people’s cultures FOR-EVER. That style of music in the U.S. came out of northeast, Ivy League, overeducated people. And it’s those people’s families who were basically colonialists, and earned all their money from colonialism. That that mindset came out of children of those types of families makes me wanna throw up. That, ‘you can take whatever you want, whenever you want’, entitlement has become sort of a "underground", but not-really "underground" aesthetic.

WB: I get annoyed with like, Antony and the Johnsons or Patrick Wolf, almost every time someone does something that’s sort of avant garde or theatrical they do it in the same WAY? Like they do it with the same subject matter and art direction. [Xiu Xiu], when you do something that’s theatrical you’re dealing with new, contemporary issues that people run into every day, it’s not like, ‘oh, I left my boat by the shore and I hiked to the mill’. F*ck THAT.
JS: (laughs) But I think it’s just what you’re looking for in music. If you’re looking for music to relax you? (laughs) Then maybe you should listen to music that is based in fantasy. But if you’re looking for music that you’re hoping to have a genuine emotional connection with then maybe you should listen to music that comes from a different source. That [fantasy] approach to music used to really be upsetting to me. But then different people need different things out of music. This is what I tell myself – in a vague and completely pointless attempt to be upset by fewer things, which for me is totally impossible – when I get super angry at a band, just to cool myself off. But its a total rationalization, I don’t actually believe it. But I want to believe.