Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart on Berlin vs. L.A., Surviving the Industry, and the Death of Music Criticism

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I've followed Jamie Stewart's musical career as the bandleader of Xiu Xiu since 2002's total shock to the system Knife Play, and since then every subsequent record has been a total surprise, which is something to always value in the current musical climate. The band's latest album, 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips (try saying that three times fast) just came out last week, and a few months ago I had the pleasure of hopping on a call with Jamie, who currently resides in Berlin, to talk about his extensive career and what drives his creative spirit. Check it out:

How's Berlin?
It's mixed.

Why is it mixed?
I moved here about two years ago. From L.A., I was thinking it would be an entirely utopian fresh start, and I have learned a very adult lesson that no place is perfect. I still like it, I'm glad that I live here, but almost to a comic degree, the things that I love about Los Angeles are absolutely not in Berlin. And the things I hate about Los Angeles are redeemed by Berlin, but also vice versa. They're almost polar opposites in every degree, which is kind of funny. I could live in both places.

What do you miss most about L.A.?
The first one is gonna make me sound like a fucking hog, but the food in L.A. is really excellent, and the food in Berlin really fucking sucks. This is gonna make me sound like a psychopath, but L.A. is obviously not the safest city in the world. One of the reasons I moved is that I got tired of being scared that I was gonna get murdered all the time—but I realized that I found that negative, teenage edginess kind of exciting. I'm really glad that Berlin is safe—I'm very, very glad to live in a safe city—but because of that, I find Berlin just a tiny bit dull.

But it's stupid that I find it dull. It's preposterous that I find it dull. But having, for so long, lived with knowing that something insane could happen at any moment, all of the time, was in fact interesting—and, in a lot of ways, very inspiring. Now, I'm living in a place where it's very unlikely that something insane is going to happen—which frankly, the adult part of my life prefers. But the lame teenage part of my life kind of misses it a little bit.

L.A. is close to a lot of nature, Berlin is not. The weather in L.A., obviously, is spectacular. The weather in Berlin is—except for maybe two months in the summer, which is incredibly nice—pretty grimy. Berlin is not un-diverse, but compared to Los Angeles, which is one of the most diverse places in the entire world...But Berlin does have a lot going for it, there's just some specific things that L.A. has that it does not have, that I miss. Being a lifelong and hometown Angelino, it's kind of in my blood—but I will adjust, and happily.

Have you engaged with the club scene in Berlin at all?
I'm still really spooked by COVID. I never really got my social life muscles back in shape. I don't really go out at all anymore. I used to go dancing a lot. Angela, my bandmate, used to live in Berlin, and when I'd come and visit her before she was in the band, we'd go dancing all the time. But, I mean, fuck, COVID was, what, four years ago? I haven't been dancing in four years. Also, because we're touring a lot again, I'm not wanting to put myself into a COVID-risky situation, because playing shows every night is a very COVID-risky situation. I'm just trying to minimize those kind of situations, because I'm about to be you thrown into the cooker. My friends' bands' tours still regularly get canceled. The people that we share our studio with had to cancel a bunch of their rehearsals for an upcoming tour because of COVID. It's still a very real problem and liability for bands. So I'm much more of a house cat than I used to be.

How do you feel about touring these days in general? You've been doing this for such a long time.
It's interesting, because now we're touring under better circumstances than we've ever toured under. But, still, half of the places we play are pretty grimy, with a lot of DIY vibes—which, in a political and sort of heartwarming way, is nice. But from a practical standpoint, having done it for so long, I'm just like, "I just want it to work and for it to be easy," and half of the time it doesn't work and it's not easy.

The reality of where we're at in terms of a band, and what our draw is, realistically half of the places we play are pretty small, DIY places. We're very happy to play them, and the pleasure and extraordinary privilege that it is to play is still genuinely moving to me. But the getting in a van part, driving all over the place, that part of it I am thoroughly over. I've had enough of it—but, it's clearly worth it for the chance to play.

You've probably heard this, but there's an old saying in country music that you don't get paid for playing a show—you get paid for the one hour of playing a show, you don't get paid for the other 23 hours of the day. I feel very much that way, although I very much appreciate the opportunity to play shows. I feel really lucky to still be able to do it.

I've been following your catalog since the days of Knife Play, and to this day I still don't know what I'm going to get from a new Xiu Xiu record. Tell me about how you operate creatively these days.
That's a very fair question, but I don't have a concise answer for it. We try not to think about where we're going to go, and we try to listen to what the universe, or the goddess of music or intuition seems to be directing us towards. There are times when it feels very natural to do something like Ignore Grief, which is the most experimental record we did. There's basically no songs on it. It's all "pieces," and abstractly arranged—versus the new record, which, except maybe for one song, is all songs in a very traditional Western folk form, verse-chorus-bridge, that type of arrangement.

At the time we made Ignore Grief, that approach felt very right. It seemed like what the music was just organically becoming. When we began to work on the new record, it also seemed to be organically what it was becoming. But since Xiu Xiu started, we've always been as moved by, as interested in, and as influenced by traditional Western folk song forms as we have by completely far out, non-formed, atonal, arhythmic, experimental music. So it's not so much going back and forth between those two worlds as it is that those two worlds have always, for us, existed in parallel.

There have been records where both of those things were very much happening at the same time, and there have been records where they seem to be a little bit more compartmentalized. In the last few years, it's been a little bit more compartmentalized than it has been in some of our earlier records, and I don't know why that is. We just try to stay out of the way of the trajectory as much as possible.

You've also always been very prolific as far as what you release as Xiu Xiu, as well as with other projects. Tell me about what drives that prolificacy.
I love it more now than I've ever loved it, so the opportunity to do it all the time is an extraordinary one, and not one that I ever want to take for granted. Now, we're doing, by some fucking miracle better, than we've ever done ever—but we are in no way so over the hump that I feel like I can take a break, because I feel like doing music for a living will go away unless I'm constantly banging it out. So there's this fear and desperation aspect of it, and married with that, I genuinely love doing it.

It's also part of my mental, psychological, and emotional wiring. Music is a way for me to organize the negative parts of those components of my personhood. I know that, without doing it regularly, I would quite literally go insane and probably do something very self-destructive and stupid. So it's as much about self-preservation as it is fear and desperation, as well as a great, deep, profound, and serious love for music.

You mentioned that the band is doing better than ever these days. Talk to me about the financial aspect of that, as well as your growing fan base. What does "doing better than ever" entail for you?
The last year of touring that we did was the best-attended tours we've ever had. They were still relatively small shows, but considering that Ignore Grief was such a far-out record and we hadn't toured since 2019—even before COVID, I had a fucking annoying mental breakdown where I had to cancel a bunch of tours, and then COVID happened, so it was a fairly long period between us touring at all. Then we put out this very not-easy record, so we were really surprised that the turnouts were as as as healthy as they were.

It seems like the tours we have coming up will probably go as well, hopefully—fingers crossed—but that wasn't ever something that we could count on before for a long time. There'd be a city that we thought would always go great, we'd show up, and there'd be almost nobody there. Then there'd occasionally be surprises where we'd go someplace and there'd be a lot of people. Now, it feels like we reliably have a decent number of incredibly nice people coming to shows, and that that's a first for us.

Do you feel like you're seeing the pull of younger listeners as well?
We were very surprised by the last batch of touring. The age range of the people coming was really wide—some cool people who looked like they were in junior high who came with their parents. The drummer that we're playing with right now is in his late 60s and had been in some very famous bands, so people who are around his age or older were also beginning to come. And then there's college-age people, and then people who are probably around your age very kindly have been listening to us since we started. We have a pretty wonderful group of people come to our shows, and we're eternally grateful for that mix and support.

Tell me more about the current lineup of musicians you've been working with. Obviously, Xiu Xiu has had a lot of people come and go over the years.
The current band is me and Angela Seo. She's been in the band since 2010, and she hasn't been able to tour consistently, but she's always been involved in the records in an essential way since she joined. I think she's only been able to tour a total of three years in the 14 years that she's been in the band. She's reconfigured her life where she's just doing music again full-time, which is great.

I'm also touring with David Kendrick, who played on Oh No, Ignore Grief, and this new record. When I was a teenager in L.A., I used to play in a band with David and a number of extraordinarily cool and talented punk rock and new-wave scene luminaries. I learned a tremendous amount from these people—I have no idea why they humored my acne-scarred face, but somehow I played with them.

You worked with John Congleton again on this record—tell me about your creative relationship with him as well. He's worked on a few Xiu Xiu records with you at this point.
He and I have been friends since around the time Xiu Xiu started. We were on the same label for a little while, when he was playing a lot more before his mixing and production life really ascended. The first time I was in the studio with him was when Jonathan Meiberg I did a collaboration called Blue Water White Death in 2009.

John's somebody who, because we've known each other for a long time and we're friends socially, I feel totally comfortable giving him a record and putting it entirely in his hands and saying, "Go crazy. Just be free. Experiment in any way you want to." And I know that the results that we will get will be more interesting than what we had thought of in the first place. Even if he's not producing something, his mixing is so exciting and so creative that it becomes almost as if he had produced it—and I really enjoy that, because the records that we work on tend to be very detailed, and it's difficult for me to zoom out from them periodically to see the whole picture.

That's mostly Angela's role in production—seeing the whole picture. I usually deal with the details, but because I've been dealing with the writing process on such a granular level, I deeply enjoy being able to put our records in the hands of somebody who can see all of those details, emphasize the best aspects, and completely delete the aspects that he doesn't think are essential to putting the emotionality of the song across. Because we're friends, he immediately and intuitively understands what the actual emotionality of it is, and that greatly enhances what the song could have been. I'm never concerned if he's going to do a good job—I'm always just jacked to hear what crazy things he tried. He's one of the best that there is, and ever will be.

In terms of bringing people into your creative space, have there been growing pains over the years when it comes to that trust?
Collaboration has always been core to what we do. This last record was one of the few records we've done where there were no guests at all, but every other record we've done, there have been guests. It hasn't been much of a risk for us, because we haven't had anybody play on the records that we're not a fan of—whose musical spirit is something that we were nervous about becoming part of the music. If it's a vocal part, we don't ask it to be sung in a particular way. It would be completely crazy and foolish not to take advantage of somebody being themselves. It's also incredibly exciting to hear how somebody will insert their heart into it.

We don't have any fucking hacks do it, you know? We don't have the mailman contribute on our records—although, as soon as that came out of my mouth, i realized I might be missing something. Maybe the mailman's got some hidden talents.

The video for "Common Loon" is very visually aggressive. It feels like being annihilated by pop cultural imagery. Let's talk about the clip, as well as the visual aspect of your art.
Angela is friends with Alicia McDaid, the performance artist in the video. Her performance art videos are fairly mind-melting, so it seemed obvious to just let Alicia do whatever she wanted to do, because everything she does is so far-out and engaging. A lot of her work is very peculiar takes on popular culture, and Angela and I are both interested in a lot of childhood imagery—Smurfs, Garfield, Trolls, stuffed animals—as well as the anthropomorphization of food, for no reason we could explain other than we're nuts and had weird childhoods. We knew that those are things that Alicia explores to, so that fits very naturally.

What has your relationship been like with the internet and social media over time? I think about how I heard Knife Play for the first time as a teenager—which probably wouldn't have been possible if it came out pre-internet.
I feel really mixed about it—as an individual, as a person who plays in a band, and as somebody who got interested in music before the ubiquity of the internet. This is going to make me sound like such a fucking tool, but I miss exploring music before the internet. I miss the value that music had, and how one was required to put time into not only finding, but listening to music. If I bought a cassette and I didn't like it, I didn't have any money and I had 12 cassettes, so I'd still listen to it because I had nothing else to listen to. And, more often than not, upon repeated listenings it became some of my favorite music. I didn't like PJ Harvey at first, and eventually PJ Harvey became one of my all-time favorites—one of my top five guitar players ever. That doesn't happen with Spotify, and it didn't happen with iTunes before that—and it certainly didn't happen with things like Napster before that.

There's very little risk, so there's very little reason to invest any time into something. Obviously, you can still go to record stores and shop without looking things up—it's not like you can't do that. But because there's far fewer record stores, there's fewer physical records, so the ability to do that is very different than when I first became attached to music. I found that pursuit incredibly valuable. Also, streaming sounds like shit if you're used to listening to CDs or vinyl. If you A--and-B them, it's really apparent how shitty streaming sounds. I don't think it's wrong or right to listen to music one way or another—this is just my personal take on it from a person in a band.

Initially, when we first started touring, before the war in Ukraine a huge part of our fan base was from Russia, where our records are not available at all. But that's where our biggest shows would be, because people were able to find us on the internet, and I really appreciated that could happen. Kast year, we played in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia, and our distribution company doesn't have records there—but those shows were great, and the internet made that possible, which I think is wonderful. I feel incredibly grateful to live in a time when technology has made that possible.

Both unfortunately and fortunately, the internet has made music journalism the lowest common denominator. Basically anybody who doesn't know about music can write about music, and it gets everywhere very quickly. Sometimes that's very helpful, and sometimes that's very unhelpful. Before, in order to write about music, you had to get hired—you had to have a track record. Now, fucking anybody who has something snarky to say can destroy a record, with great consequence and ubiquity. I think that's incredibly saddening.

A lot of friends' records, which are wonderful, have gotten ruined because some chump with a chip on their shoulder who got paid $50 to write something for some fucking music blog decided to ruin their records—and because a lot of music journalists have a lot of shit to do and don't have time, they'll frequently copy and paste shit from other articles. Before that was the model, obviously it took a lot more time for people to form opinions about records—a lot more effort—and a lot of weirder records were able to bubble to the top because they couldn't be ruined in, one swift cut-and-paste flow.

On the other hand, it seems social media is beginning to make music reviews less relevant, which is also a mixed thing. In some ways, it's great, because if a bunch of people like your record, they can just say, "This record is great, who cares what those chumps have to say," and then a record can still find its way through. But, then again, they can go the complete opposite direction, so the semi-Wild-West aspect has a lot of pluses and minuses.

I don't have any problem with expertise. I think expertise is a good thing, and I don't have any problem with listening to people who have put in a lot of work and have educated themselves, or have been formally educated, about music for the purpose of making big public statements about music. I think it's a good thing to listen to people who have studied something, and there can be a lot of negative repercussions for people to have a tremendous amount of power when they don't know what they're talking about, as you've seen. Obviously, the implications are in no way qualitatively or quantitatively reciprocal, but it exists in politics as much as it does in music, right? Anyway, blah blah blah blah blah. Sorry.

I mean, you brought up some interesting points. I've been working in music writing for almost 20 years now.
How do you feel about it?

It feels very much like something has ended. The level of power that you're referring to, I think that's gone, which has its pluses and minuses. One thing that I think was very obvious and transparent throughout the last 25 years is that it was very much an industry driven by straight white male opinions.
Um, yeah.

And I say that as one of them! But, as I said, I've been doing this for a while, and I've worked with some of the worst of the worst in that regard, so I'm not really too much of a fan of my kind. So any time there's a chance to dismantle previously existing power structures like that, I'm all for it. The expertise aspect you mentioned, I do think that's a chicken-or-the-egg thing. Are you getting uninformed opinions because they only pay $50 to put down the opinions? Who's actually getting paid to do this at this point?
That's a very, very fair point.

Music writing has also always been a young person's game, I think. I'm 37, and I think a lot of people stop doing it after a period of time because they're using it as a stepping stone for something else, or they lose interest—or, honestly, they lose a sense of curiosity. I was pretty young when I was editing and running the reviews section at Pitchfork, and I think that if I went back to that position now I'd have a significantly different approach to critique than I did when I was, say, 26 years old. But that's also a problem with media in general. I think media always values youth over expertise and knowledge, and as a result you get a lot of questionably informed people who, quite honestly, also might be having their labor taken advantage of.
Oh, undoubtedly.

It's tough. think something that's good about what music writing is right now is—and maybe this is me tooting my own horn a bit—but if you're doing it at this point, you must really like it, because there's really no other reason to do it. I'm lucky enough to have some semblance of a career, but if I was 22 at this point in time, I'd be fucked.
I feel like that's not dissimilar with being in a band right now, and almost for the exact same reasons. O can't imagine trying to be in a far-out weirdo band right now. It seems like it'd be totally impossible to be in a new band and do, like, a 40 day tour or something. I don't think people who are 22 do that anymore. The only reason we can is because we've been doing it for such a fucking long time. But it seems so hard to both write about music and make music unless you're doing, you know, Top 40 or metal.

The guys in Animal Collective had to cancel their European tour a few years ago because they can't make money off of it.
Wow. They're, like, five times more popular than us. That really surprises me. That's a drag.

You guys did have somewhat of a breakthrough in visibility around the same time as their ascent with Fabulous Muscles. I think that would be a lot harder to achieve now. What was that experience like back then, and how have you witnessed things change in terms of your interactions with what might be considered the music industry?
You're absolutely right in saying Fabulous Muscles was a record that took us from being in a band that no one had ever heard of to a band that a few people had heard of. It was interesting. My life was so fucked up and chaotic and shitty at the time that although I was, in a practical way, very aware of that we were starting to play a lot of shows, we were still playing really small places. A very big show for us would be a 250-capacity place—in New York, we'd play at the Knitting Factory, which was maybe 350 people or something. That would be the biggest show that we'd play all year—but, a lot of times, it was still for 20 to 75 people. We toured so fucking much on that record—everywhere. But even though we were getting a fair amount of oddly mainstream press, it wasn't suddenly like we were a mainstream band. We were still doing basement shows, house shows, and things like that.

I remain eternally grateful for that moment. I'm sure we wouldn't exist as a band now had there not been whatever stars aligned that made people more aware of what we were doing. We haven't continued to ride off of the success of that record, but it opened the door for people to—positively or negatively—if we put out a record, people still go, "Okay, Xiu Xiu has a record, let's see what this is." People may like it or not like it, but it doesn't de facto fall into obscurity, thank God—and that has to do with that time.

Our relation with the music business has been pretty minimal. At the time that record came out, it was at the height of the Gulf War. We got asked by a few major labels to talk to them and send them records, and because we were so deeply anti-war, our response was generally quite rude and direct. "There's no fucking way we'd ever do anything with you. If you want to listen to our record, just go to a store and fucking buy it." In the long run, from a business perspective, that was probably pretty stupid. From a moral perspective, I'm glad that we did that. Now, I would in no way be that rude to anybody. Somebody's motivation for asking for that, regardless of who they work for, is not because they're trying to fuck you over, or in relation to whatever tiny sliver that they're involved in funding a war. I'm sure they might not be aware of it.

I'm much less of a dick than I used to be. Not everybody probably thinks that, but I hope they do.

I do think there's something to be said for having principles. That's kind of the story of the last 25 years of indie, to me. It's always refreshing when I hear that people are willing to say no, and I think the pendulum is actually swinging back to saying no a lot more again, but there was a period of time, especially in throughout the 2010s, where it was "Yes, yes, yes" to everything.
That's happened with every genre and sub-genre of music forever though. Despite it being completely anti-ethical to the entire nature of punk, it very quickly became became commercialized. Hip-hop, indie, grunge, metal—that'sj ust how it goes.

We've had not great luck with most of the European labels that we've worked with, but we've had excellent luck with the American labels that we've dealt with. We've been on 5RC, and then we were on Kill Rock Stars when they stopped being 5RC, and then we've been on Polyvinyl—and we still work regularly with Kill Rock Stars, and we'll probably be on Polyvinyl as long as that label will have us. Both of them have been excellent to us. So as far as feelings about the industry, it's a thing of trust. I emphatically and totally trust everybody who works at both of those labels, and they've never given us a reason not to. There's certainly bigger, more powerful, and "cooler" labels to be on, but I couldn't be bothered by anybody that I didn't trust. They're excellent people, they work really hard, they do what they say, they're open-minded, their accounting is flawless, and they're very helpful. We really lucked out with them.