Pavement: "We Like Each Other, We Get Along, So It's Cool"

There’s a café in Melbourne called Terror Twilight; Brisbane’s 4ZZZ radio station broadcasts a show called Brighten the Corners; Shady Lane was a Sydney-based indie rock band in the 2000s; Major Leagues drew a local following in Brisbane in the 2010s; Range Life is the name of a wine producer that uses grapes from all over Victoria.

What connects this list of local miscellanea? All of the names were borrowed from songs and albums released by Californian indie kings Pavement. This inventory is surely incomplete, but the point is, Pavement made a big impression on Australian audiences during their original lifespan, which lasted from 1989-1999.

So, when the band – led by vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Stephen Malkmus – reunited for a trip around the planet in 2010, they played seven Australian headline shows in sold-out theatre venues around the country. They’ll be back here in March 2023, having rebooted once more for a global tour that began at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound in June 2022.

Pavement haven’t released any music since their fifth album, 1999’s Nigel Godrich-produced Terror Twilight. But their fanbase continues to grow, thanks in part to the Spotify algorithm, which transformed ‘Harness Your Hopes’ from a Brighten the Corners outtake into the band’s most-streamed song.

Ahead of Pavement’s 2023 Australian tour, Music Feeds speaks to guitarist Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs) about getting the band back together, challenging themselves, and engaging with a new generation of fans.

Pavement – ‘Gold Soundz’

Music Feeds: Did you all stay in touch over the years and listen to each other’s new bands?

Scott Kannberg: We didn’t really talk that much but we definitely kept in touch about music and stuff. There was one show on my very first Preston School of Industry tour where we played in Chicago, and if you bought tickets to the Malkmus show, which was on the same night, you could go to my show that was later that night.

But yeah, I listened to most of his records – the first few when they came out. I did the first two Preston School records in the early 2000s and then I didn’t really do anything until 2009 when the first Spiral Stairs records came out. And then it was another seven years before I did these last three.

He’s been more consistent over the years than I have with his recording output. But I guess, as a Pavement fan, you were pretty lucky because two of the guys who wrote the music, at least you got their solo stuff.

MF: I’ve seen a few reviews of the current tour that have described the shows as more harmonious than the reunion tour in 2010. Do you feel that?

Scott: Oh, I totally feel that. It’s a much different vibe and performance. Not to say that 2010 was bad, but even though it was ten years since we had played together, it still felt kind of the same as when we were playing in the 90s. Whereas now, there’s a different vibe to it.

There’s a whole different generation of fans that we notice coming to the shows. And there’s just more of celebration, I guess. Even with us, too, as a band – we like each other, we get along, everybody’s pretty much the same personality. So it’s cool.

MF: One example of the new generation of fans is the success of ‘Harness Your Hopes’ – a B-side that became a streaming hit five years ago and then went viral on TikTok in 2020.

Scott: Yeah, it was a nice surprise. I mean, our record label definitely took advantage of that and made a big deal about it and I think that helped with the reach of the song. But it’s a good song and it opened a lot of new doors for fans.

Every time we play that song on this tour it’s insane. People are yelling out the lyrics. It’s cute.

Pavement – ‘Harness Your Hopes’

MF: I looked at a bunch of your recent setlists. You’re changing what you play every night and playing stuff from all five Pavement albums. Did you re-learn a significant portion of the catalogue?

Scott: Yeah – I think at one stage we had about sixty songs on the list. When we first started discussing it I was like, “Hey, we know we’re going to play the same kind of fifteen songs, so let’s just make another fifteen or twenty songs and keep it to that.” And then it just kept going and going and going.

Bob [Nastanovich] really kind of obsesses over the setlist. He wants to make sure that people hear songs that they’ve never heard, let’s say, in a certain city. Or maybe a fan writes to him and says, “Please play ‘Loretta’s Scars’ – you never played that in 2010.” So, Bob makes a point of it.

MF: I noticed that you’re playing fewer songs from Terror Twilight than any of the other records. Do you feel less affection for the songs on that album?

Scott: Not necessarily. We love that record. It’s just, we played those songs a lot in our very last tour in 1999, so we didn’t really play a lot of them in 2010. The thing is, the songs are good, but they’re a lot more difficult to play. We are playing probably four songs from that record, which are good, but they’re pretty hard songs to nail. I like the songs on the record, though – they’re great.

The Terror Twilight songs are all kind of jamming songs – except for, like, ‘Major Leagues’, which we’re doing. I’d like to do ‘Carrot Rope’ one day, but that song’s pretty hard too.

MF: There is a perception that the making of Terror Twilight was a tense time for Pavement. Did that have anything to do with the technical challenges posed by that material?

Scott: Yeah, maybe. One of the things we’ve really tried to do on this tour compared to us in the 90s is we really want to make sure the songs sound great. One of the reasons the songs sound great is we’re playing more parts that were on the record. Whereas, in the 90s, I think we just improvised a hell of a lot more, and if it sounded good with whatever we played on it, that’s what we did.

We really wanted to make sure these songs sounded as close to the record as possible, but being Pavement, they’re going to sound different anyway. We’re not that proficient.