Jamie Stewart was born in 1978 in Los Angeles. He began Xiu Xiu in 2002 and began to waste his life.
Eugene S. Robinson is the frontman of the band Buñuel, and the author of the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water; Jamie Stewart is the frontman of Xiu Xiu, and the author of the recently released memoir Anything That Moves. Both have new records — Xiu Xiu’s 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips just came out last month on Polyvinyl, and Buñuel’s Mansuetude will be out October 25 on Skin Graft — so to celebrate, the two got on a call to catch up.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Eugene S. Robinson: So what do you want to talk about? I know what I want to talk about.
Jamie Stewart: Alright, you start.
Eugene: I think there’s an expectation that, because we both have new records coming out — I’ve got Buñuel’s Mansuetude, and I’m super excited about it. It’s a double album, and it’s got guest artists — Megan from Couch Slut and Duane Denison from Jesus Lizard, Jake from Converge. But what I wanted to talk about was sex. [Laughs.]
Jamie: [Laughs.] I would always rather talk about that than records.
Eugene: Well, because we both have books out as well. I read yours voraciously, and finished it in about eight hours.
Jamie: [A Walk Across Dirty Water] is so good. I really loved it. One of the nice things about living in Berlin is there’s a lot of time to read, because I don’t have a car, so I take the subway everywhere. So I read it almost entirely on the subway, which was a really good setting for it because the neighborhood that we live in — Berlin is mostly pretty nice, but there’s a couple of kind of sketchy neighborhoods. They’re not dangerous in a way like America is dangerous, but there’s just a lot of people deep and sadly into drugs. There’s a lot of people who are sort of physically decaying in front of you. So a book about, from my take, figuring out what it means to live in and around and observe and comment on the edge of life, sort of as the edge of life was going on around me… I really loved it.
Eugene: Well, now this brings up something else interesting: So you’ve moved from a dangerous neighborhood in Los Angeles to—
Jamie: [Laughs.] Trying to move out of a dangerous neighborhood, and accidentally moving into — it’s not a dangerous neighborhood, it’s just a sad neighborhood.
Eugene: But don’t you find there’s a qualitative difference between an American dangerous neighborhood and Europe?
Jamie: Oh, my god, yeah. I mean, the main thing being there’s almost no guns in Europe. So something terrible could happen to you, but it’s unlikely that something terrible is going to happen to you and the 30 people around you at the exact same time. You can get stabbed, but you can run away from somebody who’s stabbing people a lot more easily than you can run away from somebody who’s shooting at people.
Eugene: In general, I find I’m more afraid of knives than I am actually of guns.
Jamie It’s a shittier way to die, for sure.
Eugene: They say most people get shot at a distance of about three feet. So closer than that, you can get the gun away; further away than that, the person typically misses and you can get on top of them and take it away. But these are things that you do not have to consider living in Berlin. So you’re saying you enjoy it then?
Jamie: Oh, yeah, I’m infinitely more relaxed there. I’m in Los Angeles right now because we start rehearsing tomorrow to go on tour. But I miss both places when I’m in the other place. They’re almost diametrically opposed in what their positives and negatives are.
Eugene: Right, right. So why rehearse in LA?
Jamie: Our drummer lives in LA, and then our tour starts in California.
Eugene: OK, so now you’ve got some kind of hot shit drummer, or did I read that wrong? Who is this guy?
Jamie: [Laughs.] David Kendrick. He used to be in Devo and Sparks and a bunch of other super cool bands. When I was a very, very young teenager, I played in a band with him and a bunch of other new wave heavyweights — Paul Roessler from Screamers and Josie Cotton and Geza X, who did the Germs and Dead Kennedys and Black Flag records, and this great guitar player named Kenny Lyon. It didn’t really hit me until I was older how cool it was that as a very obnoxious and pasty faced teenager, I got to learn a lot about music from these cats.
Eugene: What was the name of it?
Jamie: The name was so bad! I almost don’t want to tell you, because it’s gonna make it seem so much less cool.
Eugene: No, no, it’s OK, because I know Geza as a urine licker — he was one of the first people I met when I got to California. I met him at [Jello] Biafra’s house. He and Winston Smith and Howie Klein all gave me the same kind of high hand, which I loved. I was like, “Yeah, OK, that’s great. We’ll see you down the road a bit.” [Laughs.] But that last time was at some party in LA where he was licking the urine of some biker off the floor.
Jamie: [Laughs.]
Eugene: The biker was trying to intimidate him, I guess, standing there pissing on the floor, and Geza dropped down.
Jamie: What a badass. That’s kind of amazing.
Eugene: Of course, his girlfriend at the time broke up with him immediately.
Jamie: I think that’s worth it.
Eugene: If you gotta go out, you gotta go out like that. But hold on, I will not be put off. What was the name of the band?
Jamie: The Live Nude Psychics.
Eugene: That’s not bad.
Jamie: I had nothing to do with it.
Eugene: That’s much better than The Indestructible Beat of Palo Alto.
Jamie: I don’t disagree. Not the best band name I ever thought of.
Eugene: [Laughs.] So now you’re in LA, you’re rehearsing with Kendrick. Is he on the record that you just released?
Jamie: Yeah, he’s on the record. He played super great on it. One thing I really love about playing with him is that he writes lyrics also — he wrote a bunch of lyrics on the record — so he listens to the singer a lot. I’ve played with some really great drummers, but I’ve never played with a drummer who interacted so much with the vocals or was aware of what was happening with the singing as much. So it’s incredibly fun.
Eugene: That’s cool. Are you OK singing his lyrics?
Jamie: It’s interesting — generally he’ll send a set of lyrics and I’ll add things so I feel like I can connect to them a little bit more emotionally. He writes lyrics coming from a place that’s a thousand miles away from where I would ever think about writing lyrics, so it forces me to do things intellectually and, again, emotionally that I wouldn’t normally do. Which is, for us at least, kind of the point of this band. Have you ever collaborated on lyrics at all?
Eugene: Whipping Boy’s second record, Muru Muru — Steve Ballinger, the old Whipping Boy guitar player, wrote half the lyrics. And since then, I’m not singing anybody’s lyrics. I don’t want to do it. But I liked it because I could tell which songs were Steve’s [at first], but I’ve internalized them so much so that I couldn’t remember whether they were Steve’s or not. And there are great lines in some of them — there’s a song called “Sunshine Nellie,” and the line is something about, “I made my mind up today,” and I thought that was really emblematic of how I’ve moved through time. I made my mind up today. Not yesterday.
Jamie: Yeah, that could go a lot of places. I like that. Speaking of lyrics: as somebody who writes as a journalist and a novelist and a memoirist and a lyricist, do you find that there’s big distinctions in what parts of your mind and heart that you use in those different kinds of writings? Or it’s all from the same place? How does that work for you?
Eugene: It’s like taking a deck of cards. I’m trying to interweave them to something musical. But [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti once told me, when I had the audacity to read him something I had written, “Look, before we even get too far into this: everything that you write should be written with an ear toward it being read out loud.”
Jamie: Oh, interesting.
Eugene: I mean, he wasn’t the greatest painter — he showed me some of his paintings, and I was like, “Stick to writing.” But I was willing to take his advice on the writing. So with music and lyrics, I have to be able to hear it in my head before I’m willing to write it. Which keeps me honest to a certain degree. But I imagine it’s why people go to therapy: I’m trying to clear the decks and do some version of automatic writing where how I’m feeling is coming out in the words I’m using.
We’re starting to work on the next Buñuel record, and usually they would give me the music, but for the first time they said, “Hey, maybe we could get some lyrics from you first?” And so I’ve given a couple of lyrics, but if you remember with SAL MINEO [Eugene and Jamie’s duo], you gave me the music and then you bait-and-switched me — you said you had, like, eight songs, and then you gave me 20 songs. Which I was totally cool with, because I was up to the challenge, and I did the same automatic writing. I kind of cleared my head, sat in a room, and from beginning to end, in the order that you sent, I wrote those lyrics.
Jamie: That makes sense, because I was really impressed — considering that it’s all just a lot of short pieces, mostly — how totally cohesive the lyrics seemed. I think that’s the main reason why that record works, because the lyrics seem to be of a piece, so it really holds the record together.
Eugene: Oh, that’s nice to know. But your memoir was phenomenal. I really enjoyed it.
Jamie: That’s really nice of you to say. From you, that really means a lot to me.
Eugene: I love the lead in — “If you are related to me, for the love of god, stop reading now.” And that was the beginning of the greatness. I didn’t want to write a memoir for a long time because I didn’t want to get into the filth. What [the editor] finally convinced me of is — I love Thurston, but nobody wants from Eugene a 996-page memoir. So they said, “Just go from birth to maybe the creation of Oxbow.” That I can do, because that cuts out a whole lot of the filth.
Jamie: Are you going to do the other half?
Eugene: Well, it depends on what the sales are for the memoir. If the sales are really good and I can’t get away from it, I’ll have to figure out my way around it. Otherwise, I’ll just turn it into a work of fiction. But how did the editorial process work for your memoir?
Jamie: It was a really incredibly long arc. I had a show in 2017 in New York, and the original editor, Sam Nicholson, gave me his card and said he had been coming to shows as a teenager, so he’d seen the band for a long time. He is a very well regarded editor, and said, “If you ever want to write a book, let me know.” I said, “Well, I kind of only write haikus. I’m sure you don’t want to publish a book of haikus.” And he looked at me and he went, “No, we don’t.” Fair enough. But I kept his card, and I remember having seen him at shows and he was always very sweet. Then about a year later, I drunkenly told a bunch of weird, sort of funny, sort of depressing sex stories, and I thought, Maybe I could give a crack at writing these… I talked to him about it and he said, “Well, it could be interesting. Write me a couple.” How I wanted to organize it — they’re not really chapters, but they’re vignettes that are somewhat related to each other. They’re not short stories, but you could still read one by itself and it would make sense. I sent him a couple and he wanted to do it. So I wrote him a bunch, I think probably the majority of what ended up in the book. And then he disappeared for, like, a year. I just stopped hearing from him. That happens in music a lot, unfortunately.
Eugene: Yeah.
Jamie: I thought, OK, well, I guess he’s just not into it. It’s an obnoxious way to fail, but it happens. I’m not unused to this. So then I just sat on it for a little while. Then the pandemic happened, and everybody was looking for shit to do, so I did just a Bandcamp audiobook of it — and this was unedited. I just edited it myself to the degree that I could. Then about a year after that, I hear from Sam saying, “Hey, my life just fell apart. I’m really sorry.” He gave me some very good reasons why he was out of the picture, and he said, “I want to do this now, but could you take this Bandcamp thing down?” I said, “Oh, yeah, that totally makes sense.” So then we got together and he did a round of edits with me, and then set me up with another editor from the publisher, but it was pretty much done. The editor from the publisher didn’t really do very much. Actually, the copy editor did more than almost anybody. [Laughs.]
Eugene: Which is the way it should be, really.
Jamie: Yeah. And then it came out. So it was picked over by three different people, but over several years, and stuff got added and taken away. I think there was probably 15 or 20 vignettes that ended up not being in it that I had written; there’s one or two that I wish had made it in there, but overall I think they made some good choices.
Eugene: Some of these I knew, because you had shared them when we were on the road with SAL MINEO.
Jamie: [Laughs.]
Eugene: What’s the response been like?
Jamie: There’s only one person in there that I’m still in contact with. I asked her before if it was cool if I put the story in there, and she said, “Well, send it to me, but I’m sure it’s fine.” I sent it to her and she just thought it was funny. People have been real nice about it, mostly. People seem to dig it, which I’m obviously touched by and pleasantly surprised by. I don’t really read reviews because I’m too thin-skinned, and I don’t look at sales and stuff like that until I do or don’t get a check. But people have been real nice about it. What about yours? How’s that going?
Eugene: So far, so good. I’m still doing interviews and doing book tours on it.
Jamie: Oh, so it must be going good!
Eugene: Yeah, people are digging on it. On the occasion of this last spate of book shows, I got a threatening letter from somebody who was mentioned in it. It was weird — they didn’t mind the sex story that they were involved with, they didn’t mind that I used their name, but I mentioned their father, who has passed, and apparently that was enough to get a threat of lawsuit. Which enraged me to no end, because this was something that had been shared with the person prior. But I’m asking more because, with my eye toward the second memoir, I’m super interested in the handling of sex stories. Because, of course, they’re endlessly entertaining to the actors, but if you are not in that closed loop of, “I know this person” — does it play well? Moreover, I think I need to be sure of what I’m trying to elicit. In your case, it was quite clear how you felt about it. In a lot of my cases, I feel perfectly fine about it; I don’t feel conflicted about any of the horrible things I’ve done. [Laughs.] So then in the writing, do I make myself an unsympathetic character? Because it’s a memoir, and that’s really what happened. Or do I say, “I don’t think I’m an unsympathetic character here, and you can go fuck yourselves.” I haven’t decided how to play it.
Jamie: I mean, I think as long as bragging about it. Everybody’s sex is fucking inherently bizarre, and generally prone to disaster. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d be very interested in reading this book.
Eugene: Well, you’re my target audience! I go, If this would entertain Jamie… [Laughs.] You would have a professional understanding of exactly what the fuck I’m talking about. I keep waiting for somebody who gets busted for a lot of the stuff that I did to stand up at the at the lectern and go, “So, you got me. And what?” This whole Dave Grohl thing—
Jamie: What’s up with Dave Grohl?
Eugene: Oh, bro. He went to Instagram himself and announced that he just had his fourth child — the catch was, it wasn’t with his wife. So he said, “I need to earn the love and the trust of my family who I’ve betrayed, and I apologize and I’ll do the right thing and raise —” I still am waiting for somebody to say, “You got me, and I don’t owe you guys anything.” No explanation. “What did you expect?”
Jamie: Also, “What did you expect?” — that’s a really fair reason. If you write this book, I don’t think it’s going to come out of nowhere for anybody.
Eugene: Right, right.
Jamie: It’s not like you’ve been shy about a particular way of living life. Your book is fine.
Eugene: Well, what’s funny is my kids bought bought my book.
Jamie: Oh, shit. I didn’t think about that. I don’t have to deal with that aspect of it.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s what I’m dealing with. They both tapped out at the same chapter — which, guys I do Jiu-Jitsu with also bought the book, and they all tapped out at the same place.
Jamie: What was it?
Eugene: When I was 10 years old and saw that guy raping the developmentally disabled nephew or younger brother of his.
Jamie: Yeah, that was intense.
Eugene: That was enough for some people. But it was purposely placed there, because I wanted to create the sensation of, “You don’t know what the fuck is going to happen here.” And I did the same with the Fight book, under the chapter “I Killed A Man.” Some guy was like, “I was really enjoying the book until you got there.” I was like, “Hey, woah, that’s not my fault.” But, yeah, my three older kids came to one of the readings in New York, and I was talking about Thalia Zedek being shocked and appalled when she watched a video of me playing a show in Lyon where I was masturbating on the audience — and I forgot that my second daughter was there, and afterwards she goes, “Well, you learn things every new things every day about your parents.” [Laughs.]
Jamie: How is it doing readings in front of your family? I would lose my mind — I’m very close with my family, but other than a little bit with my brother, they don’t know anything of what I’m up to in music or art or whatever.
Eugene: Well, my mom’s seen Oxbow play plenty of times. She’s not seen Buñuel, but she came to a show that we played in New York at Irving Plaza. I said after the show, “How did you you enjoy it?” And she goes, “Yeah, it was a little uncomfortable.” I go, “Uncomfortable? Why?” She goes, “Well, because every time you did something with your penis, the audience looked at me.” [Laughs.] And then she goes, “They forget I’ve been seeing you naked since you were born.” I was like, “Exactly.” My mom’s batting for the home team. She’s read the book. My kids — I don’t know. They haven’t got past that chapter, and they haven’t told me, and I prefer it that way. You know, “I’m your dad. We don’t have to talk about this.”
Jamie: Yeah, that’s fair enough.
Eugene: Alright, we’re getting to the end of the time that they want us to go for, because I know we could go on forever. I think we should do the pro forma editorial thing and talk about what’s next.
Jamie: You go ahead. What do you have? New Buñuel coming out?
Eugene: Buñuel comes out October 25. And then in November, I have this thing on this new Swiss-German label called A Tree in a Field Records. The project is called Mangene, and it’s a complete different style of music for me — it would be completely in keeping to be touring with Aphex Twin or some such thing. Buñuel goes on tour in the US in springtime, and we’re going to do shows in Italy and France supposedly in February. Book tour is an ongoing concern, even though we get to the year mark October 10. And then I’ve got the podcast and the Substack. So that’s what I’m looking forward to.
Jamie: That’s a lot of good stuff.
Eugene: Yeah, I’m happy. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, you know?
Jamie: Amen. So, we’ve got the new record coming out. We’re doing a ton of touring — doing a long ass US tour, then we do Europe after that. And then we’re doing music for a dance piece; it premieres in Seattle and is not titled yet. And then a little bit more touring in Europe, and then in the meanwhile we’re working on the next Xiu Xiu thing.
Eugene: Alright, Jamie, thanks for doing this.
Jamie: Thank you! Good to talk to you.
