It’s difficult to articulate the mystifying force in music that is Xiu Xiu, a band which has been subverting expectations for the past two decades—not out of a desire to be experimental for the sake of it, but rather as a result of front-person Jamie Stewart’s boundless musical curiosity. Each addition to the catalog brings with it an exploration of a new aesthetic, instrumental palette, or set of influences; this ethos has resulted in a truly singular and sprawling discography, held together by a consistently brutally delicate expression of the human experience. This is the thrill of being a Xiu Xiu fan—depending on your musical preferences, some records will click instantly and others may take time to absorb, and there is always an exciting left turn around the corner.
What most fans and even Stewart themself did not expect, however, was for 2024’s 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips to veer into the world of psychedelic rock. I grew up on guitar music, so upon hearing the incredibly satisfying riffs that dominate the lead single “Common Loon,” I knew I was done for. The record filters the aesthetics of rock ‘n’ roll through a series of increasingly unexpected twists and turns, landing in a sonic universe that confidently defies any typical guitar songwriting and effortlessly absorbs the newfound musical territory into the world of Xiu Xiu. I spoke with Stewart about this sonic pivot, living life immersed in the creative process, candy collections and more. Read our full conversation below and be sure to listen to their new album.
David Feigelson: I first want to say that the new record has been absolutely blowing my mind. The singles do a good job of setting up what to expect, but, as always, there are many surprises. Particularly the last song, which just had me on the floor.
Jamie Stewart: Oh wow, that means a lot to me. Thank you, I really appreciate it.
DF: Of course. Before we dive into the album, I was thinking we could lay the foundation by getting a sense of where you and the band were over the course of its creation. You recently moved from Los Angeles to Berlin—I'm curious what brought about that change and how it has affected your life and creative output.
JS: Well my bandmate, Angela Seo, and I have been roommates for many years, and we had moved to a neighborhood in Los Angeles that at the time had relatively affordable housing. It was an unusual neighborhood; it was very tight knit and kind of a closed community. We lived there for a few years, but the people in the area made it pretty apparent they didn't want people moving there. They threw eggs at our house, put nails in the tires of our car, and were just generally unpleasant.
Angela and I both grew up in Los Angeles, moved away, and moved back in 2012. At that time, LA was going through a renaissance. It was an excellent time to be in the city. Every fun, interesting, cool and inspiring thing you could imagine was happening, and it continued up until the pandemic. Unfortunately, like a lot of places, it got its ass thoroughly kicked, and has yet to really recover. It was becoming more and more dangerous, more and more depressing, and just a sad place to be.
We had already worked in Berlin a lot. There's an arts group called CHEAP that we do music for regularly, and through another arts group called Silent Green, they arranged an artist residency that would pay for us to move, give us a place to live, and help out with visas. It was becoming less comfortable to live in the area we were in, the city itself was becoming just sad to be in (even though I miss it a lot, it's sad every time I go back, because it still hasn't really recovered), and the universe essentially opened this door making it really easy to move to Berlin. It seemed like it would have been ridiculous not to accept that invitation from space. We also have friends in the city and Angela used to live here, so it's not completely out of the blue for either of us.
Insofar as how it's changed things creatively, that's been something I've been struggling with. I like Berlin a lot, but it’s almost the complete inverse of Los Angeles. I was born in LA and I grew up there, and I will probably always consider it my fundamental, internal home, even if I never move back. I'm realizing, now that I don't live there, it has been a tremendous source of inspiration for Xiu Xiu, even though the first half of the band's life didn’t even take place in Los Angeles, but rather in different parts of the United States. So moving to Berlin didn’t so much affect the making of this last record, but moving away from Los Angeles did. I thought, because I had been here a lot, that I had a handle on the city and it wouldn’t be that much of an adjustment for me, but wow, was I wrong. It's a bit difficult to put into words, there's not really anything quantifiable that I could point to and say this and that changed, therefore we did this. It's more the internal adjustment, which is definitely forcing me in ways that I didn't expect, and ways that are kind of difficult to describe, to re-approach my internal creative life.
I know it's been different for Angela too, and I don't want to put words in her mouth as to how it's been, but I know it's been a big deal for her too. We're in the process of starting to write for the next record, and it feels very different, not in a good or bad way, but just in a way that it's difficult for me to, at this point, wrap my head around. I'm looking forward to cracking the code, and it's always good to be presented with a challenge. I don't want to say that I got into a rut being inspired by different aspects of Los Angeles, but it was certainly something that I could count on. It's interesting not having that spark be there anymore, and having to essentially find others, which I'm interested in doing, but I'm still looking for them.
DF: That makes a lot of sense, and also brings me to my next question. It seems like you guys are always on, either making a record or going on tour, and when you finish, you turn right to the next creative endeavor. I'm curious how you've been able to sustain that kind of energy for such a long career, and if you ever need to take a step back, either to just let life happen and process it or because of some kind of writer's block. And if you constantly want to be trying new things and not retreading any territory, do you ever need space?
JS: If I take a break, I don't find myself refreshed afterwards. At times I have to go on vacation or I'll blow my brains out, but when I get home I don't feel renewed, at least in terms of my creative drive. When I take any kind of extended break, I feel like that part of me gets dulled, and upon returning I have to get my chops and focus back. So part of keeping it going is just working on music all the time. I also love working on music. It's my absolute favorite thing to do, it’s never a chore. By some miracle, I've been able to avoid having a straight job for a really long time, but when I had one, the only thing I wanted to do anytime I wasn’t at work was work on music. If I had a half hour break at the record store I worked at, I would drive home for ten minutes, work on music for ten minutes, and then drive back. It's obsessive craziness. Also, I am totally nuts, and the main thing that keeps me from exhibiting internal and external destructive behavior is having music around. It’s a place to put all the inherent negative energy that, for a long list of reasons, is part of who I am. So a lot of it is also a survival tactic. It's really those two things, loving it, and needing to do it so I don't blow my brains out. And if I have a writer's block, which I get all the time, taking a break doesn't make it go away. Basically telling it to go fuck itself, and forcing my way through it with stubbornness and tenacity is generally what breaks those kind of jams. But probably the biggest factor is just that I love making music, and have always had access to a studio—when we're done, that's where I will be going.
DF: That's awesome. A lot of your music is very vulnerable and expressive, and I'm curious if having to constantly call upon those emotions can be draining, or perhaps you were suggesting that can actually be a way of dealing with it.
JS: Both things certainly happen. In the broadest way, it is what keeps me on the rails. It doesn't make any sort of bad feelings go away, but it is a place to put them that's constructive. So it's not like I feel better after writing or playing a song about something that's difficult, but that energy gets directed toward something that is not being negatively put back into my body. So facing that stuff plainly on a regular basis is actually essential for my existence on Earth.
Generally I don't feel it building up and having any negative effects. But here’s something that happened recently, although it might be too much (tw: suicide). In the very early days of the band, my dad committed suicide. And he had told me for many years that he was going to do it, so it was always in the back of my head. It's a very unpleasant experience. There was a song on our second record, A Promise, called “Blacks” that was about him talking about wanting to kill himself—a lot of the lyrics are just quotes from him. I started seeing a therapist again this year, and I realized I had somehow never directly dealt with my dad’s suicide in therapy, so I started talking to him about it and he helped me get to a much better place. It’s still a lot to deal with, but a certain amount of positive processing happened and is still happening.
We hadn’t played “Blacks” since 2003, because I just didn't want to deal with it, and also because I felt unresolved around my dad's suicide, it wouldn’t have felt genuine. I didn’t feel that way when we wrote it and were first playing it, but soon after I wasn't in a place where I felt like I could honestly express it. It was too muddled for me to do it live in any sort of genuine way. But through talking to my therapist, I thought, “Okay, we haven't played this in a long time and I'm in a different place regarding the subject matter, so it could be valuable to explore the song again.”
But since I hadn’t played it or listened to it in twenty years, I didn’t remember the words or anything. So I was learning the song, alone in the studio, and it was like getting hit by a bat in the face. I started physically shaking and almost yelling, even though there was nobody there to yell at. It was really intense, it was like those feelings were a ball inside of me that started to bubble out. I was shocked; it didn’t gradually come on at all. Just a crazy, crazy physical reaction. And because I was alone, I didn't have anyone to turn to. I was like, “Okay, I have to calm down, or I'm gonna have a fucking heart attack or something.” I started just walking in circles and trying to breathe. And it didn't go on forever, the whole episode lasted at most five minutes. The only reason I'm bringing this up is to say, apparently, a lot of things that I don't feel are necessarily affecting me in a conscious way are very obviously affecting me in an unconscious way.
A lot of people that I have been in bands with have found me difficult to work with. It's very possible that's why. There’s just all this cuckoo town happening all the time, and the way that it comes out is by me being difficult to work with. I mean, I'm not excusing my shitty behavior at times. It just became clear to me that there's a lot more going on with exploring these subjects than I thought that there was.
DF: When moments like that happen, is there anything you've learned that can be helpful to calm yourself down? I have certain records and movies that I know I can use to bring myself back to center.
JS: Yeah, it’s really a more physical thing for me—the responses are more physical, so I tend to need a more physical solution. That can be just taking a deep breath and letting it out. It’s cliche, but there’s a reason for that and it works for me. I wish I had a cool record that I could say was the solution to all my problems.
DF: I mean, it could still happen.
JS: laughing Maybe that’s why I have problems, cause I haven’t found the right record yet.
DF: You never know! I have a couple questions about the specifics of this record, and then I’m curious to dive more into your creative process. A lot of the climaxes on these songs are very guitar driven. All of the tones and layers are so satisfying and cathartic, and I’m curious if there’s a different way in which you approached using the guitar for this album.
JS: It's funny, because I kind of think guitar is a little lame, but this is a full on guitar record. It was a funny trajectory. It was very clearly shaping up to be a guitar record, which we’ve never done before, and it was happening very naturally. A big part of our creative philosophy, for lack of a better word, is to not get in the way of what's happening. To just listen to what the goddess of music is saying, try to not think about it and go, “Okay, this is going and we’re getting something out of it. This feels right. Let's just do it, even if I'm a snob and I think guitar is lame. This is what's fucking happening right now, guitar mania.” So just really trying to embrace that rather than fight it.
Part of it also is the drummer we've been working with for a little while, David Kendrick, fucking loves loud guitar. He really just kept goading me to go more and more fuzz all the time. So part of it was trying to not get in the way of the shredding goddess of music. As far as the tones go, I don't have the most massive collection of guitar pedals, but I put a lot of thought into the pedals that we buy, trying to get things that are a little more out of the ordinary. I tried to put some effort into combining them. A lot of the guitar sounds are probably two or three layers of playing the same lines, but with a different pedal on each track. Also a lot of it is the person who mixed it, John Congleton, who is one of the best mix engineers in the fucking world. He really understands how to push things as far as they can go, but make sure that they still feel and sound very musical. He's an absolute master at that. A lot of what works on the record is because of the mix.
DF: I can definitely see that. Every sound is so crisp. I'm so glad he was able to pull that out of what you guys gave him.
JS: Yeah, he's in incredibly high demand, so we can't always get him to mix stuff, but when he’s available, one of the absolute delights of my life is to just say to him, “Go crazy, do whatever you want.” I can absolutely trust him to do something to not only make the record better, but also to be very surprising. There are a lot of things on the final version of the record that are pretty different from what we sent him, and they're better. We’ve been friends for a long time, so he knows me as a person and he knows the band really well. We also have pretty similar tastes, and he is always pushing himself to try new things. It's an incredible delight to have him do it, and with total confidence let him do whatever he's going to, knowing that it will be exciting.
DF: Are there any specific moments that you could point to where he took the reins and did something really unexpected?
JS: I don't think I could highlight specific moments, but I could describe specific techniques. Our songs tend to have a lot of details and tend to be pretty layered, and the things that he will pick out as being the most important, which really means what ends up louder in the mix, are often not things that I generally thought were the most important. And then when I listen to it again, I'm like, “Oh, shit, he's totally right. That is the coolest part, or that is the part that really puts across the intended emotion of the music.” We send him a pile of stuff and tell him to mute anything that’s not really serving the song, so what he chooses to take out and emphasize is always very surprising. He also really loves heaviness and low end, which is not something that we tend to emphasize in the recording, so anytime we do put any in there, he really cranks it. It’s always incredibly satisfying as a listener to be hit with that. I always forget, and I'm like, “Why the fuck don’t we put that in more?” Every time he does it, I love it.
DF: Yeah that makes sense. You collaborate with a lot of different people, and even if you have a clear vision of how you want things to sound, it seems like when you work with others you’re happy to let them run wild.
JS: Oh yeah, that's the point of collaborating with somebody. It doesn't make any sense for me to work with someone and tell them to play exactly the way that I would, because then I would just play it myself. Everybody that we’ve ever collaborated with, we asked them because they're spectacular at what they do. Occasionally we’ll ask for a specific melody, but most of the time we ask them to be themselves in this context, to do whatever is their natural response. To do it otherwise is disrespectful to their creativity. I’m also a fan of the vast majority of the people that have collaborated on our records, and as a fan, it’s super exciting to hear someone I’ve been listening to for years be themselves in our music, which is what made me want to collaborate with them in the first place.
DF: Can it also be helpful in alleviating some burdens in the creative process? I saw an interview where you mentioned that you can get indecisive over picking certain takes or layers, and it’s helpful to rely on someone like Angela to make those calls.
JS: Yeah, I'm bad at that. I’m okay at thinking of seven different synth lines, but I'm bad at figuring out which is the best one. Angela is spectacular at figuring that out, and she can do it in seconds. No records would ever be made, would ever be finished, without her.
DF: That's a great working relationship to have. You often strike a delicate balance, no matter what sonic territory you're working in, between harshness and softness. I'm curious if you see them as interconnected.
JS: I don't mean this in a self aggrandizing way, but it's a fairly accurate representation of I think who I am as a person. I can be incredibly pessimistic, I have really gnarly depression, and I don't want to be, but I can be an incredible dick. At the same time, I want to be as affectionate and sweet to people as I can be, and I try to be understanding. I also love watching and reading about the most intense, horrifying parts of human history and expression. But I love kittens, I like flowers, I like looking at fruit and going for walks in the woods. Angela is the same way too—she is one of the sweetest, most thoughtful, genuinely empathetic people I've ever met, but she’s also in many ways a stone cold, harsh motherfucker. So it’s a fairly accurate reflection of the both of us as people. It wasn't a conscious decision to have the band sound this way, but it makes sense in retrospect.
DF: That’s really interesting. When you make a song that is more traditionally structured, as opposed to more of a sound collage, is there a distinctly different intention going in, or do those structural choices just become clear as the idea materializes?
JS: It’s the latter. Like I said before, we just try not to get in the way of what seems to be coming out. On this record, the majority of the songs have really traditional western song structures, but the record we did before, Ignore Grief, was almost all abstract arrangements. One was not a reaction to the other, it was just trying to listen and see where the music was leading us. Since 2014, in the early stages of putting records together we’ve tended to come up with a framework for what we want the record to be, or rather what limitations we're going to work within. Before that we just wrote songs, and the songs we wrote that year became the record. Now we define more of a shape, and currently that seems like a fruitful way to work. Sometimes, the parameters will dictate what the types of arrangements will be, but not always.
DF: Yeah I get that. How do you define those constraints without getting in the way of what’s coming out?
JS: It's always really different. Sometimes there'll be a very distinct and specific aesthetic influence, or sometimes we’ll be influenced by particular types of gear. One of the records that started this process was Angel Guts: Red Classroom, and the constraints were to only use analog synths, analog drum machines, percussion and vocals. We wanted to be influenced by Suicide, Neubauten, Kraftwerk and Nico. So it was partially gear and partially a certain musical aesthetic. By contrast, Ignore Grief eventually took on a very codified shape, but we didn't know what it was going to be ahead of time. We were just working and could feel what it was becoming, but couldn't really write it down. It wasn't until it was almost finished, that we realized there were incredibly clear parameters that only revealed themselves through making it.
DF: Very interesting. I’m curious in what ways queer culture has shaped your creative outlook or way of expression?
JS: Well, queer culture has shaped the outlook of everybody's expression. There is an outsized ratio of queer people who have become significant artists, and who have, in extraordinarily consequential ways, changed the trajectory of aesthetics throughout history and in every culture. In that way, queer culture has radically affected Xiu Xiu because it has radically affected everything.
DF: Gotcha, that’s a good point. I have a couple more questions about more miscellaneous happenings in your life. I understand you are a big collector, and as a fellow collector, I’m wondering if there’s any collection you’re mourning in some way.
JS: When I moved from Los Angeles, I had to get rid of or give away a lot of collections, which was very sad. As a musician, this is the least interesting one to say, but I had about five vintage synthesizers and analog drum machines that I had to sell or give away. I wouldn't say that I was a collector of those, but I had more than one, and that I feel really sad about. There's one particular organ, that by luck, I sold to a friend who sold it to someone else, and that person, completely coincidentally, happens to be a friend of Angela. So it's still in the fold.
Both Angela and I had a massive stuffed animal collection, and we probably got rid of 80% of it. I had a huge rock collection, which is ridiculous, but I did get rid of a lot of those. I had a humongous candy collection, which I got rid of all of—I just put it into a bunch of boxes and shipped it to my nephews. I asked my brother, “Do you think that they would like a bunch of candy?” And he's like, “What kids don't like candy, dumbass.”
DF: What started the candy collection?
JS: Okay, this is gonna make me sound like a total wacko. When I first moved back to Los Angeles, I moved into a pretty rough neighborhood called MacArthur Park. I did not know it was as rough a neighborhood as it was. It’s a long story, it is not a happy place, but it is a very interesting place. One of the things that makes it interesting is that it's a center for Santa Muerte worship. There are a number of Santa Muerte temples, a few Santería temples, and a lot of botanicas, which center around those spiritual and cultural beliefs. That was something I didn't know anything about before I moved into that neighborhood, so entirely as a tourist, I started to poke my head in.
Sometimes people were cool with me being in there, and sometimes it didn’t seem like it was for me and I would politely back out. As I got more interested, a few people were very warm and shared some information with me. I am privately a spiritual person, and have a broad idea of spirituality, and I was finding, even though I was resistant to it because I didn't want to be a honky tourist, that certain aspects of Santería felt like they had some spiritual relevance for me, even though that's not part of my culture at all. I felt funny about it, because I didn't want to dip my heart into something where it didn't belong, but I didn't want to resist it, because it was feeling very real. I was feeling guilty about it and I talked to my mom, who grew up atheist and didn’t become spiritual until she was much older, well into adulthood. I grew up with a kind of normal Christianity, and there's a lot of inherent guilt in normal Christianity, even though my experience with it was generally pretty positive. But my mom said, “I didn't grow up with any of that guilt as a background, and if something feels real to you and you mean it, it's okay to explore.”
So there’s this spirit in Santería named Elegua and his purview is opening doors, entrances and exits in life, literally and metaphorically. Particularly creatively, that was having a lot of resonance with me. But, one of the things that Elegua likes as an offering is candy, and I had this tiny Elegua shrine in my studio. In Los Angeles, there's so many different kinds of people, so there's a ton of different kinds of candy. I like to go around LA, it's a great place to explore, and I would find little candies. Initially it was part of the shrine, and it just grew and grew until it took on a life of its own. The candy collection became its own massive, completely out of control insane person’s collection. Also, Los Angeles is very warm, and candy is made of sugar, which melts. So when I was getting rid of this candy collection, a lot of it was completely fused to itself, which I didn't realize. When I tried to move it I realized it was a fucking bowling ball of sugar. I didn't send those to my nephews because I didn't know if they were going to die. So that is the long story of how the candy collection began. I’ve never told anybody that.
DF: That's awesome. Halfway through I had no idea where the candy was going to come in. Thank you. As a send off to readers who have made it to the end, I like to ask if there is any art, literature, activism, etc. that has been inspiring you lately that you would recommend.
JS: Yeah, I think I might’ve just read the best book I’ve ever read in my entire life. Angela showed it to me, it’s a relatively new book called Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, a french writer. It completely blew my mind. I want to read it again, but I'm afraid to read it again because it was so intense. I finished it a couple weeks ago, so it being important to me is very fresh. If it's not my favorite book ever, it's in the top three favorite things I've ever read.
DF: What was so powerful about the experience?
JS: I'll say the topic, and it will not make sense. It's about a family of pig farmers in France, the first half takes place around the time of World War One and the second is in the early 80s. It's the same family, just at different times in history. Things happen in the book that in a hundred million years would never have occurred to me could be part of human experience. It is just extraordinarily creative. It's beautifully and densely written, but it’s really what he chose to include in the book and what he chose to have the characters experience and do. Also his descriptions of the lives of the pigs and what pig farming is like, how he was able to put it across so horribly. I mean, it's not a fun book. It is awful. But the ways that it is awful are so jarring and so original and so moving, and in that way it is incredibly beautiful. The descriptions are of some of the most disgusting things you could imagine, but they're done so well and so surprisingly that it is beautiful. I never think about pigs. I never think about pig farming or farmers. To have a portal opened up to something so unexpected in such a jarring way—I mean this without any exaggeration—I feel forever changed by this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I don't know if other people will feel the same way about it, but for me it was an incredible experience.
DF: Thank you, that’s a really intriguing description, I will definitely check it out. Thank you so much for chatting, this has been really illuminating.
JS: Thanks, you were great to talk to. Thanks for being so nice and for having so many good questions.
DF: Of course, thanks for taking the time.
Comments