Xiu Xiu Interview: Thinking Is the Enemy of Being Creative
Photo credit: Xiu Xiu
BY JORDAN MAINZER
On Friday, the prolific art rock band Xiu Xiu will reward their die-hards with a covers record. Xiu Mutha Fuckin' Xiu: Vol. 1 (Polyvinyl) is not your ordinary covers record, though. Its wonderfully ridiculous title refers to the monthly subscription service the band launched during the pandemic--part of which includes receiving a new fully produced full-band cover--and has kept up since. The 12 songs on XMFX are taken from the 70 or so covers the group has released since 2020 and range from experimental jams from Xiu Xiu predecessors like The Normal, Throbbing Gristle, Soft Cell, This Heat, and Coil, to stretched out takes on popular favorites from Robyn, Roy Orbison, and most unexpectedly, Memphis rapper GloRilla. Selected half by the trio of Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo, and David Kendrick, and half from fan polls, the collection acts as a window into the band's artistic minds and tastes and into what fans have loved about them over their almost 25 years.
That's another reason, then, why XMFX is not your ordinary covers record. The trio's 15th studio album, with no original songs, is perhaps ironically the best entry point into Xiu Xiu for newcomers. With each song, Stewart wished to take something near and dear and turn it upside-down--in other words, give it a Xiu Xiu spin. Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" alternates between the Stop Making Sense version's shuffle and a cold, unfamiliar clang, between Stewart emulating David Byrne's upfront warble and their vocals being relegated to the background. The blues chug of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" is subsumed by atonal saxophone-like sounds, exaggerated soulful screams, and a power-driven drum beat. The production on the spoken vocals of Throbbing Gristle's "Hamburger Lady" make it sound like found footage, or a dream. And GloRilla's "Lick or Sum" is unrecognizable, Stewart's soft cadence atop an abstract, sour-sounding synth line and cracking percussion adding an element of theatricality to the tune's horniness. Not only can you find the emotions each of the original songs are known for, in all of Xiu Xiu's original material, but Stewart and company glean newfound truths out of some material we thought we already knew front and back.
This week, Stewart spoke to me over Zoom from their home in Berlin about their approach to covers and Xiu Xiu's ever-evolving influences. Read their responses below, edited for length and clarity.
Since I Left You: Was there something about these covers specifically that made you want to put them together as a collection?
Jamie Stewart: Some of them we just had a particular connection to. Others, we did a number of polls on social media for people who had been subscribers and might be interested in being subscribers in the future, [and asked them which covers they'd be] interested in having on a physical format. So it was half our own choices and half from several polls.
SILY: Half of the covers are of bands that you presumably were influenced by--at least very directly in terms of the Xiu Xiu aesthetic over the years--and others are more contemporary reimaginings of a genre or style you wouldn't necessarily associate with Xiu Xiu. Did the band or fans tend to skew towards one type or the other with their respective choices?
JS: We were actually really surprised: A lot of the songs [that,] through our tiny lens, we thought were more far out, ended up getting the most votes. The Coil song ["Triple Sun"] had almost as many votes as the Robyn song ["Dancing on My Own"], which we did not expect. We were happy, because those two worlds being together is a lot of what we're about, so we were glad people were able to make that connection. We've done a lot of covers since we've started--a fucking lot of covers--and now we have the subscription, but the idea behind all of them, whether or not they're obvious, direct influences, [is] it's always a song that has touched us in one way or another. We're saying thank you to the song and to the writers and bands who performed them. It's never that we could do a more interesting version, or reimagining for the sake of reimagining. As fans of music, we have emotional connections to any song we've ever covered, and we'll always maintain that approach.
SILY: I like how you've contextualized the album: Parts of the songs are familiar, but with that familiarity comes a disorientation when certain bits are different than what we're used to. It's culling a different emotion from the song you didn't realize was always in the original song.
JS: This is gonna sound very corny, but that's one of the most wonderful parts about music, that the emotionality of a particular song is so widely up to an individual's interpretation, and how one's lived experience colors the interpretation of a song is as different as there are as many people on the earth. That can change for one person, too: A song I had particular feelings about when I was 16, I still like, but how I felt about it at 16 is wildly different than how I feel about it now, but I still feel something about it. It's probably my favorite part about music, how malleable it is but also how internal it is.
SILY: "Dancing on My Own" is a great example. Robyn's song is euphoric. She's lonely and heartbroken on the dance floor, but she's rising above the feeling. Your version has none of that euphoria.
JS: [laughs]
SILY: But your version emphasizes how deep the feelings are. It's so desperate. When she sings, "I just came to say goodbye," it's right before the final beat drop, and when you sing it, it's so stark. You forget that in Robyn's song, maybe she's trying to distract herself from how despondent she really is.
JS: That song has a really special place in our hearts. The first Xiu Xiu song we ever did was "Jennifer Lopez", and the subject matter of that song is very similar to the setting and idea of the Robyn song, in so far as both of the people in both of the songs--in the case of the Xiu Xiu song, it's me--are on the dance floor and feeling essentially stupid and very alone. In Robyn's case, it's seeing a very specific person and not being able to make a connection, and "Jennifer Lopez" is about me being on a dance floor and night after night going home alone despite my best efforts. I could deeply, deeply relate to what I think Robyn is going for in ["Dancing on My Own"], being in a place where there are people around, it's loud, and it's designed to be euphoric, but as an individual feeling anything other than euphoria. It's unfortunately super familiar to me. [laughs]
SILY: And probably to a lot of people.
JS: Probably to most people. Undoubtedly. Despite our best efforts not to go home alone after being at a dance club, most of us do.
SILY: It's a pretty low hit rate.
JS: [laughs]
SILY: "Psycho Killer" is from the first Talking Heads album, but your version seems more attuned to the Stop Making Sense version. "Warm Leatherette" was made famous by Grace Jones, but your version seems more attuned to the original by The Normal. Are there specific versions of these songs you associate with more than others?
JS: When I was a kid, my dad, who was a very successful musician, could tell I was getting to be more serious about music. He gave me Otis Redding's Greatest Hits and Stop Making Sense on the same day. It completely changed my life. I mean that sincerely--both of those records changed my life at that moment forever. The Stop Making Sense version [of "Psycho Killer"] is the one that from a very young age I've been deeply connected to. That record completely opened my world to songs that were not on the radio. Talking Heads were relatively popular, but I was a child, so I was listening to Top 40.
I'm really embarrassed to say that until recently, I didn't know there was a Grace Jones version of "Warm Leatherette". [laughs] So for us, it's The Normal version. I definitely need to hear the Grace Jones version. I'm sure what we did is wildly different.
SILY: She surprises me all the time, with the way she covers that or "Nightclubbing", she's so versatile.
JS: She's a magnificent artist.
Xiu Mutha Fuckin' Xiu album art
SILY: On your cover of GloRilla's "Lick or Sum", you rap a little bit. Did you have to get out of your comfort zone for that type of vocal or lyrical delivery?
JS: I talked to my bandmate Angela about it a lot. Obviously, I'm a middle class white person, and I asked her a bunch, "Is it socially okay for me to do this?" Any time I'm hammering with her--she's both my bandmate and my closest friend--she's kind of had enough of me freaking out about details and just says, "Well, do it and find out." I definitely went into it wondering if I could or should do it, but then similarly to how we approach every song, I wasn't going to do it trying to insert my middle class whiteness into the world of hip-hop, I was just trying to appreciate what I think is a fantastic song, and I think GloRilla is a fantastic artist. Once I got to the point of, "This is our attempt to show appreciation for this work of art," through that lens, I didn't feel as concerned about how I would look doing it. I think it's a very valid concern. One should definitely think about these things when one approaches art that one doesn't have a genuine connection to other than being a fan of. If the approach is through genuine love and appreciation--and that hopefully comes across--I think it's okay. Other people may not agree, and I think that's perfectly valid. I hope we did it justice.
SILY: I think so. In comparison to the other covers, your version also has some of the most traditionally Xiu Xiu elements on it, the industrial sounds, the snappy percussion. It sounds like it could just be a Xiu Xiu song.
JS: Since our conception, all kinds of beat-oriented music have certainly been an influence on us. There are aspects of it in everything we've ever done. Somebody at our label called ["Lick or Sum"] a goth trap song, which didn't seem inaccurate to me. I don't think I fully rap--I quietly talk-rap--but there's a hip hop artist from the 90's called Bahamadia, and she would always rap in an almost whisper. I was trying to channel her approach, probably because I was feeling self-conscious. For me to rap it in a full voice would have been very, very fucking stupid. [laughs]
SILY: Are the three of you avid music listeners in general?
JS: Yes, and our tastes are very far and wide.
SILY: When you're becoming a fan of a song, at what point do you think, "I'd like to respond to this by putting my own spin on it?"
JS: There's not a real conscious process behind it. Some songs I'll hear for the first time and think, "That's knocking me out, I gotta do this one." "Psycho Killer", I've loved since I was literally a child. So sometimes it's an immediate response, but others are very deep within our consciousness and blood forever. As is the case with almost everything we do, we really try not to think about it that hard and go forward with it. Thinking for us tends to be the enemy of being creative. It's impossible for us not to think, as humans with brains, [but we try] to go from an emotional place. However, one of the considerations we have to make is we have to be able to play the song. We have to crank one of these out every single month. We can't spend three months learning a song. I'm not a completely helpless musician, but I'm not the most technically adept person in the world, so it has to be something I can wrangle. Also, my voice is a little bit limited, too. There are plenty of songs I'd like to do that there is no possible way I could sing. I could barely do "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison. The key was way to high for me, so I had to pull it down by five semitones to barely squeak through it.
SILY: You change tone a lot on "In Dreams".
JS: Roy Orbison is obviously one of the most emotionally and technically adept singers in pop music history. He could sing like that without having to go into a falsetto, but there's no fucking way that I could. [laughs]
SILY: The way you talk about these covers, like they contain elements of the uncanny, fits with how Roy Orbison sings, which is kind of like he's just seen a ghost.
JS: Considering his life history and the extraordinary traumas and tragedies he'd been through, it's entirely possible he had. We have a photo of him pinned to the wall of our studio. He's one of our number one music idols.
SILY: Are you going to play these songs live?
JS: I don't know if we're gonna do them live or not. We're not really gonna tour again full-on until 2027. It probably would make sense for us to try to tackle one or two of these. If we could play them in the studio, we could play them live. However, I'm 100% sure I cannot sing "In Dreams" live, so we're not gonna do that one. [laughs]
SILY: What's the story behind the cover art and color scheme of the record?
JS: The band started in 2002, and from 2002 to 2012, we approached records in one particular way. Starting in 2014, we started chapter 2 of how we approach records. To signify that, all of our record covers since then, we've done in a fairly unified way. Each cover has a symbol on the front and may or may not have some iteration of the Xiu Xiu symbol, which is some type of x'd cross. It's always two colors: The field is one color, and the image and/or "X" is another color. The subscription we have is called Xiu Mutha Fuckin' Xiu, so the abbreviation for it is XMFX. Janelle Abad, the designer for Polyvinyl, came up with that XMFX image for the front.
SILY: Is there going to be a second volume of covers released as a record?
JS: To our surprise and delight, people seem to be as interested in the subscription now as when we first started. If we're still doing it in five more years, which I suspect we probably have [in us,] we'll probably do Vol. 2 then. It does require a fairly significant chunk of songs in order to be able to commit these to vinyl. I don't think we could crank out Vol. 2 in another six months. Because it's been over five years--a long time for us to pull songs together--I like that there are some songs that were from the first couple months [of covers] on there, and some that are very recent. I like that there's some development noticeable to us.
SILY: Is there anything else in the short or long term future for the band?
JS: We've been doing a concert called ERASERHEAD XIU XIU, which is a sonic and visual tribute to the aesthetics of the David Lynch film. We have a record of that music coming out this summer. We'll have a new record of original Xiu Xiu music coming out at the beginning of next year, which we're working on right now.
SILY: Is there anything you've been listening to, watching, or reading lately that's caught your attention or inspired you?
JS: I'm watching this documentary about Eartha Kitt on Criterion Channel called All by Myself, which is kind of blowing my brains out. Both Angela and David in Xiu Xiu are avid readers of noir which...I haven't really read much of, but I'm reading this book by Elliott Chaze called Black Wings Has My Angel, a full-on noir book. He writes in a very literary and strange way. That's also blowing my brains out. I'm on an almost embarrassingly completist Coil kick. I listened to them a little bit before, but after the last four-to-five months, it's all I've been listening to, and they have 10,000 records, so it's easy to listen to all of them. That band has really taken over my musical consciousness lately. I've also gotten kind of obsessed with Playboi Carti.
