From putting a nude rent boy on an album cover to writing the lines “Did you know you were going to shoot off the top of a four year old girl’s head… and see into her throat” on 2004’s anti-war dirge Support Our Troops, Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart has never shied away from the more shocking aspects of contemporary life. This year, he returns with an album called Dear God I Hate Myself, combining “pop structures” with (ahem) self-hatred to create what might be the best work of his career so far.
A line in the new single Gray Death struck me. “You expect me to be outrageous, I will be extra-outrageous.” What do you think of that as an introduction to Xiu Xiu?
It’s a little self-serving for me to say that it might be. It’s probably not wholly inaccurate. It kind of comes more from some advice that my dad gave me. He was in music and before he died he advised me to try to take things too far. So it’s sort of a bit of an homage to his advice I guess.
With a title like Dear God I Hate Myself and a picture of yourself on the cover, the new album seems confrontational. Was that the intent?
I think the intent was just to express feeling that way sometimes. How to put this… extreme negative emotion is sometimes looked down upon as not being genuine. So in addition to being an autobiographical comment, it’s an attempt to make extreme negative emotion something that doesn’t necessarily have to be hidden away.
Do you think you’ve had a problem with people interpreting you as theatrical?
People are free to interpret things any way that they want. I know that it’s not that, and there’s nothing I can do other than to be honest in my own attempt at expressing that. All of the songs are about something real that is happening. And almost by definition, saying something that is honest is confessional.
So do you write to get past problems?
I don’t really feel cleansed for having wrote a song about something. It clarifies an issue, but it doesn’t make it go away. It gives the energy behind it some place to go, but it doesn’t make it go away.
When Women As Lovers came out in 2008, the press release said that it was your most accessible album to date “on a human level”. Does that carry on to this album?
I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that line. We’ve never done anything to attempt to be accessible. We’ve really pointedly played around with pop structures and pop types of songs because we like pop songs, but the point of that is not to be accessible, it’s to make the music that reflects what we’re interested at the time. I would say that Dear God I Hate Myself’s arrangements are extraordinarily influenced by pop music, and whether that makes something accessible by default, I don’t know. The point is not to try to be accessible, it’s to try to be as good as we can be.
Is it difficult for you to sing the songs night in night out, or if you have a detachment from them?
No, it is difficult. The point would be to not have a detachment from them. It would be the opposite of what I’ve always tried to do with this band. It gets exhausting for sure. I try as hard as I can to be as honest as I can every single night. Sometimes that is achieved and sometimes it’s not, but the intent to do it is definitely there.
In homage to the chorus of Chocolate Makes You Happy, what makes you happy at the moment?
Well, it’s really cold in New York right now, and I grew up in California so I’m not used to it being cold. And I’m really interested in birdwatching so I’ve began to put gallons of birdfeed in the grass. My front yard is completely infested with the local birds. Looking at them every morning makes me pretty happy. However chocolate still makes me very happy as well.
And what keeps you awake?
What doesn’t keep me awake. I’ve had a bad time sleeping since I was a little kid. Horrible, horrible, horrible sense of anxiety every night.
Xiu Xiu play Whelan’s on the 20th February for the sum of €15. If you’re not at Lady Gaga, like.
Words: Karl McDonald
