There is a strange and beautiful truth hidden inside the best music ever made
The more space the artist leaves, the closer we all feel.
It is something I have been thinking about ever since I first heard Stephen Malkmus’ Traditional Techniques on the day it came out, March 6, 2020. Practically the worst timing in American history to release a record. Right on the edge of the world shutting down. A moment when the word space suddenly became something clinical and frightening. Six feet apart. Empty streets. Quiet rock and roll clubs. The ache of distance.
What I heard was not a soundtrack for future covid isolation.
It felt like a British folk record beamed in from the early 1970s. Acoustic. Patient. Warm. Full of negative space and reverb that opened up around my ears like I was listening in a cathedral. I had just finished mixing my own record and after hundreds of hours of listening to my own very maximalist music, Traditional Techniques became the perfect palate cleanser. After all restraint can hold more meaning than 100 overdubs or volume ever could.
It is no secret that Pavement is my third favorite band of all time, and when they played their final shows in 1999, it felt like a door slamming shut. But time has a funny way of turning distance into something sacred.
Their first reunion in 2010, which my band got to open one of the shows.. yeah (holy shit) worked so well precisely because of the space between those eras. Eleven years of growing separately gave the band room to return as something both familiar and completely refreshed. Their most recent reunion proved the same thing; sometimes the only way to keep the magic alive is to let it disappear for a while.
And in all that time apart, Stephen Malkmus never stopped moving. Since Pavement’s demise, he has released an incredible discography of albums with the Jicks and under his own name, stretching himself across more styles than most artists attempt in a lifetime. Prog wanderings, indie electronic experiments, folk meditations, guitar jam journeys, and perfect indie pop like no one else can.
The miracle is this
Every time Malkmus puts space between himself and what came before, he finds a new universe inside it. He steps back, stretches out, breathes deeply, and somehow pulls us even closer to something we never knew we needed so much.
And on Traditional Techniques, a huge part of that closeness and coolness comes from Matt Sweeney.
Matt Sweeney understands space better than almost anyone.
You can hear it in his playing but you can also see it in his very sexy smile.
Matt Sweeney has a serious case of diastema. What's Diastema you ask.
That rad space between the front teeth.
Many of history’s most important faces had this same space
Madonna, Cleopatra, Ray Davies, Elton John, Brigitte Bardot, Joe DiMaggio, Mike Tyson.
My son has this same space. His mom does too. Aka good company.
Sweeney has this rare gift of being a musical connector
the guy who championed GUIDED BY VOICES in their earliest cassette days
the guy who introduced Kurt Cobain to them
the guy who has played with everyone from CAT POWER to Iggy Pop to Bonnie Prince Billy, ZWAN to his own great band Chavez.
But my favorite stuff is the stuff he has done with Stephen .. on Traditional Techniques, the interplay between Malkmus and Sweeney becomes something transcendent. Notes floating between them like soft storm clouds rising into air. I wanted more of it.. and I felt like COVID 19 STOLE it away from me. My chances of seeing it live or them developing more music together.
Which brings me to one of the tracks Rudy Fischmann and I discuss on the latest episode of Discograffiti Perfect Songs Forever podcast.. The song is from the 2024 release by The Hard Quartet. Malkmus and Sweeney's SUPER GROUP with Emmett Kelly and Jim White.
Rio Song by The Hard Quartet is a meditation on distance..
distance between cities, between people, between what we gain and what we cannot keep.
It is a song about rising, drifting, aching, returning.
I have loved this song so much since it was released.. Whenever my son and I drive somewhere, we have this rule
He gets to DJ and pick a song, then I get to pick a song. And we go back and forth. "
And every time he says “Ok Dad your turn”
I put on Rio Song. It has become a running joke.
And every time he groans.. He's pretty into modern rap right now.
“Daaaad come on not again”
But then I hear his tiny voice start singing along with Matt Sweeney
"Up above the world again
Up above the world again
Who could blame you...."
And every time it absolutely kills me.
I look in the review mirror
and see him singing with that gap in his mouth much like Sweeney’s.
It makes me smile every-time. The space in the music we are sharing
and the space in the world that seems to shrink when he sings along.
We are in a moving car but somehow we are floating up above the rest of the world.
That is what this episode of Perfect Songs Forever is really about.
The distance that makes connection possible.
The air between notes where we as listeners get to enter.
The space between musicians that creates the spark.
The space and taste between father and son that music somehow erases.
I was so worried as a music fan that the work Malkmus and Sweeney did on Traditional Techniques would be forgotten because of the time it was released, but rock and roll salvation has come and the Hard Quartet.. erased that fear.
The best music is full of space
and it brings us closer together than anything else ever could.
You can hear us gush about Rio Song and Killed by Death by the Hard Quartet here https://www.patreon.com/posts/237a-soldiers-of-145791111?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_share