MMT50 - 227 Meeting Malkmus - a Pavement podcast

jD hangs with Stephen on today's episode of the Top 50 Countdown. First, as usual, he shares his Pavement origin story and then reveals song 27!
Transcript
Track 1:
[0:00] Previously on the Pavement Top 50. You can exhale now because track 28 is Stop Breathing. Amir, what are your initial thoughts about this song? I love this song. It appears in my Top 20 that I sent you. I think it's number 14 there. So it's half of your number. Hey, this is Westy from the Rock and.

Track 3:
[0:22] Roll Band Pavement, and you're listening to The Countdown. Hey it's jd here back for another episode of our top 50 countdown featuring seminal indie rock band pavement week over week we're going to count down the 50 essential pavement tracks that you selected with your very own top 20 ballots i then tabulated the results using an abacus and some fucker named gene how will your favorite song fare in the ratings well you'll have to tune in to find out. So there's that. This week, I'm joined by Pavement superfan, Stephen. Stephen, how the fuck are you? I'm very good, JD. How are you? I'm doing quite stellar, in fact. It's a good day to be breathing and upright, you know? It is. It is. Spring's in the air. You know, winter's gone. Things are looking up. Funny enough, it's snowing here today. First, you know, we've passed spring. We didn't get any snow at all. And then, you know, it turns into spring and all of a sudden we've got snow. So, you know, who can fucking tell?

Track 3:
[1:30] No, no, but yeah, thanks for having me on. It's like we said before, just before we started, I've been listening to the whole countdown so far. And, you know, it's been great. It's a nice little pick me up on the Monday morning when it drops. And it's a good feeling to think that, you know, there's going to be one a week for the whole year pretty much. So, yeah, I've been really enjoying it. Well, thank you so much. That means a lot. So let's get, you know, let's make this about you now and let's get right into your Pavement Origins story. Yeah, okay, yeah. So, I mean, I'm 42 now and I got into Pavement when I was about... Sort of 15 16 so it was basically when uh terror twilight came out.

Track 3:
[2:19] When i was a teenager i was really into radiohead at the time i mean i still am but uh, they were they were my band at the moment so i was obsessively into everything that they did and i would read all the interviews and you know get every release and bootleg and ep and thing that came out uh from that band and i remember i was on holiday once and uh i picked up a music magazine in the airport on the way over and there was a a big article in there about pavement and the terror twilight release um and i'd kind of heard of them a little bit uh i kind of knew off them but it was always but they were always sort of mentioned in the same breath as um, the fall and john peel and things like that and so yeah in my mind i kind of built them up as a kind of scary alternative loud punky i don't know abrasive sort of band that was sort of unlistenable, um and i kind of remember at the time also around that time in the 90s um blur brought out their uh.

Track 3:
[3:27] Self-titled album the one that has song two on right graham graham coxson was going around on the interview circuit and saying oh yeah this this this album's influenced by you know really really hard understandable american bands like like pavement and i was like oh okay yeah so this in my head i kind of built them up as um something a bit difficult and then i read this saw this article in um this music magazine it must be key magazine or enemy or something and they just came across like a really nice bunch of guys and i thought right when i get back from holiday i'm going to buy that record it sounds really good also so yeah the other thing was that the main draw at that time was uh the radio head rich sort of connection godrich yeah so he he nigel godrich produced it they had johnny greenwood playing harmonic