I should get my hands on one of those again. Really cheap, maybe around twenty-five dollars, and it had a horrible octave shift in it that couldn’t follow anything so it was mostly just random. But the one cool one we had was a really cheap Danelectro called the French Toast. This is literally the only shit I care about, just distortion pedals! One was a yellow MXR that I left in a parking lot at an airport, one was a crappy RAT. I think we had three distortion pedals at the time. Then we just ran them through distortion pedals. We had a Yamaha DX21, which I think Cory was the only person in the entire world who could get some decent sounds out of it, and some other garbage synth that I don’t think anyone feels fondness for even now. Two shitty synths, and not shitty in a good way. How did you create the grating, mechanical sounds on the record?īack then I think we only had two synths. But it was, at the time, a daily concern. It is an option, and thankfully it’s not something that is as big of a part of my life as it was then. Not promoting it as a way out, but just as a way of just… dealing with it. It’s more just dealing with it as a way of life. Yeah, there’s definitely a sense of uncertainty in the lyrics in regards to suicide. are more there to illustrate what there is to lose from suicide. I frankly don’t remember because this song in particular is more about suicide. Is the mention of the names used heighten the personal element of the songs? At the time we were real close friends, and “Wei” and “Huai” are her brother and sister. “Chen” is Yvonne Chen, who was in Xiu Xiu at the time we were writing it, who co-wrote it. What are the mentions of the Chinese names in the lyrics here? At the time it was very specific, but now to me it’s probably just about difficult existence in a more personal or general way, depending on what year it is, what happens to be going on… does that even make any sense? Most of the lines from the song are things they had said to each other, and it’s an observation of their impossible attempt to have a relationship… their difficult existence. Their relationship was completely secretive, and they’d sit above my window and be a couple. She was gay and was dating an older woman from the neighbourhood, and I think the older woman was married to a man. Attached to the house was an apartment that was right above my bedroom window, and there was this young girl who lived in an apartment next door. We lived in this house that was literally falling apart, not really like a punk house, more of a nerd house in the style of a punk house. When we first started off the band we were obscenely broke. I think that the Xiu Xiu version, to my ear, says what I think that song is trying to say.Ĭory and I used to live in this really terrible house. It was a song that Cory McCulloch, who started Xiu Xiu with me… yeah, we both liked it and essentially didn’t want that song to go to waste! I also think the Ten In The Swear Jar version didn’t really suit the feel of the song with how it was arranged. We self-released one CD that was limited to about five-hundred copies and we never toured. Ten In The Swear Jar was a band that nobody had heard of. I wish I had a decent theoretical reason for picking that song. Why choose to rework and open the record with it? Older fans will recognise this as a song from your previous band, Ten In The Swear Jar. Myself and Stewart pulled into a shimmering vegetarian restaurant on Baldwin St, Bristol to discuss A Promise, relationships, self-abuse, and the heartbreaking vow behind the album’s title.
#Did anyone like the one more light album series
This absurd conflict between sex and human relationships, along with Stewart’s guilt towards the experience, served as a stimulus for the harrowing emotional palettes of the band’s formidable A Promise, which would launch Xiu Xiu to the height of indie rock infamy.Ĭross Sections is a series which dissects cult albums with the help of their creators. He stripped, posed with the baby, took his money, and left. There, Stewart paid him to take his picture, his only attendant being a rubber baby toy which had been carried around with Stewart on his trip. A chance encounter with a young homeless man would lead to one of the most striking, controversial, and ridiculed album sleeves of the past decade.īeing asked for sex in return for money by the down-and-out young man, Stewart instead invited him to his hotel room. Jamie Stewart, whose eccentric extremes have propelled Californian experimentalists Xiu Xiu through all manner of indie trends over the past decade, found himself on vacation in Vietnam prior to the recording of the band’s 2003 sophomore album. The story of A Promise begins in a gay cruising spot in Hanoi.
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