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Three questions with Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart

What’s your live show like these days?

It’s actually changed significantly recently. We had been using a drum machine, along with a drummer, and we removed the drum machine and added a bass player. So it’s, I think, louder and more intense, more dynamic and completely live, whereas before it was partially programmed. We try to change the live show pretty significantly every year—add or subtract what seems to us to be an essential element, just to keep us on our toes, for one. And we’ve been touring a lot since 2002, so a lot of people have seen us, maybe three or four times, so we just wanna make sure they’re not getting tired of us doing the same thing all the time.

Since your lyrics are entirely personal and never fictional, does performing your songs night after night take an emotional toll on you, or is it cathartic in a sense?

It’s not really a consistent experience. Writing them can be clarifying in so far as having to delve super deeply and spend a lot of time with a particular subject that’s been really intense or difficult to deal with. But I wouldn’t really use the word cathartic. I don’t feel better afterwards for having played a song. I’m not really sure. I would think by this point I would have a clear idea of what the kind of personal functionality of it is, but I don’t really know. But it must be working in some way, since I’m still doing it.

Given that you operate in such an intensely real world lyrically, do you have much interest in listening to music from storytelling songwriters?

No, I’m not really interested in that kind of music at all. I don’t really listen to music casually, like, I don’t have it on when I’m doing the dishes or something like that. If I’m listening to it, then I’m listening to it to have some kind of experience or learn something or get something out of it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with listening to music in a casual way, but it’s not really what works for me. I don’t have a trillion records, but the records I have I listen to a lot. Like, probably about every two months I’ll go on a crazy Smiths jag, just as a palliative to get through some rotten part of the tour. But it’s, like, the dumbest band to devote yourself to, because every whiny person on Earth devotes themselves to The Smiths.

With A Crowd of Small Adventures, Love Pentagon. April 9, 10 p.m., $7. Beauty Bar, 598-1965.

Photograph by Spencer Patterson

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