Welp, it’s finally happening. Stephen Malkmus, king of indie rock, slacker dad of the century, is finally getting a gut. It’s only a small belly, he clarifies, but nevertheless—Father Time comes for us all. The frontman of Pavement, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, and The Hard Quartet is calling us from the back of a tour bus stationed outside Union Transfer in Philly, where the Quartet will be performing cuts from their stellar self-titled 2024 debut. From there, they’ll head to Brooklyn, where Malkmus will have a homecoming of sorts, having recently snagged an apartment with his partner in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan. Between the gut, the New York digs, permanent residence in Chicago after almost two decades in Portland, and life on a bus, things are still changing for Malkmus as he quietly approaches retirement age.
“I’m more used to taking a couple of vans, one with gear, one with bodies of the band, and then driving four hours each day, maybe finding something weird to eat and listening to music together in a communal way or zoning out,” he explains. Back then, before gigs, he would roam around cities looking for cheap barbecue or something else to quell his stomach. Now? He hangs out on the bus, looking for a nearby coffee shop and something light to coat his gut before indulging in a small amount of alcohol; before each gig, he’ll take a shot of tequila or whiskey, something to quiet the nerves and keep the cobwebs from settling.
This boozy treat aside, Malkmus’s diet is pretty straightforward. He and his partner do a lot of cooking; his kids love carbonara, he loves turning roasted chicken dinners into taco lunches. Snacks are chips or leftovers, though he doesn’t always indulge. Sparkling waters are procured by the dozens, and though he may be navigating the New York grocery-store experience more than ever before, nothing can get in the way of La Croix diehards getting their fix. (My wife and I routinely put away at least a dozen a week, turning the heavy lift up four flights of stairs into a fitness competition.)
Malkmus is one of the easiest guys to talk to, the perfect blend of self-deprecating, astute, and endlessly funny. GQ caught up with the rock legend to chat about The Hard Quartet, Alex Ross Perry’s buzzy meta-documentary Pavements, and, of course, how he maintains that slim frame.
GQ: How’s the tour going so far?
Stephen Malkmus: It’s young. It’s young and vibrant. College-aged, just a freshman. It’s going fine.
So you’re still early enough in this run that it’s not automatic?
Yeah, there’s always a little bit of ‘What did I get myself into?,’ at least for me, and I think everyone feels that way, unless you’re a dedicated road dog or something. I’m with new people and their friends and stuff. We share some mutuals, but there are different people backstage and stuff. It’s kind of interesting.
You ready to talk about what you eat?
I’m worried. I don’t take nootropics or lion’s mane and I’m not a gym guy. But maybe you should have people like me to represent in the GQ demographic. The real ones.
When you’re on the road, do you usually leave town right after the gig and travel through the night?
This time around, yeah. We’re on a bus. It’s maybe a little more expensive. I’m more used to taking a couple of vans, one with gear, one with bodies of the band, and then driving four hours each day, maybe finding something weird to eat and listening to music together in a communal way or zoning out. When you wake up, you’re in front of a venue and you crawl half formed out of a puddle and then quickly form into yourself over the next hour trying to find coffee or whatever. Some people are better at it than others, and some people probably drink more and they’re worse at it. There are people on this tour that brought their pajamas. They have little coffee units.
Walking around trying to find coffee must be a decent way to get to know a city when on tour.
If the weather’s nice, it’s good. We started in the Mid-Atlantic in some nice college towns. Atlanta was nice. Sometimes you have a car and now you can take Ubers, but back in the day there was no rideshare thing. You’d be stuck. I’d try to rent a car. I would just drive around Tulsa and look at the architecture or something by myself, get away from the band, maybe go find a cool cheap-eats place, barbecue or something. It’s still possible with the bus, but I’m more likely just to stick around the venue.
Are you pretty conscious about what you’re putting in your body when you’re on the road?
There’s a balance to it. Maybe it’s a subconscious thing. I just can’t really eat french fries and burgers over and over. I love them. Barbecue and fried food I’ll devour as well. I have no guilt and I don’t feel it or anything. I’m skinny, basically. I’m getting a tiny belly, finally, now that I’m almost 60, so there must be some subconscious thing that tells me it’s time to have vegetables or tofu. I almost don’t have to think about it.
Are you a big snacker?
Not really.
Well, that’s how you keep the belly off.
Maybe. I mean, I like chips and at home, but when you eat at home, you’re just more in control. It’s just healthier. Even if it’s from the most basic supermarket store—that a GQ man shouldn’t eat from—it’s still better for you. I eat chips and when I get hungry I’m just looking around, digging into leftovers; things that are not too gnarly.
What’s the most surprising thing on The Hard Quartet rider?
It’s pretty basic, dude. There aren’t many surprises. I had nothing to do with it. I just like sparkling water.
I’m a sparkling water devotee. Let’s get into it.
I’ll have San Pellegrino or La Croix or something. I like some whiskey or tequila. I like to take one shot before I go on stage and shake out the cobwebs. I saw a whole roasted chicken on there. That’s kind of nice. Jim, the drummer, has in the past asked for organic vegetables and even raw meat to be cooked, because sometimes he makes food on a hot plate.
What’s your go-to sparkling water?
We’re sort of basic. My partner likes La Croix. There are Italian ones that are great and I like Topo Chicos for the different bubbles. I like those more than she does. They’re smaller bubbles or something. But she’s a pamplemousse La Croix drinker. I like Polar. It has some weirder flavors, just to spice it up. They have better packaging. It looks a little more appetizing.
Now that you’re settled in Chicago, what’s the food scene like there versus Portland, where you were living before?
At a certain point I was sort of burnt out on it all after 15 years. I don’t know about much in Chicago. We eat at home a lot. We don’t have expense accounts and we got kids so it’s a lot of cooking. We rarely get takeaway. We’ll maybe eat out for dinner once a week, lunch once or twice a week.
Oh yeah, yeah. We love that. That’s from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, I think. It’s an automatic, you can always make that. Maybe you don’t have ricotta in the refrigerator, but almost everyone has frozen peas and bacon and parmesan and pasta. You’re checking to see if the ricotta has green on it from the last time. We roast chickens once a week and then the next day I will often fry it with onions and make tacos, just crisp the shit out of it and make USA tacos. That’s comfort food.
‘USA tacos’ sounds like something the president would promote.
They’re not Trumpy.
I know you mentioned you’re not a big fitness guy. Are you walking when you’re on tour? Do you have an exercise regimen?
Yeah, I walk. We have an exercise bike in the house in Chicago. It gets snowy and you don’t want to move sometimes and I’ll ride that for 45 minutes watching a pirated TV show or something, like White Lotus. Then I walk the dog. That’s an hour. I play tennis. That’s my main older guy exercise. I can do that without even feeling like I’m exercising because you sweat your ass off. Then I do yoga, too.
The one close to me is this hot yoga studio. I did that a long time ago, so I bought their intro package. This yoga feels like it’s pretty much for addicts, recovering addicts, and addictive personalities because it’s so intense and so hot. You just suffer pretty much for 60 of the 90 minutes. You feel really good afterwards, but you’re also fucking beat up like you’ve been in a dryer. But it’s also kind of awesome. I just can’t really vouch for it a hundred percent. It’s not for everyone. I almost don’t want to admit I’m the Bikram hot yoga guy, but I do like it. I would love it if it was like 10 degrees cooler. If it came from a different tropic of India, just a little further north, would have been good.
Matt [Sweeney, Hard Quartet guitarist] would have a lot of opinions about that. He was involved with Superiority Burger and stuff like that. It would be with a New York thing, I think. I hang around below Canal Street. Dimes Square is basically my office, dude. Just kidding. But I have an apartment near there. Everyone likes dumplings and they’re cheap and rock and roll is cheap and everyone loves rock—not everyone loves rock and roll. They love good rock and roll. Everyone loves music. Music’s cheap. Dumplings are cheap and we could just do something fun. It would be with North Dumpling, the one on Essex. The ladies there would just be like, “What?” It’s a real small little operation there. No one would be able to get in and it’s all high school kids because it’s cheap.
I know you were also in some fantasy sports leagues with Momofuku founder David Chang. Are y’all still doing that?
He had to bow out. It was too competitive. I still do it, but I don’t do it hard. In the early 2000s there were four years where I was actually winning everything and that becomes addictive. It was variance, it wasn’t like I was so good. It happens with gamblers too. You don’t want someone to go in the casino for the first time and put a silver dollar in a slot machine and get three sevens because they’ll be chasing that high into bankruptcy and addiction.
While it’s happening you think you’re good and success is coming via skill.
I realized that after a while. You can grind your ass off and win some of these games, but it was a lot of luck and once I realized that I backed off and I just let the computer pick my team. But doing baseball this year, I don’t recognize as many players. I know who Ohtani and some of the big players are, but the drop off is pretty fast after the stars.
Yeah, I mostly try to choose Mets players because that’s my team.
I picked Soto. He’s on one of my teams. I got Lindor on a team. Vientos, too. And a guy named Winkler [Jesse Winker], but I might have to drop him.
You spent a bunch of time in NorCal growing up. Are you a Giants fan?
No, I never really liked them. I stuck with the Dodgers. I also just liked the teams that were good. In the late seventies I was into, perversely, the Milwaukee Brewers. They had players like Paul Molitor and Robin Yount. I liked that they were called the Brewers. They just seemed weird to me. I also liked the Pirates back in the ‘We are Family’ era when they were the most vibey team in the world and their uniforms were really cool. That’s kind of how I rolled. I liked the Dodgers, but I never liked the Yankees and I liked the Red Sox more than the Yankees. I learned to despise the Red Sox too as time went on. I don’t like the Braves. I’m more of a hater, I guess. I don’t like the Cubs. I like the Mets, but some teams give me bad feelings. The Giants don’t give me bad feelings, but I don’t really like ’em.That’s how it works.
Do you consider the New York show a homecoming?
I always feel like home is where my bands were first appreciated more than other places, and I always felt at home there. Most bands might say that if they’re just talking about getting a good guarantee and playing bigger rooms, but I really did feel like that’s where I lived when the Pavement stuff started.
Alex Ross Perry’s documentary Pavements opens next month. Aside from being in the band that inspired the movie, what was your role in the film?
There’s current day concert footage and maybe some backstage stuff, but there aren’t interviews. There are some other kinds of gags that we’re in, but it’s sort of like we’re just there. We’re not acting. We’re not even supposed to know the camera’s there. That’s sort of how I treated it. I don’t know what the final edit will look like.
Ideally, where would you eat before the New York City gig?
If Matador was there and they said, ‘Steve, we’re going out,’ I would go with them. They go out on so many meals. That’s basically what they do. That’s what being a record label is, as far as I can tell—it’s just eating good food. I would maybe try to go with them wherever they went to get free food and talk to them, or I would get sushi. Something light, really, something that I feel good eating.
Something that mingles nicely with the pre-performance shot, I imagine too.
Yeah.
You don’t want something heavy before having to force down some bourbon. That’s never a good feeling.
You don’t really want to, but sometimes I’ve made the mistake of going to the steakhouse with Matador before the show and getting the Mad Men martini or something, and then you just focus on making it through. You survive instead of thrive.