The stories behind five of Pavement’s best songs
An essential part of the 1990s alternative scene, Pavement may seem like an unlikely candidate for social media virality. But the 2020s have pushed them back into the limelight as TikTok teens grew unexpectedly obsessed with their 1999 B-side ‘Harness Your Hopes’. It’s a phenomenon that’s difficult to get your head around, but Pavement have always been an enigmatic band.
More intrinsically than the indecipherability of their recent TikTok fame, Pavement’s music itself is full of mystery. The elusive band are dependable for their slacker strums and alt-rock rhythms, but the only consistency in their lyricism is nonsense and nuance. From the strange rhymes of ‘Harness Your Hopes’ to the skateboard contemplations of ‘Range Life’, their lyrics are always open to interpretation.
While that may be part of their charm, it can be frustrating trying to figure out the stories behind Pavement songs. Stephen Malkmus and his bandmates have been fairly tight-lipped about the meanings and themes of their sonic creations. Malkmus once simply deemed ‘Gold Soundz’ “a self-doubt song” and left it at that.
Interviews rarely delve into their inspirations or subject matters, leaving it up to us to decipher them. There are, however, a few tidbits of information Malkmus and the band have divulged throughout the years, which we’ve pieced together to tell the stories behind five of Pavement’s best songs below.
The stories behind five Pavement songs:
‘Our Singer’
‘Our Ringer’ marked the closing track to Pavement’s debut record, Slanted and Enchanted. Characteristically bold guitars drive Malkmus’ vocals home as he delivers some of the band’s most straightforward lyrics. “I’ve been waiting, anticipating, sun comes up, the skies won’t sink my soul, I’ve dreamt of this,” he sings optimistically.
This song is almost as simplistic as its lyrics suggest. Inspired by The Fall, it was penned and produced quickly as the band ran out of time to complete the record. “We were running out of time recording the album, and I was like, ‘I got this last one. I’m not even going to bother teaching it or doing any over-dubs; just get in here and play a waltz beat,’” Malkmus explained to Rolling Stone.
Fortunately, the track it resulted in was exactly what they were looking for to finish the record. “Just some frustrated California 22-year-old. It has a certain directness and freshness that makes it a nice closing for the album,” he concluded.
‘Harness Your Hopes’
An album reject turned TikTok trend, ‘Harness Your Hopes’ has become Pavement’s signature song. It’s an alternative rock anthem, but where it really thrives is in its ridiculous lyrics. Malkmus meanders between molasses and asses, between pavement and depravement, with wit and ease. It’s expertly written, even if it does take some real scrutinisation to understand.
Malkmus never intended or expected the song to gain the traction it did. In fact, he only wrote the lyrics the way he did because he thought it would be a B-side. “That’s the kind of thing you write when you’re feeling cocky, and you think it’s a B-side,” he told the BBC while discussing the writing of the now-iconic, “Show me a word that rhymes with pavement, and I won’t kill your parents and roast them on a spit.”
‘Carrot Rope’
Featuring on the band’s 1999 record Terror Twilight, ‘Carrot Rope’ is a song not even Malkmus could explain. More playful than their gritty guitar-driven alt-rock, the song saw the band venture into more melodic, indie territory with a brief self-referential shout-out to ‘Harness Your Hopes’.
As Malkmus revealed in the commentary for Slow Century, the song made it as a single because Domino pushed it as one. It had received plays from John Peel on Radio 1, so they saw it fit to be released as a single in the summer of 1999. It’s easy to see why – it’s accessible, optimistic, and would even spawn two other versions.
‘Summer Babe’
Released as a single in 1991, ‘Summer Babe’ has become one of Pavement’s most well-loved tracks. Over groaning guitars, Malkmus sings of mixing cocktails with plastic-tipped cigars and waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. The song was born out of a desire to rebel against the contemporary scene that surrounded Malkmus to create something more permanent.
The singer was living in either Hoboken or Jersey City and refused to join the “noisy art thing”. Instead, he endeavoured to make some “real songs that people remember”, as he explained to Rolling Stone. After he ran it by Scott Kannberg and got his approval, ‘Summer Babe’ was born.
‘Range Life’
Another of Pavement’s most beloved tracks, ‘Range Life’ ventures into diss track territory in its third voice. Several refrains of “I want a range life” in, Malkmus turns his attention to the Smashing Pumpkins, declaring them “nature kids, they don’t have no function.”
“I don’t understand what they mean, and I could really give a fuck,” he sings.
These lyrics, perhaps expectedly, prompted rumours surrounding the two bands. The band had reportedly been kicked off the bill at Lollapalooza in the mid-1990s in favour of the Smashing Pumpkins, though this is a claim frontman Billy Corgan has since refuted. “I had no problem with Pavement,” he told Rolling Stone, “When I met the guys from Nick Cave’s band, they said they were told that I’d tried to kick them off the bill, too. I’m totally a Nick Cave fan. That was astounding to me, maybe Pavement didn’t start the rumor. Maybe it was some industry insider.”
