All the musicians I love most are (at least partially) driven by a desire to reflect their authentic selves to others through their music, and in turn enable others to see themselves in it. I could listen to the Beatles’ discography and see how their views on women, drugs and spirituality changed over the years; I could feel Hendrix’s and Prince’s yearning for freedom from societal constraints; I could step into the surreal world that GBV’s Bob Pollard constructed to both transcend the daily grind of his domestic life. It has always been easy to explain why I see a bit of myself in those artists. However, I didn’t truly understand my relationship with Pavement until the last year or so. 

After experiencing communication breakdowns with various loved ones that made me feel as if Mercury was permanently in retrograde, I realized why I love Pavement’s music so much. To me, it’s a reflection of the struggle to communicate, a soundtrack to those moments when I have something to say, don’t know quite how to say it, but feel compelled to say it anyway, regardless of whether or not I choose the right words.

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the album on which “Cut Your Hair” appears, is one of rock’s most gorgeous monuments to ambivalence, ambiguity and imperfection. The album begins with a fumbled solo and ends with an incomplete sentence; the songs are full of missed cues, dropped tempos, voice cracks and bum notes. There are songs with multiple titles (“Elevate Me Later/Ell Ess Two”) and multiple subjects (“Stop Breathin’” is about tennis AND the Korean War); songs that veer back and forth from sloppy jamming to anthemic riffing; and songs that make little, if any, linear sense. 

Yet, despite the album’s occasionally frustrating nature, it rewards patient listeners with beautiful melodies, strong hooks, clever wordplay and creative interplay. Eventually, the mistakes and nonsense become integral to the listening experience. Malkmus’ fumbled solo during the intro of “Silence Kit” ends up making the riff he plays when the rest of the band kicks in sound even cooler. When the musicians slip out of sync with each other on “Fillmore Jive,” it underscores the weariness in Malkmus’ voice as he sings of sleep deprivation and emptiness. The songs have a buoyancy and spontaneity that would be absent if they were played entirely in time and in tune (a hard lesson I learned from Terror Twilight, the band’s worthy yet divisive swan song).   

As I gave the lyrics more attention, certain lines began to stand out and supply context. These lines often appeared in the middle or toward the end of a song, like theses read long after the average professor would give up on making sense of the paper. When I was 13, I didn’t really understand what Malkmus meant when he sang “Songs mean a lot when songs are bought/and so are you” on “Cut Your Hair.” “What the hell does that have to do with a haircut?” I thought to myself. After a while, though, I realized that the haircut is a symbol of many musicians’ futile desire to contort their images to suit the marketplace (“Darling, don’t you go and cut your hair/Do you think it’s gonna make him change?”). Just because Malkmus didn’t elaborate on the metaphor didn’t mean that he wasn’t making sense.

Of course, there are many Pavement songs in which Malkmus merely sings whatever comes out of his head at the moment. Sometimes it’s hilarious (“I’ve got all this Harvard LSD/Why won’t anybody fuck me?”); other times it’s just awkward (“One of us is a cigar stand/and one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine”). However, slivers of pensive imagery (“You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life”) and hard-won wisdom (“It’s alright to shake, to fight, to feel”) are always around the corner. Even when I can’t get a handle on what a Pavement song is actually about, it elicits an emotional response from me. Their songs make me laugh and cry in ways that more lyrically direct bands often fail to do.

Likewise, there are many Pavement songs on which the musicianship stretches serendipity to its limit, toeing the line between imperfection and lameness. Even after being accustomed to the band’s modus operandi, it took years for me to get past the bad drumming on “AT&T,” the cracked vocals on “Type Slowly,” and the clumsy soloing on “Fin” in order to appreciate the greatness of the songs themselves. However, Pavement’s knack for melodies and hooks eventually saved the day: even their sloppiest and most abrasive songs are easy to sing and/or shout along with. If the listener ends up bettering the band, it merely reinforces the humanizing, democratizing, empowering effect that all punk-infused music should have.

Pavement’s music permeated my adolescence so thoroughly that even some of my friends and relatives became Slanted and Enchanted with me. My little brother was born in 1994, the year Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was released; three years later “Stereo” (from Brighten the Corners) became the first song he memorized in its entirety. He made me play it for him daily for a year, and would get sad if our mother and I didn’t sing it along with him. None of us got sick of it, though. My mother even developed a small crush on Malkmus after seeing the song’s video, calling him “the cute white boy” whenever any of us would mention him. That same year, I put “No Tan Lines” (my favorite Pavement B-side) on a mix tape for my friend Niema, the only person I truly confided in at the time. She too fell under the band’s spell, and two years later we saw what, unbeknownst to us, would be the band’s final Austin show.

The nearly sold-out show, which took place on the outdoor stage of Stubb’s, exceeded our expectations. As Terror Twilight proved, Pavement had become, for better or worse, a well-oiled touring machine, such that what few mistakes they made on stage became glaringly noticeable, instead of merely being par for the course. When Malkmus bungled the central guitar riff to “Frontwards,” he dramatized his failure by throwing up his hands and sulking into the microphone. For Niema and me, it was a confirmation of the slightly bratty nature that many journalists alluded to when writing about him. It was refreshing to know that the band was still capable of making mistakes. In retrospect, though, Malkmus’ tantrum was an expression of the built-up frustrations that caused him to dissolve the band later that year.

Pavement’s absence has left a gaping void in music over the last decade. Many bands have mimicked Pavement’s loose musicianship and cryptic lyrics, but very few of them possessed their melodic gifts and unexpected profundity. Malkmus’ subsequent records with his current band the Jicks boasted increasingly proficient musicianship, but they also veered closer to jam-band territory than Pavement ever could. Preston School of Industry, the band that Malkmus’ foil Scott Kannberg (also known as “Spiral Stairs”) formed, squandered its post-Pavement goodwill on dire stabs at alt-country. Rumors of a reunion circulated for years, slightly stoked by Kannberg only to be shrugged off by Malkmus. As far as I was concerned, though, the writing had been on the wall ever since the Matador label’s deluxe double-disc reissues of Pavement’s albums started generating more interest than either front man’s solo work.

As inevitable and unsurprising as this reunion may be, I still can’t overstate how much joy it gives me. I think of every time I struggled to sing something just slightly out of my range, or to play something just slightly above my skill level, only to discover after mastering it that it sounded cooler with the mistakes left in. I think of the bonding moments I had with my mother, my little brother, and my old friend. I think of how genuinely flattered I was when a British reviewer said that my music was “the black version of Pavement.” Last but not least, I think of every single time over the last few years in which I was too tired, confused, and scared to locate the exact words for my feelings, yet too emotionally constipated to remain silent. I simply drowned my sorrows in Pavement’s music until I felt happy (or at least okay) again. I lacked the courage to simply let the words spill out of my mouth, on to the page, and let sense arise from nonsense on its own.