Credit: Press
November 8th, 2026 · 9:45pm GMT
In 1994, Pavement were doing something that shouldn’t have worked on mainstream radio, and Kurt Vile happened to be listening.
“I was just like any other normal kid at the time,” he recalled, “I heard ‘Cut Your Hair’ on the radio. It was an exciting time for music on the radio, because it was getting out there”.
When Stephen Malkmus yelled, “No big hair!” at full volume, a teenage Vile in Pennsylvania decided he’d found his band. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is weird.’ I like it.” He bought Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain on cassette soon after, lamenting later, “I wish I still had that cassette”.
It’s a relatively small pivot to decide to launch a career on one shouted line, but it makes sense when you look at what Vile has done since. He’s a songwriter who has spent two decades getting profound by being deliberately casual, and Pavement were the first proof for him that the two emotions could coexist.
For him, humour was the hidden thread. “I never really thought about Pavement using humour, but it’s true,” he admitted, “I definitely pride myself on using humour in my music. I guess I’ve got my own brand, but what’s cool about Pavement is that, if you listen to their earliest recordings where they’re noisier and experimental, they always have that melancholy mix with the absurd.”
He also admires how Pavement built their legacy, which was built patiently and on their own terms. “They put out a cool 7” single followed by two more cool singles and a 10” before they’d even released Slanted and Enchanted,” Vile explained. The debut’s sound effects and “noisy dimensions” thrilled him, and he describes the guitar as “just adventurous”. By the time Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain arrived, the band of oddballs had firmly established themselves on the radio.
Propelled by the unexpected commercial success of ‘Cut Your Hair’, Pavement proved that an alternative outfit could infiltrate the mainstream without filing down their jagged edges. Much of this crossover rested on Stephen Malkmus and his frontman charm, and rather than opting for traditional rockstar theatrics, he relied on an effortless, off-hand charisma and dry lyricism that subverted the slick production of mid-’90s radio.
Further reading: From The Vault
Vile credited Malkmus with the musical knowledge to pull it off: “He was just a trailblazer; all of them were, really.” Yet, for all the distortion and slacker anthems, the track he returns to most frequently does away with the noise entirely. ‘Range Life’ is, in Vile’s words, “a perfect example of a melancholy, almost classic rock song”.
He called the lyrics “lackadaisical, but nostalgic”, and the whole thing “just a really pretty song”. It was his favourite for years, and he still knows every detail of it.
Listen to his own records, and you can hear all of what makes Pavement so special. Whether it’s his earlier material such as Constant Hitmaker or more expansive work like Bottle It In, the band’s weaponised casualness, dry jokes tucked into melancholy verse, and gritty guitars that wander off course are firm influences. But for Vile, it was all down to Malkmus shouting about hair.
