Too Cute

Jamie Stewart is taking pics, making sweets and collecting stuffed animals.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Apr 1, 2009

When Jamie Stewart starts his first solo tour since 2003, he does so with the nicest of intentions and the sweetest of gifts.

The Xiu Xiu frontman will bring homemade chocolates and pictures of his stuffed animals. He'll take your photograph and strip down his band's dreamy-abrasive avant-pop songs and give you a taste of their upcoming Dear God, I Hate Myself.

Why? "People asked about the chance of me presenting songs in the most skeletal of terms, and I have the time, and I would miss you if I waited so many years to see you," says Stewart. Aw.

His flight landed in Durham and he's sitting in the airport as we speak. "There's a little girl sitting in front of me going bananas. She keeps giving me peanuts and climbing over the seat until her mom stops her. She's covered in drool and pink clothes. We have a lot in common."

If Stewart wants to talk foodstuffs and fluids, how's this: If you shoved the Smiths, Silver Apples, Ian Curtis, the Art Ensemble and absinthe into a blender and pressed "froth," you'd get the dark banana-nutty-drool-y sensation that Xiu Xiu's given off since 2002's Knife Play. "I'd include everything you listed but add in video game music, Eastern European modern classical, field recordings, candy pop, Korean traditional music and 1920 78 recordings about death."

Duly noted. "And lyrically, the notion of writing about the real lives of people I know, my life and any political implications therein has and will always remain. That defines the band."

Stewart is poring over his solo program's set list but won't tell me exactly what his new tunes sound like. His life has changed. The topics he'll sing about evolved. But the things important to him in music are the same: taking things too far, experimenting with sound, being horribly naked with emotions. "And trying to make music — and I say this with a straight face and do not care what you think — that touches people."

Though he'll tinker with God songs during the shows, Stewart sounds wary of that process — recalling that Fabulous Muscles was the only Xiu Xiu CD that he sang on tour before recording it. "I'd lived them, so singing them was already real. I didn't have to do 20 takes to build up to it. They can take on their true form with having been exposed to glare ahead of time."

That said, he's experimenting with a Stylophone, a Game Boy and a "dumb old" Garage Band to force himself to be more productive while traveling. "And not be such a wilting flower," he says.

Hard to imagine him being more productive. Along with writing film music for director Cam Archer, tunes for a book about bareback porn and collecting Xiu Xiu lyrics for a volume on that subject ("and playing with my cat"), Stewart just started a monthly music subscription series. The 50 subscribers get CDs of music with "zero reference to pop in that the pieces come from an ambient perspective."

Something more concrete and sellable at his shows are 10 different hand-decorated mix CDs and a self-photographed/color-copied poster series of his immense collection of stuffed animals.

"I only started collecting them in the last year but already have 500," he says. "My favorite's a very expensive turkey. I like ones that look like real animals or fantastical beings."

Stewart has also taken to making and selling handmade chocolates, a delicious art form he became obsessed with in the snobbiest choco-city he knows: Torino, Italy. "It's hard to find really good chocolate in the U.S. — especially in the South — so I took matters into my own hands. But snob that I am, they're never candy-like." His last great flavor was blueberry, pumpkin seed, honey and sea salt. "I don't use much sweetener but try to make more like complex hard liquor that you'd want one shot of and then stagger away from into the forest."

Before you stagger, Stewart and his pal David Horvitz will take a solo photograph portrait of every single person at every single show — audience, soundman, promoter — for the Xiu Xiu blog with the best snaps to be published as a book. Xiu Xiu combs will be available for you to fix your hair.

Don't ask him why photographing everyone sounds like a good idea.

"Ask why not," says Stewart.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Jamie Stewart with Andy Giles, Sun., April 5, 7 p.m. (sold out) and 9 p.m., $10, First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St., 866-468-7619, r5productions.com.

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