For a while in 2018/19, I was into buying 33 1/3 books that had been written and dedicated to albums that I greatly appreciated myself. Off the top of my head, I own the ones written for R.E.M.’s Murmur, The Village Green Preservation Society by The Kinks, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music and Television’s Marquee Moon. I’m sure there are a few others too. Being the Pavement fan I am, it only made sense to get the edition dedicated to Wowee Zowee. Now, at this moment in time, I can’t really remember anything much from it. I read it the one time and felt that I didn’t really need to again. But I did learn a few things that I would have never thought about before. Like how Malkmus recorded the guitar solo for ‘Rattled by the Rush’. Or how he played all the instruments on ‘AT&T’.

A large amount of the book is taken from an interview with Stephen Malkmus in which he reveals all this stuff. While mentioning the things noted in the paragraph before, he also stated that when time came to record the vocals, the majority of them were made on the spot with a mix of also having some stuff written down to help guide him along. I have a clear memory of reading this, anyone can correct me. But I do recall him mentioning that ‘Pueblo’ was one of the songs to receive this treatment. You can probably tell by looking at the lyrics anyway. What Malkmus is singing about here is anyone’s guess, but the melody mirrors that of the guitar during the verses so at least that gets into your head during the initial listen.

The track consists of a verse and a chorus and another verse and chorus, separated by a chill instrumental break with a few guitar freak outs. Probably the most notable part of the whole song is when Stephen Malkmus amps up the intensity of his vocal from the second verse into the final chorus, in which he’s more yelling at the listener rather than singing. After all this, the song funnily ends on a bit of a damp squib – like the band had no idea to properly end everything, so they sort of just stop playing. But in the context of Wowee Zowee, its oddities should come as no surprise. If any reader out there is a big, big fan of the song, it’ll be worth to check out the work-in-progress versions of the song that were released on the Crooked Rain deluxe edition from 2004. The ‘Beach Boys’ take makes sense when you hear it, and the ‘Domain’ version is something that sounds like it could have fit on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain itself.