After this track here, there’ll be only one more left to write about from Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the band’s second album, released in 1994. Feels like I’ve been covering a lot of Stephen Malkmus-associated material in this section of this series lately, but I can’t complain. I’m a big, big admirer of the guy’s work. Regarding the tracks from Crooked Rain…, the first I shared my thoughts on was the “hit” single ‘Cut Your Hair’ in 2014. And a few other nunbers have popped up on here along the way. Just have to click on that ‘crooked rain crooked rain’ tag below to see them. Now we’re at the album’s third track, ‘Stop Breathin’. The chorus in this one got to me on that first listen, so much so that I remember singing it loudly on my out of my student flat and to a seminar in my first year of university. The whole track was an instant thumbs-up.
Following the one-two punch of ‘Silence Kit/d’ and ‘Elevate Me Later’, whose combination set an immediately catchy tone to the record’s opening moments, ‘Stop Breathin’ then arrives as the sobering, meditative, contemplative number to slow things down a peg. Set to a 6/8 waltz time with wonky-sounding arpeggiated chords created by an unusual guitar tuning, Malkmus depicts the scene of a tennis match and blends it with warlike imagery. At least that’s how it goes in the first verse. The second I’ve never been able to pin down quite as well. Overall, I’ve come to think the song is told from the point-of-view of this tennis player who’s really going through it on the court and wishes that the crowd stop breathing, as if that’ll help them perform any better. The narrator loses, left a broken mess, conceding to his father that the pressure was too much. Though I could also be completely wrong. That’s a sort of the surface level way to look at it. But it’s my way of understanding. It’s definitely a very alluring characteristic of the song, the fact that what it’s about isn’t so cut and dried.
The other notable detail is how the lyrical part of the track actually finishes two minutes into the duration, after which the song turns into an instrumental jam – directly influenced by ‘Sing Swan Song’ by seminal German experimental rock band Can. There’s an interview out there I swear I’ve read where Malkmus says this straight up, but I can’t find it after trying so hard to(o). I remember being determined to memorise the chord changes that occur during this breakdown, exactly when and where they happened. I think I watched a few live performances to get it down, and it felt great once I did. Was like an accomplishment. I think this jam is pretty much performed by Malkmus, bass guitarist Mark Ibold and Steve West on the drums. Genius gives a nice little description of what goes down in it. I do find it funny that it does sounds like Malkmus just sort of stops playing the guitar when the drums come in again in that final finish, disregarding any sense of timing, leaving Ibold to properly ramp things off with the bass.
The Music in My Ears 
