I became acquainted with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks’ Mirror Traffic properly during my first year of university. How could I be so sure? Well, the year was 2013. I’d been into Pavement for years up to that point, and the Jicks’ material was the logical step to hear more stuff by the guy who usually wrote the Pavement songs. It was announced that the new album by Stephen Malkmus and the band, which turned out to be Wig Out at Jagbags, was to be released in the first month of 2014. Might have even been the first or second week of January. So it made sense to listen to the most recent album at that point, just for preparation.

It’s not my favourite Malkmus and Jicks album, I must admit. But there are a select number of songs on it that go up there as some of Malkmus’s best work, in my eyes. A couple more from the album are to come in this series. But today, the focus goes to the third song on Mirror Traffic, ‘Senator’, which was also released as a single, alongside a neat video featuring Jack Black and other recognisable faces. Something’s telling me I may have been aware of the song before properly listening to it in the context of the album. I want to say there was an article I read making light of the fact that the “What the Senator wants is a blow job” lyric had to be changed to “What the Senator wants is a snow job” for the radio edit.

‘Senator’ appears to be a track concerning the USA’s attitudes concerning the environment. And he sort of implies that the USA, particularly the people in power, aren’t really focusing enough attention on taking care of it. Instead, what the office representative wants put into action is a blow job. And in the middle, there’s a little bit where Malkmus reminisces about smoking weed with a friend of his back in the day, narrowly being avoided by the cops. How it all ties together, I don’t know, but it somehow works and is all good stuff to listen to. It’s marked by this start and stop motion, alternating between Malkmus’s sole vocal and the whole band coming together. Some nice little descending guitar scales pop in, and a solo at the end brings everything home. A very complete track, I think.