Pitchfork: What is success to you? Has it changed over the years?

Stephen Malkmus: First of all, there’s really simple things: If you’re gonna do a tour, you want to have your own dressing room and your own hotel room. And one form of success that’s, like, physical is where you end up on the bill when you do festivals—it’s visceral, you can’t help it. Then, you also want your friends to like it, there’s a whole ego gratification thing about doing a good job.

From the outside, it seems like you’ve never really cared about other people’s opinions on your music though.

To a point of fault, maybe. [laughs] In the early days, and with some of the early Jicks records, there was no feedback from anybody. I would just hand out the records, and the labels were like, “That’s cool.” But now I’m a little more interested in getting feedback from people in my cohort. Which songs do you like? Is the message getting through? I might have an idea that I like, but do you like it? How can it be more than what it is, with just a few little twists? The last few years, I’ve been a little more open.

On the new album, it seems like you are more conscious of the world around you. On “Bike Lane,” you contrast a privileged person’s obsession with niche politics—of whether or not a bike lane is made—with the life-or-death politics that most people in the world face, as symbolized by a reference to Freddie Gray.

We spend a lot of energy on lifestyle, and that’s OK; you wanna perfect your lifestyle, I understand. My normal, middle-class audience would actually be very concerned about where they live—that’s not a judgment—and there’s a lot of energy spent on things like bike lanes. It’s very passionate. That’s fine. But I’ve been, as all of us have, concerned in watching the things happening far away from where I live. And upset about them.

The song starts really minimal, like Queens of the Stone Age on Xanax, and then changes into glam, like the Clash or something. In my mind, I was singing like the Ramones. It’s totally dark, like the cops and robbers stories of rock’n’roll: I fought the law and the law won, a lot of classic imagery of the outlaw. So you have two things that don’t cohere, like they’re just totally different worlds. In the real world, the outlaw’s just getting creamed.

When you see so much discord around the globe, can Portland feel like a conscious retreat from the real world?

I think we all sort of exist in a world on the internet where this is all happening. It almost doesn’t matter where you are. When you hear about what happened at Charlie Hebdo, it doesn’t matter that you’re not living in Paris. It’s just hard.

The news is unavoidable. Are you on Twitter all day?

No. But more than I should be. It’s replaced print media for me. It’s not really so much a chance for me to connect with like-minded people as to see what weirdness is going on. Weird dudes—who might be bots—with their strange names and neoliberals and neoreactionary things. It makes me afraid sometimes.

Does having two daughters growing up in this weird time change what you want to accomplish in the world?

In this achievement-based lifestyle, most of us have certain boxes we’re checking to make us useful humans. But a lot of things you do as a parent are kinda invisible. There’s a lot you achieve—just getting dinner on the table—that are more than making a song.