After almost an hour has passed, I realize we need to start talking about music, partially because that's the motive for this story but mostly because Pavement is a band worth talking about. We leave the restaurant and jump in his Audi; he rolls a cigarette with a Dutch brand of tobacco called Samson. I notice that Malkmus does not wear a seat belt, nor does he tell me to wear mine. I am immediately more comfortable.

The original plan was to meet at Malkmus's home and talk about the upcoming Pavement reunion shows, four of which sold out in New York a full twelve months in advance. (The worldwide tour begins this month in New Zealand.) Malkmus meets me at the front door and says, "Okay, here's the new plan. I'm sure you can roll with the new plan. My daughter has this Thanksgiving feast at her school, right? And I'm going to go there for an hour. Do you like coffee? Actually, that doesn't matter. I will meet you at a coffeehouse in an hour." He gives me directions to the coffeehouse, and that is where I go. I get the sense that Malkmus is very accustomed to telling people what to do; he's polite, but he speaks in clear, direct sentences. When he shows up at the coffeehouse a hundred minutes later, the first thing he tells me is that—despite the aforementioned school feast—he's still hungry. "It was potluck," he says. "I don't eat potluck." We drive to the Thai place; he buys a $9 bacon-oriented sandwich.

After we talk about sports, I try to persuade him to take me back to his house. "It's kind of crazy over there right now," he says. "Maybe not today." We decide to go to a park instead. I try to talk about music on the drive over, but Malkmus wants to talk about books. He just returned from a festival in Holland and Belgium that featured both musicians and authors, and he talks about whom he saw—Nick Kent ("My wife really loved his Stones books when she was in college"), Denis Johnson ("He's got a lot to be proud of"), a slightly drunk Jay McInerney ("He looks exactly like his author photo"). Malkmus is more gossipy than one might expect—he's never cruel, but he likes to talk about how an artist's persona is both detached and irrevocably tied to how his art is consumed. He likes to talk about authors the way Pavement fans like to talk about Pavement.

There's an inherent problem with writing about Pavement: People tend to know nothing or everything about them. To most of the populace, they were a band with a funny name, one minor MTV hit (1994's "Cut Your Hair"), and a lot of abstract credibility among people who get mad at the radio. But to the kind of hyperintellectual, underemployed people who did not find it strange to buy concert tickets a year in advance—and who will buy the band's upcoming greatest-hits release even if they already have all the tracks—Pavement are the apotheosis of indie aesthetics, the "finest rockband of the '90s," according to former Village Voice critic Robert Christgau. They are remembered as the musical center of the lo-fi era, a designation that's spiritually true but technically wrong.¹ Over the span of five albums and nine EPs, Pavement became a decade-defining band, widely regarded as essential and game changing (at least among those who cared). Malkmus is completely aware of this. This being the case, I return to our discussion about Jay McInerney: Since just about everyone now concedes that McInerney's self-perception as a writer was adversely impacted by the avalanche of criticism he received in the years following Bright Lights, Big City, I ask Malkmus if he's had the opposite experience: Does being endlessly told you're a genius make you feel like one? Did having so many people insist that Slanted and Enchanted was brilliant change the way he now thinks about those songs?