Creativity Quote by Stephen Malkmus

"We always did our own mixing" lands like a casual flex, but it’s really a mission statement in work boots. Coming from Stephen Malkmus - indie rock’s patron saint of smart slack - the line champions a kind of autonomy that’s aesthetic, economic, and moral all at once. Mixing is where a song’s politics get decided: whose voice sits forward, how abrasive the guitars are allowed to be, whether the drums punch or blur. Saying they handled it themselves isn’t just about control; it’s about refusing the outside “fixing” that turns idiosyncrasy into product.

The subtext is a quiet suspicion of expertise. Not anti-skill, but anti-polish as a default setting. In the Pavement-era world this quote evokes, professionalism often meant sanding down the very weirdness that made the music feel alive. DIY mixing becomes a guardrail against the industry’s most seductive promise: let us make you sound like you belong. Malkmus implies they didn’t want to belong. They wanted the lopsided balances, the near-mistakes, the sense that the band is discovering the track at the same time you are.

It also reads as a band dynamic in miniature. “We” matters: mixing is usually a hierarchy, a final arbiter. Here it’s collective, messy, and insistently internal. The intent isn’t nostalgia. It’s a reminder that independence isn’t just about not signing away rights; it’s about keeping your hands on the last, most consequential knob.