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Dennis Cooper asks Stephen Malkmus about his writing process: SM: I'll have a first line, maybe, off the top of my head, and I'll kind of build off that. Usually I'll be thinking of what I've read lately. Like I'd been reading John Ashbery before we did the album [Brighten the Corners]. He's brilliant, and I took his work as like, Okay, I can do something like that. It's not against the rules. I don't have to do something that's really formal. DC: I read that you appropriated lines from Ashbery's "The Tennis Court Oaths." SM: [laughing] No, no. DC: I tried to compare your lyrics to the poems, and the only thing I could find was the common word "concierge." SM: Mh-hm. That could well be. But I was thinking of The Tenant, that Roman Polanski movie too. That always reminds me of a concierge. I love that movie. It's so sick. DC: I can see the Ashbery connection in the sense that your songs seem personal, but, at the same time, they adopt a kind of omniscent, everyman stance...