A conversation with Carrie Brownstein from 2005
The Sleater-Kinney firebrand talks politics, Pearl Jam, and the scourge of reality TV in this Dubya-era dispatch
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the ‘90s and ‘00s and present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
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THE OPENERS
Over at Apple Music (where my words often appear, even if my byline doesn’t), I wrote about When a Thought Grows Wings, the new album from L.A.-via-Toronto mystic (and pandemic-era social-media sensation) Luna Li, whose journey from bedroom-bound psych-pop to symphonic-soft-rock heaven continues apace. (And if you never got acquainted with Li’s wonderful, beabadoobee-graced debut album, Duality, let my Pitchfork review from 2022 inspire you to rectify that situation immediately.)
This past Wednesday on CBC Radio’s Commotion, I produced an interview with Hamburg-based writer Christoph Dallach about his newly translated tome, Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock. Here he is speaking with host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about how the futurist innovations of Can, Neu!, Faust et al were actually a direct response to growing up in a post-war Germany where former Nazis had simply traded in their brownshirts for white collars.
Notes on the newest additions to the stübermania 2024 playlist:
Caribou, “Come Find of Me”: This is my favourite of the four singles we’ve heard from Honey (out Oct. 4). It’s got the incessant, mantra-like urgency of Caribou’s 2014 signature “Can’t Do Without You,” but it’s dipped in the ecstatic, synth-smeared sounds of 2000s-era delights like the Chemical Brothers’ “Star Guitar” and Gui Boratto’s “No Turning Back.” Also, the oversized Snaith-mask motif in the video above feels like the cuddlier Canadian answer to Aphex Twin’s evil grin.
Allegories, “NOSTALGIA KILLS”: Also hailing from Caribou’s neck of the woods (Hamilton, Ontario), this electro duo luxuriate in a tropical chillwave vibe on their first single since 2022’s excellent LCD-lit album, Endless, but they cut through the washed-out haze with their yearning sophistipop melodies.
The OBGMs, “IT’S OVER”: The latest teaser from the Toronto garage-grunge rippers’ upcoming album sounds like “Sunflower” if it was recorded for Surfer Rosa.
Seafoam Walls, “Cabin Fever”: I wrote about Miami’s preeminent “Caribbean jazzgaze” band—a favourite of Thurston Moore’s—for Pitchfork back in 2022, and this single from their new album, Standing Too Close To The Elephant In The Room (out Oct. 18), sees them continuing to execute their highwire balance of aquatic serenity and pulverizing alt-prog.
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, “LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE”: The Philly indie-pop futurists’ new album, YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING, plunges you into a thick textural soup that’s a bit overwhelming to navigate, but that makes those moments where they come up for air—like this breezily bizarre serenade—all the more rewarding.
Click here for the Apple Music version
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Carrie Brownstein
The date: May 25, 2005
Location: Phoner—I was at the Eye Weekly office on Church Street in Toronto; Carrie was in (where else?) Portlandia.
Publication: Eye Weekly
Album being promoted: The Woods
The context: I fucking love The Woods. For the past 19 years, the album has occupied a very holy place in my record collection—I put it right up there with The Stooges’ Fun House, Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me, and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me an an exemplar of rock music at its most emotionally unsettled and flesh-ripping-furious. The fact that Sleater-Kinney broke up a year after its release was the ultimate affirmation of its powers—this is the kind of record that seems impossible for a band to top, a mic drop with the force of an atomic bomb. And while Sleater-Kinney eventually emerged from the rubble in 2014 to embark on a fruitful second act, they haven’t dared to approach the same volcanic peaks again (a proposition that became all but unattainble once their wrecking ball of a drummer, Janet Weiss, left the band in 2019).
While The Woods’ pole position in the Sleater-Kinney discography seems indisputible today, this interview with singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein took place just a day after the album’s release, when seasoned S-K enthusiasts initially drawn to the band’s wiry, post-punky intensity were still getting used to the new album’s thundering, muscular hard-rock sound, which owed a lot more to Led Zeppelin IV than Gang of Four. So we started our conversation talking about what was still a relatively new phenomenon in 2005: fans talking shit on the internet.
Have you sensed any negative reactions to the new record? It’s quite the extreme makeover.
Not from my friends. From the fans, it’s hard to tell. The record just came out yesterday. I would imagine it’s [the fans] more than other people that would are going to feel the sting—like, if they don’t get it or it isn’t speaking to them, it may be disappointing. But at the same time, I feel like there’s going to be people that never liked us before who’ll like it. That’s the story I keep hearing: “Oh, I liked your band, but my friend hated you guys, and then I played them your new record and now they’re a fan.” That sorta stuff is weird, but exciting. I feel like in a live context, everything is much more cohesive, and you see common threads between all the songs live moreso than playing the records back-to-back. People picking up the record may feel, “oh, this is so different,” but when they see us live, even the older songs sound harsher and louder live than they do on record. To me, The Woods captures more of the live thing than [2002’s] One Beat did it. I think that what happens with any musical or artistic entity that’s been around for a while and has different identities, people are going to latch onto certain things and feel like this is what the true essence of this band is, and if you do something that doesn’t fit that definition, they’ll think, “this is not Sleater-Kinney,” whereas for us, it’s all Sleater-Kinney, and for most of our fans there is a big picture.
Well, usually, most complaints boil down to, like, three people on a message board…
That’s why I don’t read the message boards—they can make you feel like the whole world is against you, when it’s really just one kid in Cleveland.
Do you feel pressure to live up to people’s expectations of you to be their generational spokespeople?
I don’t feel a pressure when we’re writing a new record, I definitely would have to tune that out, but I am also extremely lucky. I don’t really want to be making something that isn’t meaningful for people, but all I can hope for is that it’s meaningful to me. Whether people love it or hate it, we needed another record to come out. And all you can hope for is to share that feeling with other people. I just feel lucky to be in a position where I’m making a contribution that’s important to someone else. I don’t know what other way I could be contributing right now, so it does feel important to me. But I definitely have to tune out that sense of expectation, and only try to meet my own, and cross my fingers that we go beyond our inner circle.
There’s little on The Woods that is explicitly political, but the songs do seem to comment on a culture of passivity that’s encouraged by the powers that be…
Certainly, One Beat was one more overtly, stridently political at a time when not a lot of records were, so that seemed necessary, but I would not want to repeat that. We’re not writing essays, we definitely don’t need to do that academic thing of “well, commenting on my piece from 2002…” With any record we do, we want it to be different from the last one. This record seems to me like such a product of the time: It’s unstable, it’s unhinged, and there’s so many moments of uncertainty, and the songs have a darkness and heaviness, but from a more visceral and emotional standpoint. In some ways, it feels like just as much a reflection, except it’s more about the sonic and emotional tenor of the record than a pointed lyric.
Speaking of emotional moments on the record: Where did the inspiration for “Jumpers” come from?
I read this article in the New Yorker about people that killed themselves jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and it chronicled the few people that actually survived, which is really rare and horrific, and it talks a lot about the engineering aspects of it, and how they refused to put a suicide barrier on it, whereas many other common sites of jumping, like the Eiffel Tower, have all put in suicide barriers, but the Golden Gate Bridge won’t. And I was living in California at the time for six months and was pretty unhappy at the time, and I was reading this article while living in this oversaturated sunny place and feeling totally in opposition to it, but I didn’t actually write the song until I got home. A lot of it, on a metaphorical level, is about structures—these structures that seem stable, whether they’re political structures that we rely upon yet are completely hollow or disintegrating and prove more damaging than strong, or something like the Golden Gate Bridge, which is this feat of engineering, but also a site of despair.
I feel like “Modern Girl” is a spiritual successor to R.E.M.’s “The One I Love”—a seemingly sweet song that’s actually quite cynical.
It’s funny you say that—that’s totally true. That’s a song in high school I even came to late—like, “Oh yeah, this song is horribly sad!” “Modern Girl” is definitely the most misunderstood song on the album. It’s a musical break on the record, but it’s almost like a character just shutting out the rest of the sound for a moment—you’re playing with your band, and all of a sudden you just stop and turn on your personal tape recorder and whisper something into it.
Is it important to you that listeners recognize the dichotomies and double-meanings in your songs?
I think one hopes that anything you do, people are going to be able to find their own way into a song. You can’t over-explain; you don’t want to put out a novel to accompany your record. You hope people come to it with different ideas and experiences, and you hope it’s layered. And this record, musically and lyrically, is very layered and it takes a little bit longer to reveal itself. I think that, hopefully, people will take multiple listens and find new things to hear. It’s important for things to have multiple meanings and be complex. It’s such a time of reductive, simplistic rhetoric, everything is being dumbed down for us all the time, so that we can put things into these black-and-white categories: this is morally good, this is morally bad. I feel like it’s an artist’s responsibility to make something that is complex and ambiguous, because certainly, there’s not a lot of room for that everywhere else. Certainly, in politics, people aren’t willing to be ambiguous.
I’m wondering if the experience of opening arena shows for Pearl Jam in 2003 had any impact on The Woods—both in terms of the heavier sound and the hungrier attitude…
There were certain things about it that were really crucial—having to prove it again was really important, and getting to a place where all of a sudden you can’t take for granted that the audience knows your songs and you can’t rely on them for any kind of energy or feedback, and just having to turn inward and have it be about the musical connection with the other people you’re playing with. In a lot of ways, that informed the ways we approached this record. But also, it’s good just to be tested. With a smaller crowd, you can assume a political homogeneity, and that’s not necessarily good. Maybe it’s reassuring and you feel a kinship, but I feel like if the election proved anything, especially to us out here on the West Coast, it’s that we can’t ever assume that. A band like Pearl Jam are confronted with people that are brought together by their music, but they certainly do not share politics—and I think that’s a bigger challenge as a performer, to find a way that music that can have meaning, where it doesn’t fall into a political category. We’re never going to be that band, so I don’t have to worry about it! But I think it’s a good thing to try. I think a lot of the people in the bigger progressive cities in the U.S. really did think everyone felt the same as them, and we were in for quite a shock last November.
Is it imporant for each of you to take time away from the band in between records?
I think so. We’ve definitely already written songs about music, and I don’t really want to write songs about touring. It’s important in terms of just being able to live a life that’s full and can provide us with inspiration and experiences that are really crucial for our happiness separate from the band, but it’s also a time when you’re building up stories and ideas. For me, it makes me need music more: The longer I’m away from it, the more urgent it feels, and this record has an urgency that is reflected by so much time off. By the time we came back to it, it was like some animal ripping at some piece of meat—we have to write! One of the first songs we wrote was “Let’s Call It Love” and Corin gets to such an intense scary place in the chorus, and it’s like “Whoa, where did that come from!?!” We just feel lucky to have it, and to be able to go to those places that are dark and scary and that you’re not really allowed to go in your daily life.
It’s funny you mention not wanting to just write songs about music, but then you have “Entertain,” which seems to target bands who are playing it safe by plundering the past…
It’s kind of about music… It definitely is about culture, with music being part of that, and just a conflation of how art, politics, and individual lives have all been conflated into the same sphere of entertainment. Even with reality TV, it’s like our lives are these new commodities: We’re only as valuable as our ability to provide entertainment for the rest of the country. With everything from politics to crime to natural disasters all being repackaged in this very entertaining way, what’s music supposed to do then? If everything is entertainment, how do we go beyond that? We’re all sort of complicit in wanting to passively be entertained by all those things.
So it’s not just about The Killers…
It’s not just about The Killers. I don’t mind that people are interpreting it on that level. Almost everyone’s like, “‘They’re probably singing about…’ and then they name off six bands that they just hate! Honestly, I can’t tell any of those bands apart. They’ll be gone long before we are. I don’t want to date our song.
ENCORES
OK, so maybe we were wrong about the shelf life of The Killers, a band I instinctively resented back in the mid-2000s because they were selling all the records that I thought Franz Ferdinand deserved to, but who I’ve come to see now as the Stone Temple Pilots of the post-Strokes rock renaissance: an easy target, to be sure, but the singles are undeniable.
My eternal allegiance to The Woods has made it difficult for me to get too attached to Sleater-Kinney’s more refined post-reunion discography, and I can’t say I’ve returned to the band’s latest record, Little Rope, with much regularity since its release this past January. But the album does include at least one instant S-K classic in Brownstein’s “Needlessy Wild,” which feels like a 21st-century new-waved companion to The Fall’s “Totally Wired.”
Next week’s headliner: Liam fookin’ Gallagher
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