Carrie Brownstein on Meeting Danzig, Sleater-Kinney’s Future
Carrie Brownstein has just released Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, a vivid memoir focusing on her turbulent, thrilling years as a singer and guitarist in the groundbreaking Nineties punk act Sleater-Kinney — including a harrowing account of the mounting bouts of anxiety that led Brownstein to bring the band to a crashing halt in 2006. “It was arduous,” she says of her two-year writing process. “I had to get up and write every morning, and there’s no magic, mystical quality to that. The hardest part was just sitting down to write and not finding ways to avoid that.” Brownstein has more avenues of procrastination open to her than most writers: While working on the book — and its accompanying audiobook, narrated by the author, which you can preview below — she also regrouped with Sleater-Kinney singer Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss for this year’s excellent No Cities to Love (their first LP in a decade), and shot new seasons of her cable comedy, Portlandia, and the Amazon original series Transparent. She called during a rare moment of downtime to talk about it all.
There’s a very real possibility that a little over a year from now, Bill Clinton will be back in the White House. Do you think the second Clinton era would be as good for music as the first one was?
I actually think that Republican administrations are better for music. The Reagan era was such a great era for punk and indie rock. So I think we’d have an explosion of passionate, vitriolic music coming out of all genres under Donald Trump, or someone even more intense, like Marco Rubio or Ben Carson. When it comes to music, we should be hoping for as outlandish a Republican candidate as we can get.
You write very honestly in your book about the tensions that led to Sleater-Kinney’s breakup in 2006. Were you worried about showing those chapters to your bandmates as you were reuniting?
I was writing the book when we began the early practices, rehearsals and songwriting for No Cities to Love. When we were recording in San Francisco, I found that I would go back and illustrate with more vividness some of the earlier chapters, because I was re-immersed in the world of the band. But it wasn’t until we were on tour for the album that Corin and I sat in a hotel room, and I read her a couple of chapters. I wanted to make sure — especially with her — that she was comfortable with parts of the book. She was really excited. I think one underestimates how flattered people are to be written about. And I think both Janet and Corin are aware it’s my perspective — it’s not the definitive Sleater-Kinney biography.
Has the experience of touring with Sleater-Kinney again this year been everything you expected?
It’s been really wonderful. There were a lot of people who had just discovered Sleater-Kinney through No Cities to Love, and then there were fans that had been there from the beginning. The front of the crowd was young kids and college-age kids, and that was important. Our fear was that people would view the record and the tour through the lens of sentimentality or nostalgia, but it didn’t feel like that.