Why Kathleen Hanna Spoke Up About ‘Violent Alcoholic’ Dad on New LP
“It’s almost like I’m possessed by the devil, and I’m letting go of my possessions,” Kathleen Hanna says of the new LP by her band the Julie Ruin. “I can see my head spinning around, and I’m puking out all this shit that’s not my problem.”
During her quarter-century-plus career with Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, the singer-songwriter has opened up about her experiences with sexual abuse, sexism and violence. But on Hit Reset, out Friday, Hanna gets even more personal than she’s ever been. “It was a really scary family that I grew up in – it’s been really hard to say stuff about my family because everyone’s still alive,” explains Hanna. “I really wanted to wait until that wasn’t the case, but my life won’t wait.”
On a track called “Calverton,” Hanna pays homage to her mother for teaching her how to be a feminist in the face of serious emotional abuse. “Even as my dad was waking me up in the middle of the night when I was 14 and screaming that I’m a slut in my face, my mom always told me that I could do anything I wanted to do,” she says.
The feminist icon recently filled RS in on what it was like to revisit her harrowing past, her opinion on the Stanford rape case verdict and why a Trump presidency could be a sign of Armageddon.
What was your mindset going into Hit Reset?
I think it was really like, “Let’s be more collaborative than on the first record and see what happens.” A lot of the first record was written previously. It wasn’t that I wrote the songs, but I brought in most of the sample ideas. I’d sample myself singing and playing bass or use a drumbeat I liked – I’d bring it in or turn it into keyboards and make it into a verse. I’m pretty good at verses, but with choruses, I need help. We would build from there. Kathi [Wilcox], our bass player, wasn’t even in the group when most of the record was written, so she had to add all of her parts after she came in. She brought in bass lines and we’d just start writing.
We’re really into using everything we have available to us – in New York everyone has other jobs to do, so we’d try to utilize our time really wisely. We’d tape everything we did on my phone, log it all right after practice, put it in the Dropbox for everyone, put it in my Pro Tools and I’d sing along with it. Every day I’d come up with new ideas for vocals, let it sit, take the best couple of ideas and try them live. We’d see what people were reacting to. Everybody brought in ideas. We were constantly working. You get that collaboration, but you also get everyone to have their individual music ideas heard.