You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.
You can’t bury a part of yourself that’s so innate to who you’ve been, even if it’s not for the sake of anything other than a pure enjoyment of it.
I think in some ways, whether you’ve ever actually been to Portland, people definitely understand this highly curated niche lifestyle, because a lot of people are sort of striving for that now. Or they’re hating on it.
With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.
It’s hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.
I don’t want to mislead people.
I’ll admit that I’m not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast.
I feel like I came in comedy’s side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways.
I have no desire to play music unless I need music.
I think that there’s always an assumption, when a band goes on hiatus or stops playing, that there’s some acrimony brewing under the surface.
For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.
I need a template of a template.
Practice. Learn and then unlearn – that’s the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can’t merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process.
After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.
If you always want to look relevant, just be CGI-prepared.
I really don’t know what to do when my life is not chaotic.
I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.
I’ve never understood people who play up the artifice of music.
I have no problem spending money on a great meal with friends or a flight to see somebody that I love, versus something like a fancy car. I don’t need a fancy car. I don’t need a giant TV.
I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.