Carrie Brownstein & Corin Tucker on Sleater-Kinney New Album

“Sleater-Kinney is where we give ourselves license for the far reaches of something,” Carrie Brownstein says by means of introduction. “There’s always an intense emotionality to our music. It’s not really a place where we feel limitations.” She’s being modest. The band’s newest album, the excruciatingly hopeful Little Rope, rose from the ashes of tragedy: Brownstein’s mother and stepfather were killed in an overseas car crash in 2022, with her bandmate and close friend, Corin Tucker, receiving the call from an embassy as her emergency contact. Several of Little Rope’s songs were written prior to this personal rupture, and were, unsurprisingly, mutated in its aftermath as Brownstein went through her grieving process.

Mind you, this isn’t a sonic equivalent of the Kübler-Ross model. The Sleater-Kinney method leans on how Tucker’s guttural vocals and Brownstein’s distorted guitars communicate with each other — Tucker does most of the singing for this 11th outing — resulting in a pillar of strength that embodies their relationship. “This record is all about finding a way through that and finding yourself even when it’s a difficult time,” Tucker explains as we begin to break down the lyrics that made it onto the album’s final cut. “Sometimes that’s howling and sometimes that’s humor.”

Hell don’t have no worries
Hell don’t have no past
Hell is just a signpost when you take a certain path

These are the first words that introduce listeners to the album. You’re welcoming us to this omnipresent, uniting hell. Why start with this as the prologue?
Corin Tucker: Dropping the listener into the world is the most dramatic way of starting a story. By evoking this feeling of, as you said, a hellscape, it says we’re going somewhere very deep with this record. It’s dark. It’s going to a lot of different places of loss, struggle, and resistance. It’s meant to be an intense journey as an album. But I also think those lines have a freedom to them, because there’s nowhere left to go. We’re fallen, and from that place there’s reconsideration and there’s acknowledgement of the mess and the struggle and the ugliness. It’s as much about embracing that, or figuring out a way of reconstituting it, as it is in rejecting the idea of it. It puts a listener on a precipice of potential liberation.

What was your path to figuring out how much you wanted to share when it comes to themes of uncertainty and control? What was the edge?
Carrie Brownstein: Sleater-Kinney has always been a band and a context where we’re able to share the personal and the difficult and the strange, but it’s also not a one-to-one personal narrative we’re expressing with each song. We don’t want to be obtuse, necessarily. We want to set forth from a place of honesty and authenticity, but sometimes those come in the form of character-based songs.

I’m aggressively fun
Death of the party
A lecture for one

There’s a level of enthusiasm nestled in these lyrics, where you admit to embodying an unrefined and reckless life at times. I’m like, Yes, same. Was liberation on your minds while crafting this one?
CB: It’s pushing up against your own self-limitations or internal dialogue of criticism and feeling your emotions are often mismatched with the context. In certain settings, where you should have more restraint, you feel histrionic. And then in moments where you’re called upon to be more open, you feel detached. I just kept circling around these words, needlessly wild, needlessly wild. Corin and our producer kept saying, “The more you repeat, the more you ruminate on wildness and put the word ‘needless’ and ‘wild’ in your mouth, the more it gets stuck there, and the more it becomes about the repetition and the stuckness of this state.” Then you get that agitation.

Has repetition often been a core part of your songwriting?
CT: Repetition in a chorus that people can sing along to has always been a part of our songwriting. The whole idea of a chorus is that we’re singing it and experiencing something together.

CB: Even though this tradition of repetition exists outside of punk music, I love the way it exists in punk. I love the Ramones’ “second verse is the same as the first” method. There’s this clarity of purpose there. It’s about creating community and getting people to sing along with you, because you’ve only said a few things and now you’re going to say them again. There’s something joyous about that simplicity. Each time you say it, it can mean something else, which is like meditation. You’re bringing your whole experience to a single sentence.

What were your peak needlessly wild years?
CT: The 1997 European tour. I was needlessly wild. I did a lot of those behaviors on repeat. Yeah, I lived it and did it.

CB: I’m a late bloomer. Mine is a little later. I would put mine in 2017 and 2018. I had outsize and inappropriate emotions to commensurate to what everyone else around me wanted.

Go softly with me
My heart is raw
Too many losses
Have left me down

I love the imagery of J. Smith Cameron in the music video, singing into a void of people and yearning for some kind of connection. Carrie, you described this as a woman who “loses sense of what’s appropriate.” Tell me more about how that’s reflected in the song itself.
CB: The song is really asking to be seen. It’s asking to be seen as a partner and as someone you’re very, very close to and saying, “I need you to say these important things to me right now. I need this immediately.”

There’s a jubilance to this song that’s not apparent to those just reading the stanza. How do you decide which songs get a more anthemic treatment than others?
CB: “Say It Like You Mean It” had an undeniable quality from the moment it was brought into this world. Corin sent me a very rough version of it. There was music on the verses and the music already had such a hook. When the chorus came, I just thought, “Oh, this is a classic song.” I was listening to it on repeat as I started to work on it, add my stuff, and make some changes. I think something that feels anthemic either just possesses that quality or doesn’t.

CT: If we’re lucky, a handful of songs will possess that, and they become the tentpoles of the album.

Hey, get ready,
I’ve been down so long
I pay rent to the floor

This made me giggle. How do these shards of humor make their way into your songs? Are you selective with that sort of thing?
CB: When I wrote that vocal melody, it had a sassiness to it. It felt like a sermon that one’s giving to themselves alone — imagining this audience in a house, just as you’ve been by yourself for too long, immersed in a state of incoherency or despondency. You just start expressing these weird, dark thoughts. I love wit and humor in songs. Not so much silliness, but something that serves as a counterpoint to something that’s more depressing overall.

An idea that’s repeated here is what you fear the most will hunt you down. When you were making Little Rope, what were those fears and how did they manifest into the lyrics?
CT: Losing people is one of everyone’s biggest fears. There are a lot of songs about saying good-bye, loss, and losing that connection with people. As you get older, it’s more a part of your life than when you were younger. It’s really hard to keep going. It reorganizes your world.

CB: The idea of death and mortality hangs over this album, but there’s a bigger, existential ontological crisis that I fear. I think I fear loss of faith a lot — loss of faith in humanity, and the ability to maintain hope in a way that isn’t narrow or blatantly commercial. I fear a loss of trust and a dismantling and deconstruction of the scaffolding in one’s life, whether that’s people leaving or institutions losing their importance. Just a sense of alienation that things will become unrecognizable, including oneself. That is such an existential fear. There’s a lot of bargaining on this album. There’s a lot of begging. There’s a lot of longing for people and places and ideas to bolster us so we can exist and move forward.

How do you two maintain those feelings of faith and hope in 2024?
CT: The Republican primaries are making me feel good. Music, creativity, friends, and seeing resistance and resilience — those give me hope. We recently did these in-person signings of our record with fans in the middle of two crazy storms. People came out in person and were like, “Your music really means something to me.”

CB: We’re not true optimists, but we’re not cynics either. Generally I try to look out with some positivity. Otherwise, you can’t go on. We can’t get onstage if we don’t believe in the ability of music to bring people together. All of the joy, spontaneity, and frivolity that happens in a live setting? That’s the stuff we live for.

Is it food or garbage
It smells good enough
Can you gimme a little rope
Come on gimme some

The “little rope” line wound up titling the album. What does that represent for you both?
CT: It’s a subtle way of saying, “I need more freedom to live my life.” That’s a pretty big concept considering how it feels like the bodily autonomy of so many people in the United States has been challenged in the past couple of years.

CB: “Little rope” is a signifier of one’s darkest, most despairing moment of wanting to disappear. But it’s also what pulls you from that and what binds you to someone else. Because of that, it symbolizes a lot of the themes on this record of that precariousness and in-between state — that ledge we were talking about earlier, on which most of us find ourselves these days.

I like thinking about how little wins can pull you in and fill you up — and they can come out of nowhere, like when you’re having a shitty week and need them most. In an album defined by navigating grief, what were the little wins you experienced along the way during its creation?
CT: There was a cat café next door to our studio. You could buy coffee and also pay to have a moment with a cat.

CB: The cats were all up for adoption.

CT: I feel like we would go in there all the time and be like, “What’s happening today with the cats?” Sometimes we would go in and were told, “No cats today, sorry, they’re not feeling it.” It’s okay.

CB: I have an Australian cattle dog mix and we were doing dog agility, which is when you see the dogs jumping over hurdles, running through tunnels, or going on seesaws. I drive out to the country and hang out with mostly women and their dogs. I love stuff like that.

Don’t come around, I’m a real letdown

These eight words are such a succinct way to talk about grief. It’s like you’re texting back a friend who’s concerned about you. How did you arrive at this particular approach?
CB: We love melding lyrical content that has a little bit of sorrow to it with an upbeat, driving song. I knew I wanted the tempo to be fast. It has that repetitive guitar line that keeps things moving. It’s a song about wanting to get to the next place and wanting to be out of this loneliness and sadness. It’s a love letter to friends — reminding them that you appreciate them and, when you come out of this hole, you’ll get back to them. We all feel that when we’re steeped in despair. You get it in your head, like, “I’m undeserving of people being around. Please leave me alone.” But the energy of the song suggests you’ll come out of it and you’ll have your friends along with you.

I think Little Rope is so effective in its response to loss because it puts a spotlight on who you navigate grief with and chosen family. If you don’t mind me asking, what have you two learned about each other over the past two or so years that was born out of this place of grieving?
CT: We’ve known each other a very long time, but there’s strength I see in Carrie that comes from going through something so difficult. She talked about having faith in this interview, and she put her faith in making music and being the person that she wants to be in the face of something so horrible. That gives me strength — to see her acting with that kind of courage. In a time where a lot of people would not be able to keep going, she did.

CB: Corin is such a solid, steady presence in my life, but she’s still capable of really surprising me. In the process of making this album, it was fun to see some of her feistiness come back. When tasked with having to sing more and sing in a way that she hadn’t done for a while, I saw the rebellion I first witnessed in Corin when we met when I was in my late teens. We were so young and she always seemed intimidating. I saw that a little bit again. I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is very cool.”

I stood outside your house last night
Wanted you to see my face

The vulnerability here is something else. I feel in most other lyrical scenarios, the singer would be hiding and ensuring they weren’t seen, but here, you very much want the song’s subject aware of your presence. Why was it important to make that so pronounced?
CT: The character in this song is just so frustrated with feeling like they’ve disappeared. As a woman getting older in the music industry and being 51 years old now, I feel like women are so often not listened to, not looked at. That type of fury turned into this idea of taking those feelings and blowing it up and being like, Okay, is she a ghost? Is she haunting someone? Once you have decades of fury coming out, it’s going to be big. That’s how “Six Mistakes” comes across. It’s like, let’s not pussyfoot around here.

I hope listeners don’t get it twisted.
CT: Yeah, I’m not saying that stalking someone outside of their window is maybe the best way to handle these things, but it’s meant to be a story of what happens to this frustration after so long of asking to be recognized.

You’re burning all the books in this town
But you can’t destroy the words in our mouths

This seems to be the most overtly political statement on the album. Was there one inciting event that encouraged you to write this song? I ask this knowing there are too many potential inciting events to count.
CB: It was an amalgam of states starting to legislate against queer youth, transgender youth, and starting to go after books that contained what they deemed inappropriate content — usually content that had to do with race or queerness. The hypocrisy and the cruelty was so glaring. I probably read about some school PTA meeting in Florida and was just like, “Oh my God, please don’t.” More broadly, it’s about those literal trespasses and psychic trespasses upon bodies. No matter how hard people try, you cannot legislate against hearts, words, and art.

Do you view this as a call to action for listeners?
CT: I don’t think there’s anything quite so pedantic about it. It’s more about giving space for people to acknowledge and celebrate who they are, and to sing along with something. You still have to write a good song and a good melody. When we go on tour, though, we like to bring in organizations that do more to explicitly help people. We’ve had Planned Parenthood and we support queer youth centers in Portland. Those kinds of resources we like to align ourselves with, but musically, we’re not trying to put too fine a point on it. 

Get up girl
And dress yourself
In clothes you love
For a world you hate

This was fully written before your mother’s death, Carrie, and you’ve described the song as being a gift to yourself before the tragedy occurred. Was there ever an urge to retool it?
CB: What’s weird is grief renders you a little incoherent. I loved the song and I was happy with the lyrics. The song is about being able to function — the paradox of how functional the performance of life is, how functional we are, and how adept we are at performing happiness and humanity. If you just look out and survey the world, it’s amazing that we’re able to still find these shimmering moments.

It wasn’t until we got into the studio and I sang it for the first time that it hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t believe it suddenly was so obvious what it was now about. It had never been about my mom dying. It was about a deep foundational pain in my life, of which of course my family and my dynamics with them are a part of. But it was never singing to someone who was no longer there. That was really intense. That was a strange experience and I think speaks to that ineffable, otherworldly aspect of music that the meaning of it is not always in the making. Sometimes the meaning of it shows up later, and that’s okay.

Were there any other instances of your songs taking on different meanings after they’re written and recorded?
CT: I think that’s true for a lot of songs. Take a song like “What’s Mine Is Yours.” In the studio, it felt very much like a tight punk song and had a stilted feel of anger to it. But live, it’s so fun and wild. It’s like this very ridiculous character that people enjoy. It feels like an act of anger can become a celebratory thing.

CB: “Modern Girl” has definitely taken on different permutations for me. I wrote that song during a brief stint where I lived in Northern California. It was the first time I lived in California as a Pacific Northwesterner. I found the glare of the sun and the incessant blue sky very alienating. My moods felt in such contrast to the brightness, so I wrote a song about feeling at odds with a landscape. Then when I started doing Portlandia, I thought of the verse, “TV brings me closer to the world.” That was so weird. When I wrote the song, it was about watching television as a means of feeling less alone. Now I’m on TV and there was almost an irony to the entire song. It’s essentially adapted to who I am.

You built a cage but your measurements wrong
I’ll find a way, I’ll pick your lock

There’s a duality here to the place of release. Physically, you can escape a cage, but there’s a bigger catharsis waiting on the other side. What’s the catharsis you were both seeking?
CT: We knew we were painting a pretty dark picture with this album. But, as Carrie said, both of us have a little bit of optimism in us. There’s a sense of resistance that comes from doing what you think is important and making music if it helps you get through life. That is a way of picking a lock. That is a way of getting through. So, take that little slice of hope at the end of the record to be like, Yeah, this is difficult, but we’re not giving up. We’re still here.

CB: There’s some defiance there. For me it’s less about the lyrics, but the combination of my guitar and Corin’s vocals, which is such a fundamental aspect to how we communicate. It’s a conversation that’s been happening for a long time between us. I like hearing it as the conclusion of this album because the lyrics give way to wailing and the guitar. It feels like we’ve said all there is a say, but there’s the promise of more to come.

Carrie, you said something in a recent interview about women in rock music that piqued my interest, which was, “There aren’t tons of people still playing music like we are.” I’m wondering if you both could expand on that — why do you think that is?
CB: I’m not sure how we’ve done this for 30 years. There’s not a lot of precedent. We don’t see a lot of folks ahead of us to guide us with what’s happening. It’s an unsustainable career and more so now because of streaming and the devaluing of art. When people don’t want to pay for things, then it’s hard to keep making them. I do worry because, well, it would be nice for people to not only have a “moment” but a career, so all the artists that have only been around two or five years can tell us stories when they’re older.