Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  We had always recorded in Portland or Seattle, places that were or felt like home, and we’d recorded with someone we’d known for years, who was part of our community; we were still working with the label we had worked with basically from the beginning. With The Woods, we pulled the rug out from underneath ourselves, a potentially self-sabotaging risk. But changes had also happened unwittingly—we were already one foot out the door, dangling. Bob Lawton, our longtime booking agent and one of our most consistent and loyal team members, decided to retire. And Julie Butterfield, who had been our PR person, our manager, a source of reason and guidance, and a close friend throughout all of the band’s history, had also decided to embark on something different. Two of our pillars were knocked out already. So, when we thought about Kill Rock Stars, our label and a group of people we loved, we realized that maybe we should take all the known factors and comforts away and start over as much as we could.

  You can’t really be reborn, but we wanted to create an ersatz beginning. We started looking for a new label and landed with Sub Pop; we got a new booking agent; we hired a producer we’d never worked with before; we cobbled together a whole new existence for ourselves. From a songwriting perspective, it was invigorating, but on a personal level, it was stressful for each of us.

  Our songwriting process had changed. For a while I thought academia was pulling me in a different direction from the band, and in the fall of 2003, I moved to Berkeley for a relationship and to test out the potential of attending graduate school. Ever since those early days of Sleater-Kinney playing shows at Bryn Mawr or Wesleyan, I’d imagined a different kind of life for myself, a quieter life, one I thought to have more consistency and normalcy. Yet here I was, practicing a more domestic self in a sunny Berkeley bungalow, and I felt fitful and dissatisfied. I applied to two low-residency MFA programs in nonfiction and was accepted to both, but as I spent time around academics in the Bay Area, my desire to be in that world faded. With music, I had been working in a populist medium, whereas academia felt insular and impenetrable. I wanted my work to be found, discovered, available. And I was fooling myself thinking that I could or would give up the one thing, music, that, although peripatetic and jolting and full of vicissitudes, had also brought me the most joy, the most highs, the most connection I had ever felt.

  Over those six months in California, with Portland in the rearview mirror and the band something I could examine with some distance, I realized my yearning had little to do with place and more with the fact that I continually made a ritual of emptiness. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I would always feel a certain deficit. Like before, as a way to fill the hole, I began writing songs. Music began to restore me again.

  Living in California informed many of my lyrics on The Woods. While there, I read a Tad Friend article in The New Yorker about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. I wrote the song “Jumpers” about this piece. I read it as I was taking BART into the city, and I found myself crying and thinking about how out of place I felt. I had never lived outside the Pacific Northwest before. And I couldn’t understand why, in this place of such intense beauty and sun—and where I assumed I’d find those things invigorating—I felt a sharp, alienating contrast. I related to the feeling of not being able to find meaning in your life, so that you try to find a way of instilling meaning in your death, looking for a way for it to somehow be symbolic or beautiful or publicly acknowledged. The Golden Gate Bridge is a structure that is extraordinarily solid in terms of engineering prowess, but unstable in that it’s a launching place for those in despair. I wanted to write about the instability of structures, whether they’re internal structures that we thought were holding us together or political structures that we thought were stable or safe, that we could rely on for doing good. I felt a weakening in the foundation; I guess I didn’t know that foundation might be the band itself, that things I thought I could count on were starting to dismantle.

  I returned to Portland and the band with an almost desperate relief. I bought the house I still live in, latching on to my own small square of the city with a sense of new permanence. Janet and Corin and I could once again write on a regular basis instead of on my limited bimonthly commutes. Writing for The Woods marked another shift. Less often did Corin or I bring in parts of a song or an entire song. Now Janet and I were doing a lot more of the songwriting, while Corin was busy with family. We had to push her, and she was reluctant to be pushed. Sleater-Kinney were making our scariest record, and Corin was a mother with a young kid; it was natural that in that realm—in parenthood—she wanted to ward off and protect her kin from horrors, to bring light and happiness into her world. Yet Janet and I were really embracing harshness and leaning into something sonically and thematically dark. We felt there was a creeping tepidness in music, a cloying softness, as if music were only a salve, not an instigator. It’s not that we didn’t listen to or appreciate pretty songs, or that music couldn’t merely be for entertainment. I can listen to soft songs, but I can’t play them. Even Sleater-Kinney’s lighter songs feel thorny or brittle—they aren’t gentle, and they make horrible background music. Janet and I wanted this record to have teeth. Corin didn’t quite feel the same intensity at this point. There was tension.

  When Corin finally got there, especially vocally, she went way out there—but I feel like we shoved her. On the chorus of “Let’s Call It Love,” she sounds mad and desperate, longing and lost—we tossed her out into the ether and you can hear her singing her way back; the notes are carrying her, but it’s not pretty. It’s the sound of someone fighting against herself and against her doubters, who in that moment happened to be in her own band. I think The Woods turned out exactly how we wanted it, but the process was very painful.

  Janet was the one who found and reached out to Dave Fridmann. At the time he was mainly known for his work with the Flaming Lips. Dave only works in one studio, which is in Cassadaga, New York. Initially, we thought it sounded glamorous to record in New York, and I imagined weekend trips to the city. In actuality, Cassadaga is tucked away in the far western part of the state, near Buffalo, more than eight hours from New York City. Plus, we were recording in the depths of winter and were snowed in most of the time. We stayed at the house attached to the recording studio, where we felt isolated, entrenched in a wholly immersive and insular experience. We didn’t have the luxury, at the end of the day, of returning to our regular world, to our friends and relationships and animals and families. The intensity never let up: we ate and slept and breathed the music. While one of us was cooking, the others would continue working, then we’d all eat together. After a full day of recording, we’d go up to our rooms and watch movies or TV shows until four a.m. We watched music documentaries and burned through Freaks and Geeks. We played Led Zeppelin records and read. We were too wired and rarely slept.

  In the mornings we’d take walks in the woods with sticks to protect ourselves from the undersocialized, overly protective country dogs, and we’d wear orange vests on account of hunting season. Then it would snow again and we would sled down the hill, careening and careless, mostly ending up in ditches. The neighbor boys came over and let us fire their shotguns at bottles, or took us out on their ATVs; it felt like good, clean fun, in such contrast to what we were unleashing in the studio, which felt raw and messy.

  Dave told us to let him produce and have a say on this record, or we shouldn’t work with him at all. It was a scary prospect. We were accustomed to having total control; John Goodmanson was always wary of overstepping, of intruding too heavily on our process. But we were willing. When we first arrived in Cassadaga, Dave sat in the room with a notepad while we played the songs for him. He would question why a certain song part needed to be there, and we either had to justify the structure or reasoning, or change it. It was an intimidating but important process. On “What’s Mine Is Yours,” which abruptly changes in the middle of the song, it was Dave’s idea to have it completely fall apart. Originally th
e song went from the second chorus into a bridge, but his thought was that if we wanted a change, it should be noticeable. He said, “Why doesn’t everyone just stop playing and see what happens?” And that’s how we got a sudden long weird guitar solo in the middle of the song—one of us had to come in, otherwise there was just silence, so I played until everyone else found their way back into the song. Fridmann created a lot of ledges for us to jump off. His way of describing what he wanted to hear was very visual and textural. He told Janet, “I need you to sound like Keith Moon, but like I’m lowering a blanket over Keith Moon.” We trusted him right away, and when we heard ourselves back after the first takes, we knew we had found the right person.

  I suppose many of our longtime listeners were upset because we were taking perfectly normal songs and making them hard to listen to; the sound was blown out and grating. We wanted to make something fractious; we didn’t want to please or appease. Perhaps that sounds arrogant or even callous, but we recoiled at the common, tacit expectation that the more records you make, the more they’ll start to feel cozy, settled in, mellowed out. Daddy rock, mommy rock, lullabies, as if once we’re no longer in our twenties we’re just supposed to soothe ourselves to sleep every night. We were more prone to insomnia, at our most awake in the dark.

  —

  The very first show for The Woods tour felt inauspicious. We played the Moore Theatre in Seattle. I wore a typically bizarre polyester shirt with a large bow, buttoned too tight and high up on the neck to be conducive to performing. (That “business casual” vibe is hard to quit.) It was another one of those sartorial choices—like a cowboy hat or faux-fur jacket—to be categorized in the “bad tour purchase” column. After the show, we were backstage celebrating with Sub Pop, whose employees had all come to the show in their hometown. I could feel my neck getting hot.

  At first I thought it was the shirt. But then came the familiar feeling of my ears swelling and closing. I was breaking out in hives. My breathing grew tight. I left the festivities. My dad and a friend of mine took me to the emergency room, where I stayed until nearly four a.m., amped up on steroids for the swelling, which were in direct competition with the Benadryl I had taken prior. I woke up in my father’s guest room, groggy, with puffy eyes. We had a show to play in Portland that night.

  Our big hometown show to debut the new record was at the Crystal Ballroom, a large venue downtown. A few minutes before I had to head to soundcheck, I walked into my bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were still swollen from the allergic reaction the night before; the hives had diminished but my skin looked mottled. My face was its own Halloween mask. Then I couldn’t breathe. I was outside myself looking in, I was on the wall of the bathroom, I was outside my house, a satellite. I could feel my smallness. When my chest constricted, it was not on account of my rib cage but of the universe enveloping me and folding me into its vastness, its nothingness. I called Corin to tell her that I was having chest pains and that I’d be missing soundcheck. I drove myself to a hospital in northwest Portland. They hooked me up to an EKG machine, which of course determined that I wasn’t having a heart attack, that physically I was fine—it only proved that perhaps my brain wasn’t. It was a panic attack, possibly exacerbated by the steroids, which I’d need to stay on for a few more days.

  My body wanted me to take it easy, but in some ways we were already taking it incredibly easy. After Corin had her son, Marshall, our touring became less intense. Her responsibility to Marshall and her desire to spend more time at home and less time on the road reshaped our schedule. The first leg of the tour for The Woods would only be a month long. We took care of ourselves: we didn’t smoke or do any drugs—we barely drank. We did do a lot of the work by ourselves. We still helped load our own gear, designed our own T-shirts, consulted on and approved PR and marketing strategies. But this tour we’d get to take a bus, so for the first time we wouldn’t literally be driving ourselves to the shows. I’m not complaining. A band is a small business, and we liked being hands-on, part of the decision-making process; we liked being in control.

  Corin with her sleepy infant son, Marshall. During the writing of One Beat. Portland.

  It’s no wonder that many artists deal with tour by desensitizing themselves until the moment they are onstage. Tour is a precarious nexus between monotony and monomania—a day of nothingness followed by a moment that feels like everything. You deal with tour by reading, walking, watching TV or movies, zoning out online. If you’re lucky, you engage in an activity that posits you in a specific place: a museum, a visit with a friend, a local restaurant. But most of the day feels shapeless, a blurriness that comes into focus only once you soundcheck and begin the progression toward the show itself. Even the day’s most mundane activities—eating, drinking coffee, working out in the hotel gym, doing a phone interview with a weekly paper for an upcoming show—all of these things carry with them a sense of validation and productivity because they are couched within the sphere of tour. But in actuality, it is aimless. If it’s not already numbing, you find a way to get numb.

  Even missing someone or something is dangerous, because it takes you out of tour. When I moved back to Portland to write The Woods, I wanted to find a way of tethering myself to a place, to home, and so I adopted a dog. Up until that point I had few domestic responsibilities, save for my two cats, that I could take on or be competent in. If you’re in a band, you’re surrounded by few demarcations of maturity in the traditional sense, because you’re perennially enacting fairly adolescent behavior. It’s an unconventional life. Of course, some people get married and have children, but just as many people in that world don’t. A music career, especially for a woman, is so at odds with the assumed normative path toward maturity and aging.

  Tobey was a wirehaired pointer mix with a challenging combination of intelligence and wild energy. At first I was obsessive: this was a whole new skill set to learn. I dove into training, research, problem-solving. Tobey provided a certain level of distraction that I really liked. He was impossible and stubborn and adorable. Janet got a dog, too, and we would take them on the short legs of tours. I loved the sense of companionship, though I had moments of panic, too—this was something I really had to commit to, this dog. Leaving Tobey made it harder to tour because he became a reminder of how much I was away.

  The rest of the U.S. tour I made it through without medical incident. Our final show was in Denver. We were playing the last song of the regular set, “Entertain,” when my palms began to itch. This was not a mild sensation but an incessant, unignorable nuisance—I would scratch furiously and then strum at my guitar. The itchiness was a bizarre intrusion of bodily reality into an experience that usually obliviates the quotidian. By then, “Entertain” was a song that we elongated with an improvised jam, stretching out our enjoyment of the set and of the crowd. But on this night I couldn’t think of anything other than the hives. I could tell one of my eyes was swelling shut and I mouthed to Corin, “Allergic reaction.” We abruptly finished the song and our tour manager drove me to the nearest hospital.

  The reaction was ten times worse than it had been in Seattle. The doctors gave me two shots of adrenaline to prevent me from going into anaphylactic shock. Both eyes swelled shut. Instead of toasting to a successful tour and hanging out with our crew, Janet and Corin drove to the hospital. We spent the last night of tour sitting around my hospital bed.

  When I got home, I saw a specialist who determined that I had a food allergy. Looking back, I realized that each incident of hives had been preceded by the consumption of soy. The doctor called it “exercise-induced anaphylaxis.” Instead of having a normal reaction, the sweat and increased heart rate expedites the speed with which the allergen courses through the body, making it potentially life-threatening.

  But also, allergies? Hives? These are not the afflictions of rock bands or guitarists. “Hives” doesn’t really have the same ring to it as, say, “heroin,” and it
falls far short of legendary potential. Nor are there any memorable songs about allergies, at least none sung for adults. With allergies you don’t get to venture into the euphemism “exhaustion” like you do if you lose your mind, throw a fit, punch someone in the face, go on a racist social media rant, or get arrested. Nope, I was sane, high-functioning, a little on the anxious and depressive side, and now saddled with an affliction that would garner me more sympathy at a natural grocer or with the PTA than with music journalists or fans. Not necessarily fodder for Behind the Music.

  Next up to promote The Woods was a European tour that would begin in the UK. England in particular had long been fairly indifferent toward Sleater-Kinney, but for some reason they were enamored of The Woods. The British press love when American bands play at Americanness (the same way the U.S. eats up the Brits playing at being Brits). It is a satisfying cycle of self-validation, a country imagined by outsiders. And I suppose The Woods was our own scrappy version of a national anthem of a frontier, jagged and belted through a crackling megaphone. We were excited to finally be met with more than just a mild enthusiasm overseas. Our first show was at All Tomorrow’s Parties, a weekend festival we co-curated with the Shins and Dinosaur Jr.