Categories
FEATURES FREE MP3s GUEST EDITOR

Corin Tucker Band: Dance The Blues Away

The last time the Corin Tucker Band played in MAGNET’s hometown, its frontwoman and namesake realized it was time for a change to reclaim its voice.

“Groundhog Day” (download):

“We had a show in Philadelphia,” says Corin Tucker. “I distinctly remember this one guy—God bless him, he was drinking out of a paper bag the entire show. He was so completely ready to dance, right through the quietest acoustic songs. I thought, ‘Man, it just seems like people really want to be moving around, so maybe we should make a record that’s a bit dancier.’”

The first Corin Tucker Band album, 2010’s 1,000 Years, was dominated by moody, thoughtful songcraft—quite a left-turn coming after Tucker’s last album (to date) with groundbreaking trio Sleater-Kinney, 2005’s furiously distortion-heavy The Woods. But now, 1,000 Years’ follow-up, Kill My Blues (Kill Rock Stars), is another sonic shift. The rhythms are more hip-shaking, it’s true. “I definitely never spent so much time playing a disco beat,” laughs drummer Sara Lund, formerly of Unwound. Tucker says the band was influenced by “the entire 1980s. I was a teenager then, and that music was just emblazoned on my brain.” She also cites the likes of “early Roxy Music or even some of the Patti Smith stuff, all that great guitar stuff that still has a good danciness to it.”

But in addition, on Kill My Blues, the guitars are louder, the textures more extreme. Her Sleater-Kinney bandmates, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, have garnered plenty of media attention with their projects together (Wild Flag) and separately (Brownstein on Portlandia, Weiss in Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks). Kill My Blues serves as a timely reminder of Tucker’s inimitability.

On much of 1,000 Years, she sang in a more muted register than usual. Kill My Blues marks the return of Tucker’s trademark wailing vocals, which she says can only be captured by certain vintage microphones.

“My voice is super-dynamic,” she says. “It’s not an easy thing to get if I’m singing something really quiet or something that’s really loud. I think some of those really super-sensitive tube mics are the best ones for a singer like me.”

Her lyrics on the album cover an amazing gamut—from clarion calls to teenage memories to more elliptical pieces. Leadoff track “Groundhog Day” is a call to arms, addressing current women’s issues head-on. “Did I lay down, did I fall asleep/On the backs of women who have come before me?/Tell me almost equal, almost good enough/Almost had a woman go and run the White House.”

The song’s placement at the beginning of the album is no coincidence. “To me, that was key in sequencing the record,” says Tucker. “It’s just how I feel right now. We cannot let Republicans roll back the gains that women have made in the past two generations in terms of reproductive rights and the other gains that women have made.”

At times, the LP brings to mind S-K’s post- September 11 album, 2002’s One Beat, a collection of rock anthems for troubled times. Throughout Kill My Blues, Tucker writes—and the band plays—like something important is truly at stake on every song.

“I lost some really amazing people in my life in the past couple of years,” says Tucker. “Music is a place for me that’s like natural therapy. My feelings come out whether I want them to or not. It’s just an incredibly cathartic place for me. A kind of brutal emotional honesty, I think, comes out on these songs, because of losing people and things just being kind of heavy in the past few years. But then we wrote this dance music. It’s kind of a weird combination of things, but I think that’s sort of what being 40 is sometimes like. [Tucker turns 40 in November.] So, it makes sense to me in a weird way.”

The title track is an intense love song, proclaiming, “You’re the one, you are/No one else hears the call.” At the same time, it’s one of a number of songs on the album that makes room for surprisingly seamless reference to modern technology. “You’re the noisy surprise/You’re my new ringtone.” Another song, “Summer Jams,” wryly muses, “Life may be sweet, but it’s short as a Tweet.”

Tucker says such references occurred “subconsciously. But it really has snuck in to the baseline of the way we deal with things. Finding out the most crushing news—sometimes you’ll find out someone died on Twitter. Wow, how did that technology change so fast? The most important people you’re communicating with, those are the people you’re texting with. Those are the messages like, ‘I’m OK!’ That kind of emotional, fast response relates to the intensity of some of the songs.”

Despite the often personal nature of these songs, they were written in a deeply collaborative process with the rest of the band—Lund, guitarist Seth Lorinczi and bassist Mike Clark. “I usually come in with a riff and an idea for a song,” says Tucker. “I’m like a really spare writer when I write music. And they’re all such great musicians—they’re much better musicians than I am—that they’ll write around that in a way that really brings it together as a song.”

“I think collaborating is incredibly important and satisfying to her,” says Lund. “I think like a lot of musicians who developed in a band situation, not as a solo artist, being able to bounce ideas off other people is incredibly useful, so you’re not creating in a vacuum. And having other people’s input, and having other people steer the song in a direction they weren’t intending in the first place.”

Adjusting to this style of songwriting was challenge for Lund. “I come from a very different background in collaborative songwriting, like Unwound, where we spent a lot of time jamming things out and not a lot of time talking about structure and what was happening,” she says. “And with this record, we did spend a lot of time discussing the structure and battling things out and negotiating and making compromises and having multiple opinions. Often, Corin was the tiebreaker. She ultimately often had the final say. And Seth likes to say, ‘Well, it is your name on the band title.’”

You can hear that attention to detail and structure on a song like “Blood, Bones And Sand,” with its rich, layered guitar parts leading into powerful, dramatic choruses. The final track, “Tiptoe,” is even more extreme, with a stuttering, bluesy opening riff at one end and an effectively door-slamming close at the other. The song “pretty drastically changed from when we first started playing it,” says Lund. “We just said, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s take it more like a Tom Waits version of bluesy, as opposed to Buddy Guy’s version of bluesy.’”

And, just in case you were wondering, there are no plans for a Sleater-Kinney reunion in the immediate future. “We’re on hiatus,” says Tucker, adding that the three members still share “just utmost respect for (each other’s) work and for everyone as people as well.”

—Michael Pelusi

2 replies on “Corin Tucker Band: Dance The Blues Away”

Comments are closed.