Here’s an exclusive excerpt of the current MAGNET cover story. To read the whole thing, order a copy of the issue here.
Nine years after going on indefinite hiatus, the legendary Sleater-Kinney has returned with yet another masterpiece. MAGNET goes behind the scenes to find out how and why the band kept this unexpected reunion like a secret for so long. Story by Steve Klinge, photo by Gene Smirnov
Corin Tucker is walking through an empty Union Transfer—the music venue in Philadelphia that used to be a Spaghetti Warehouse—bouncing a rubber ball and holding hands with her daughter. Sleater-Kinney—Tucker, Janet Weiss and Carrie Brownstein, plus Katie Harkin, who joined the band on keyboard, guitar and percussion for the tour—just finished the soundcheck for the night’s sold-out show, and she has a few moments to switch roles, back to motherhood. She’s smiling.
It’s a bitterly cold last day of February, the end of a busy week for the band. On Tuesday and Wednesday, they played two shows in Washington, D.C., the first of which was broadcast live on NPR. Thursday, they taped a performance on Late Night With Seth Meyers (Fred Armisen, Brownstein’s partner in Portlandia, leads the house band) before playing the first of two sold-out nights at New York’s Terminal 5. Saturday is Philly, and they had planned to tape a session for NPR’s World Café in the afternoon, but cancelled because Brownstein came down with a touch of laryngitis and needed to save her voice for that night’s concert.
The soundcheck goes smoothly and efficiently with only two hurdles: The sound guy objects to the Portland Trail Blazers cap that Brownstein wears because it affects the levels he’s setting (although Brownstein jokingly accuses him of hating on her hometown team), and the harmonica Weiss plays during “Modern Girl” sounds shrill until she switches microphones. When the band talks to MAGNET before the show (after individual phone interviews earlier), Brownstein will be sipping tea and coughing occasionally. Tucker will come down with it the next day; fortunately, the first leg of the tour is almost over, and the band has a couple weeks off before heading to Europe. And when they hit the stage in Philly, they’re fine: Brownstein is full of focused energy, and her voice is strong and clear.
Nine years after going on indefinite hiatus, Sleater-Kinney has returned. With No Cities To Love, they’ve made something unprecedented: a reunion album that’s more than credible, that more than reminds us of their past, that is more than a “return to form.” It changes and advances the narrative; it gives us something new to think about, something new to love, something—when it comes down to it—that’s incredible. Name another band that got back together and created one of its best albums. They have returned on their own terms, and, in this age of oversharing and instant information, they managed to make their return a shocking surprise. As they sing, in the readymade pull-quote from “Surface Envy,” “We win, we lose—only together can we break the rules/We win, we lose—only together can we make the rules.”
Tucker, Weiss and Brownstein are in their 40s now, and they’re more adept at making their own rules. While they are fully committed to the band, Sleater-Kinney is now only one of their priorities. The group had been on the write/record/tour cycle from its inception in 1994, when Tucker and Brownstein joined forces as a diversion from their bands Heavens To Betsy and Excuse 17, two linchpins of the Olympia, Wash., riot grrrl movement. They released seven albums, concluding with 2005’s classic The Woods. But the strain of touring took its toll. At the beginning of 2006, Sleater-Kinney, by then based in Portland, Ore., surprised everyone by announcing they would part ways after a farewell tour.
“It was difficult to be on tour that much,” says Weiss. “Stepping away from it was a way to preserve it, and not take the band to any sort of levels where we were unhappy. We really try to do this band when we have the energy and vitality to do it. It can’t really be a half-assed project; we really have to do it 100 percent.”
Weiss continued her longtime collaboration with Sam Coomes in Quasi, and played with Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, amongst other projects. Tucker released two very good albums with her own band, raised her son and daughter, and worked a day job. Brownstein started a blog for NPR, volunteered at an Oregon Humane Society and launched Portlandia. She’s also in the Amazon TV show Transparent and has written a memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, hitting shelves October 27. Brownstein and Weiss were also in Wild Flag, the short-lived band with Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole.
The success of Portlandia is part of the story of Sleater-Kinney’s return. Weiss works as a location scout for the show. Tucker has appeared in it, and the spark of the S-K reunion occurred in December 2011 when Brownstein and Tucker previewed an episode in which Tucker’s son appeared. With the enthusiastic support of Armisen and Tucker’s husband, filmmaker Lance Bangs, the three women began gathering in Brownstein’s basement to play together.
From the start, the goal was to write new material for an album; the band had no interest in coming back just to perform the old stuff. They had done a farewell tour in the spring of 2006 and didn’t care about another victory lap. Friends were eager to see what would come out of working together again, and they wanted to do so outside of the public eye, so they kept their rehearsals a secret.
“As far as the chemistry, that was fairly easy to reignite,” says Brownstein. “Although the bigger challenge was actually because we have such a familiarity with each other and things can be so seamless, that’s not exactly the place from which you want to create. Sometimes it’s better to have there be more tension, so if you want to make something different, you can’t fall back on what feels safe. So, we gave ourselves the same mission we do with every album, which is to try to make something different.”
“Since we hadn’t been playing live, there was definitely some reacquainting that had to happen,” says Weiss. “The live shows are really where we sort of hone our telepathy and our sort of power; we really develop that onstage. So, because we didn’t have the advantage of playing shows, it took us a little longer to reconnect.”
The band was determined not to repeat old ideas, and they rejected a lot of material as they were writing.
“If we wrote anything that sounded too similar to something that we’d already done, we ended up tossing it,” says Tucker. “It could be a perfectly good song, but it just wasn’t something that had a feeling of newness or discovery about it.”
“It’s easy for us in a way to fall back into a pattern, like Carrie’s guitar playing 16th notes”—here Weiss sings some notes that sound like the opening of “Words & Guitar”—“and Corin’s guitar playing the bass notes, and I’m playing some syncopated drum thing. There are some signature things to the sound that we try to avoid so that we don’t repeat ourselves over and over again. A lot of the choruses on this record, Carrie and Corin sing together in unison, which is a newer idea. Simple things like that we can try to change up the patterns. It’s important in order to try to stay current and vital.”
Indeed, the principals had broken the Sleater-Kinney mold—even the malleable mold that it was—with the freewheeling distortion of The Woods, and this LP needed to be something equally new.
