Sleater-Kinney is still speaking its own language
There is a difference between saying words and really talking. There are people with whom you make polite, light, surface conversation. And then there are those sacred few with whom it feels like you’ve discovered a secret way of speaking that breathes undiscovered life into language. Sleater-Kinney members Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker speak each other’s secret language musically. They’re bringing their “Little Rope Tour” to Chicago’s Riviera Theatre Thursday, March 21.
The duo met in the moss-covered college town of Bellingham, Washington, in 1992. Tucker was in the area with her riot grrrl band Heavens to Betsy to open for Bikini Kill, but when the main act canceled, Tucker’s band helmed the performance. After the show, Brownstein, a student at Western Washington University, approached Tucker to talk music and the scene at her school, the Evergreen State College in Olympia. Tucker took Brownstein’s address and offered to send her some fan zines. Brownstein is still waiting for those to come in the mail but transferred to Evergreen a year later.
The guitarists/vocalists encircled each other, listening to each other play and touring together with their separate bands, before combining their musical talents in 1994.
“Back when we started the band, there was such a particular musical vernacular that we created together,” Brownstein said in a phone interview. The self-taught pair both detuned their guitars to C sharp and discovered they could create sounds together that were unlike anything either had tapped into before.
“It’s very intuitive and imaginative. The guitars interlock in a particular way, and [the] vocals contrast in a particular way. I think it’s a form of expression for each of us that we don’t necessarily have in other avenues of our life,” said Brownstein. “In some ways, it’s become the soundtrack to our lives, no matter what age we’re at.”
Their self-titled debut album was released in 1995. Since then, they have released 10 subsequent albums and taken an eight-year hiatus. During that time, Brownstein began to star in the West Coast culture-lampooning sketch show “Portlandia” with Fred Armisen and Tucker embarked on a solo project called the Corin Tucker Band.
Tucker and Brownstein’s time apart helped them grow as communicators and reminded them about the uniqueness of this project.
“We have worked at being better collaborators and better communicators. We started the band when we were kids,” reflected Tucker. “Coming to a collaborative art project with more of an adult voice has been really helpful for us in terms of writing and arranging. I feel like that’s one of the things that’s made ‘Little Rope,’ our new album, so strong is that we’ve been able to dig in and really work hard on making each song as impactful as it can be.”
The foundational way that Tucker and Brownstein write music is by sitting together in a room and hashing out vocal and guitar ideas. When that ideal isn’t possible, the artists, who both live in Oregon, collaborate digitally. “The through line is that it really isn’t a Sleater-Kinney song until each of us [has] added our ideas to the song,” said Brownstein.
The process is also a two-person collaboration again. Between 1996 and 2019, guitarist Janet Weiss, who Brownstein noted is very talented, was a member of the band. “When we were writing with her in the band, it was collaborative between the three of us,” said Brownstein. Tucker added, “When we started the band, we had kind of like an instant chemistry, and being able to write together … we built on that through our different experiences over the years.”
“Little Rope,” released in January, is shaped by the 2022 deaths of Brownstein’s mother and stepfather. “If nothing else, it just raised the stakes for the album,” said Brownstein. “It created an environment where we didn’t really want to make a record that sat in the in-between. That embodied the middle. We wanted it to reach to our edges and look out beyond that and drag the weight of it all with us.”
Tucker stepped in to do more vocals to support Brownstein; with everything heightened emotionally, her voice is raw and unleashed on the album. When Brownstein listened back, she thought it may be too much but says she was told by others, “That’s actually how everyone’s feeling right now.”
One song on the album that particularly refused to stand in the middle is “Hell”: “Hell needs no invitation/ Hell don’t make no fuss/ Hell is desperation/ And a young man with a gun.”
“It’s meant to be a metaphor for the sort of normalization that we do in the United States, of the culture of violence that we live with,” Tucker said. “The kind of gun violence that happens every day that we’ve kind of rationalized.”
Tucker added: “Humans are just so good at talking themselves into, you know, normalizing a reality. Is this really how we want to live our lives? Do we really want to send our kids to school where they’re practicing a shooter drill?”
The album’s other themes include urgency, facing the unknown and depression. With the more frequent use of Tucker’s devastating vocals, “Little Rope” forces audiences to face the gravity of our world while falling into the rabbit hole of stories the pair have crafted.
Brownstein, who describes music as one of the most perennial and consistent things in her life, believes that Sleater-Kinney provides the pair with a form of singular expression. She said: “I think we returned to the band because it is a vehicle for storytelling, and it’s storytelling that possesses volume and breadth and depth and dynamics that are unavailable to us in other contexts.”
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Sleater-Kinney’s “Little Rope Tour”
With Black Belt Eagle Scout
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 21
Where: 4746 N. Racine Ave., Chicago
Tickets: Start at $39.50 at axs.com/events/505481/sleaterykinney-tickets