For Sleater-Kinney and Carrie Brownstein, it’s been 30 years and change
There have been four Sleater-Kinney albums since the indie-rock stalwarts roared back to life following an eight-year hiatus, from 2015’s tightly charging “No Cities to Love” to this year’s new “Little Rope.” And each one was recorded with a different producer or production team. Ahead of a soldout show at the Paradise Sunday, guitarist and singer Carrie Brownstein sees that as a crucial motivator for a band about to begin its fourth decade.
”I think what we appreciate about fresh ears is that there are people who are less purist about Sleater-Kinney’s sound,” says Brownstein. “[Producer John] Congleton, I think, is a good mix of appreciating and understanding the strengths of the band but being unafraid to deconstruct and rebuild and get inside the songs and see what we can make of them. I think that’s exciting for us. This far along, there’s no reason to put out an album that sounds like another album of ours. I think even if audiences think they want that, ultimately they don’t want that. And we don’t want that.”
And so even as “Little Rope” carries with it some echoes of the mournful warmth of 1999’s “The Hot Rock,” Sleater-Kinney approaches it with the maturity and defiance of two bandmates with 30 years of partnership behind them and hungry to keep proving themselves. (Formerly a trio, SleaterKinney’s longtime drummer, Janet Weiss, left in 2019.)
Brownstein and singer/guitarist Corin Tucker arrived at the themes of loss and pain that run through the album all too honestly, as Brownstein’s mother and stepfather died in a car accident midway through recording. But she doesn’t see “Little Rope” as, in her words, a “grief album.”
”I think [the accident] shaped the album and raised the stakes of what it means to put music out into the world, what it means to be in Sleater-Kinney, what my friendship with Corin means,” Brownstein says. “I also think that Sleater-Kinney has always been a vessel for grappling with strong emotions. It’s certainly not our first album that deals with loss. So I think it was an appropriate container, a familiar one, with which to be in a state of disorientation and confusion and sorrow.”
As for bringing songs that contain those things on tour with her and having to revisit them night after night, Brownstein doesn’t view them as a burden. “The thing about touring, and music in general, is that songs that you write from one state of being are transformed and transported in a live setting,” she says. “You can’t get onstage and sing a song and predict how you’ll feel or how the audience will feel. So the magic of music is that it’s not like I’m carrying this baggage with me. If anything, it lightens the load. It reconfigures feelings, because you have to reckon with the present, you have to reckon with the room, with the audience, who they are, what they are.”
It helps to have the kind of faith in your partner that Brownstein has in Tucker, whose vocals on “Little Rope” show a maturity in more ways than one. “I feel like this is probably Corin’s biggest singing record maybe since [2005’s] ‘The Woods,’ ” says Brownstein. “I think she has more control. Now she can vacillate between the verses of ‘Hell’ and the chorus of ‘Hell,’ whereas I think she was not able to do that 20 years ago. She just had more of one speed there. It’s not wanting to tell the same story with your voice. You have more lived-in experience. And so her voice has more body to it.”
As for Brownstein, she was just named the 64th-greatest guitarist of all time last October in a Rolling Stone ranking of the 250 best players. After refusing to scoff at Ry Cooder, listed two spots lower — “I think anyone on the list or not on the list knows it’s arbitrary and subjective and you take it with a grain of salt” — she credits the current iteration of the poll for presenting a wider vision than in previous years.
“I think they’ve started to think of guitar differently than they used to,” she says. “It’s not just about technique, it’s about style. It’s about influence, who is a progenitor of a certain sound, who’s influenced a subset of bands. So yeah, if I was comparing myself to people who can solo and shred in a way that I can’t, then that might get in my head. But when I look at the list, I think, okay, this is a wide-ranging group of people, and they’ve done a fairly decent job of acknowledging more broadly and respecting different approaches to the instrument.”
Brownstein’s hunger for a variety of inspiration came to fruition when Sleater-Kinney went dormant following the tour for “The Woods.” During that time, she wrote a blog for NPR Music and created and starred in the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning television comedy “Portlandia” with Fred Armisen. She also formed the fiery quartet Wild Flag, which included Weiss, while Tucker put out two terrific albums on her own. Brownstein says that hearing what the others were up to made everyone feel like they were missing out.
“I think particularly Corin, she was like, ‘Wait a second, how’d you guys form a band without me?,’ ” says Brownstein with a chuckle. “But I think that’s a good feeling, too. That’s how it felt coming up of age in Olympia [Wash.]. It wasn’t necessarily your bandmates, but that’s why those artistic communities are vital, because you have people playing off one another and kind of competing, trying to oneup each other, gleaning influence. So it’s not a bad feeling to be like, ‘I wish I was doing that,’ because then that inspires you to go do something.”