Kim Gordon
The former Sonic Youth artist and musician on her brave new solo album, cooking for Neil Young and “voyeuristic” LA
As KIM GORDON prepares to release No Home Record – her brilliant debut solo album – she takes stock of her consistently adventurous career so far. To discuss: her early days in New York’s Downtown, cooking with Neil Young and the perils of gentrification. “Life is unexpected,” she tells Tom Pinnock
IHAVE to show you this picture,” says Kim Gordon, reaching for her phone. “Sorry! You’ll probably regret bringing it up…” Gordon finally finds the photo she’s looking for on Instagram – a shot of her Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Syd Barrett, sitting nervously on a beanbag. “He’s 11,” she explains. “He’s got an enlarged heart, which means he coughs a lot. Now I understand why people have support dogs.” Syd is back in Los Angeles, but his owner has flown to London, where she’s meeting Uncut in the ornate, low-ceilinged library of an 18th-century Clerkenwell hotel to discuss the first solo album of her storied career. A brave mix of abstract guitar, grimy electronics and Gordon’s impressionistic vocals, No Home Record playfully combines her long-standing interests in radical sound and art. While the music created by her former Sonic Youth cohorts in recent years has generally been reassuringly familiar, the nine songs on Gordon’s LP are stunningly modern in their approach.
“It’s funny, I can’t really figure out where I fit into the contemporary landscape of music,” says Gordon, sitting with excellent posture on the edge of a small grey settee. She’s looking her usual stylish but slightly formal self, in a black leather jacket, light-coloured top and grey check trousers, with chunky silver sandals showing off pastel-yellow nail varnish. “I never professed to be a musician. I got into it being inspired by No Wave bands, so it’s the only kind of record I could make. My friend, the poet Elaine Kahn, wrote my bio, and she said my music isn’t something you listen to, as much as experience.”
“When you make a solo album it’s a different mindset,” says Gordon’s friend J Mascis. “The limitations of a band are not occurring. Kim was never technical or anything – she’s a feel-oriented player.”
“Kim has this incredible use of language and a playfulness to what she does,” adds guitarist Steve Gunn, another friend and occasional collaborator. “I think she really utilised that with this record. She’s developed her own syntax and style. And it’s really her.”
Fuelled by mineral water and biscuits, Gordon proves to be intelligent, warm and funny company, in direct contrast to her ice-cool image onstage and on camera. She speaks softly, and is often charmingly self-deprecating as she discusses cooking for Neil Young, the “voyeuristic” nature of Los Angeles, her early days in New York’s Downtown and the creation of her new album. Her reserve makes sense, though: Gordon’s main talents have always been for improvisation, channelling direct inspiration and following her instinct, in all realms of art, and the best way of developing those skills is by being able to listen and observe the world around you.
“I just intuitively felt my way through writing and recording,” she explains of her new album. “In the back of my head I always wanted to make a weird jazz record, but I didn’t really know how to go about that, and it didn’t go that way! There was no blueprint – it was like, ‘I’m just gonna do this, who cares?’ It just happened.”
AFTER decades on the East Coast, first in New York and then Massachusetts, in 2015 Kim Gordon moved back to Los Angeles, where she grew up. Sonic Youth were over, as was her marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore, but Gordon was working on new artwork, on music with her duo Body/head and on a book, Girl In A Band. From that evocative memoir, one might get the impression that Gordon has a somewhat conflicted relationship with LA, and she agrees.
“It’s a very sensuous environment in a certain way,” she says. “I have these haunting memories from childhood of the scent of night-blooming jasmine, and of the ocean – to me, the Pacific Ocean is so beautiful, and I kind of carried that around with me when I was
“I was inspired by Cardi B. I was like, ‘This is so punk!’”
KIM GORDON
living on the East Coast. I like looking at the architecture in LA, too: there’s the Tudor style, the ranch house with the wagon wheel on the fence, and then these giant stucco Mcmansions. It’s a very voyeuristic city, very filmic. And it’s a desert – everything you see green is pretty much fake. It’s a strange environment. But I don’t feel very healthy in LA. I don’t think I eat as healthily as I used to – I’m surrounded by green juice places and yoga, and it makes me feel like that.”
Gordon was brought up on the city’s west side, where the mountains were seldom visible, but today she and Syd reside in a chic ’30s house in the hillier Los Feliz area. “They used to call them the ‘Red Hills’ in the ’50s, because architects like Rudolph Schindler built unconventional houses there. They were more bohemian, so they were called communists. But now it’s all gentrified.”
If Sonic Youth’s finest music still drips with the feel of Manhattan at its grubbiest – and ergo its coolest – then Gordon’s new record is instead infused with the colourful, sumptuous chaos of Los Angeles; from its pastel-coloured artwork to its blocks of guitar and synth, as bold and sprawling as the Pacific or the Santa Monica Mountains.
“I’m pretty much a minimalist,” says Gordon. “I always liked hip-hop, but I didn’t wanna do a hip-hop record. I was really inspired by Cardi B – I remember when I first heard that song, ‘Bodak Yellow’, I was like ‘This is so punk.’ I loved the spirit of it.”
This interest is nothing new for Gordon, as Sonic Youth producer and Don Fleming recalls: “Kim was always into hip-hop. When the Goo sessions were happening [in 1990], we were in Greene Street Studios and Public Enemy were recording in the other room. I was with Kim when we talked to Chuck D about adding a spoken part to ‘Kool Thing’. Chuck was a bit hesitant, as there were no set lyrics – we wanted him to just freestyle. Kim was great at convincing him to try it.”
FREESTYLING was, in fact, the way No Home Record was created by Gordon and producer Justin Raisen, who first worked on the 2016 single “Murdered Out”, included here. “Kim was always like, ‘Just do your thing, make it as messedup as you want’,” remembers Raisen. “Usually it would get even more fucked-up after! She loves it loud, she loves it trashy, she loves it dirty.”
“They were all equals in Sonic Youth,” remembers Don Fleming, “but often I felt that Kim’s perspective was more ‘outside the box’ than the others.”
Naturally, then, one of Gordon’s favourite tracks on No Home Record is the uncompromising, minimal “Paprika Pony”; it was developed from a trap beat that Justin Raisen’s brother Jeremiah brought in, and was originally intended to open the album.
“When I heard that beat I said, ‘Oh, that’s cool, it has an atmosphere I feel would really suit me,’” remembers Gordon. “Then I did some low-end feedback, it’s subtle. That song is like a modern-day Adam and Eve, like they’re in the garden but they’re on their phones [laughs].”
“‘Paprika Pony’ was a poem,” says Justin Raisen, “but it felt like it worked and it flowed, so it’s as it is, but on some songs I would start pulling things from her vocal improvisations – ‘That’s the chorus! That’s the verse!’ Then we’d mute the musical idea that the vocals were conceptualised over, and then start doing weird shit over it. So it was like a hip-hop record. Very relaxed.”
“Justin would just be like, ‘Bring your fucked-up poetry over!’” says Gordon. “I was trying to think of good rhythms, so I’d play Justin some No Wave stuff, lay some guitar down.”
“Cookie Butter”, at six- and-a-half minutes the longest track on No Home Record, was recorded with Shawn Everett, who recently produced Brittany Howard’s Jaime. He and Gordon first met when Kurt Vile invited her to add feedback to “Mutinies” on 2018’s Bottle It In.
“It was one of the most casual sessions I’ve ever done, she was just having fun in the studio,” says
Everett. “I had her drum machine and guitar going through loads of amps – it was like a sonic playground. She was primarily using an acoustic guitar to do all the feedback, and she was making it sound more aggressive than I’ve ever heard an acoustic guitar sound before. These were more like sonic paintings she was creating, like Pollock in a way.”
“She rides the noise like a wave!” marvels Raisen. “She’s like Jimi Hendrix, but with noise.”
THE drum machines that power No Home Record might be a change from the more organic textures of Sonic Youth’s sound, but Kim Gordon’s experiments with electronic rhythms actually predate the formation of the group. In those early years in New York, living in the grimy splendour of the Lower East Side, Gordon became heavily immersed in the No Wave and underground art scenes. “My friend Dan Graham had this performance piece, Performer/audience/mirror,” says Gordon. “He wanted to perform it with an all-girl band, so he introduced me to Miranda Stanton, and we were trying to figure out what direction we’d go in. Miranda had this drum machine, and I started playing these chords with it, and had these lyrics from a magazine ad. Miranda was like, ‘Well, that’s cool, but you actually don’t need us.’ So I put that aside, but it was always in the back of my mind.”
“It was a thriving, vibrant time for the arts in NYC,” recalls producer and multi-instrumentalist Jim Sclavunos, now drummer in the Bad Seeds but a member of Sonic Youth on 1983’s Confusion Is Sex.
“Many artists hung out at CBGBS and Max’s Kansas City, some artists dabbled in music, some musicians dabbled in art. Usually the artists knew much better parties to crash. Kim knew Basquiat? Everyone on the scene knew him to some extent.”
“If you think about Kim’s life, it’s so crazy,” laughs Shawn Everett. “She’s some kind of Forrest Gump of leftfield art; she’s been there through everything, she’s met everyone.”
As the ’80s dawned, Gordon’s primary interest was art. Her first show, staged at Manhattan arts space White Columns, was titled ‘Furniture Arranged For The Home Or Office’ and consisted of borrowed chairs. Yet after Sonic Youth released their selftitled EP in 1982, Gordon’s art took a backseat, her time increasingly swallowed up by being in a successful band; the endless cycle of tour-record-tour that Jim O’rourke, speaking to Uncut in 2015, termed ‘golden handcuffs’. “I like having some routine,” says Gordon, “but it does infringe on your life too. It was always hard to have an art career and the band, and have a family and manage a house. It’s a lot. I always felt like I had my art for myself, so now I’m enjoying that.”
Today, Gordon’s art is more acclaimed than ever, and she’s recently shown two exhibitions simultaneously: ‘She Bites Her Tender Mind’ at the Irish Museum Of Modern Art, in Dublin, and ‘Lo-fi Glamour’ at The Warhol, Pittsburgh. “Yeah, it’s difficult,” she laughs of her multiple shows. “Unexpected. I always saw life as ‘becoming’, and never really arriving anywhere. So it’s a little discomforting, but at the same time art’s always been there. It sounds weird to say that that’s what I aspire to, never arriving. ‘She Bites Her Tender Mind’ comes from a Sappho poetry fragment. Her work is so modern and kind of amazing. My daughter turned me on to her. It was quite an egalitarian society then? Yeah, we’ve come a long way. In the wrong direction.”
ONE set of paintings that Gordon is exhibiting this year is dubbed the ‘Airbnb Series’, and they capture her fascination with the curated nature of many of the properties found on the app. With her art and music cross-pollinating, her interest blossomed into the caustic second track on No Home Record, also called “Airbnb”. “Superhosted!” she spits. “Andy Warhol prints on the wall/cosy and warm…”
“Everything is branded now, and designed,” she explains. “Your environment is prescribed for you. It’s presenting a lifestyle as this utopian thing you’re supposed to dive into. I’m fascinated by the design aspect of it, and sociologically how that fits in. Part of the song was written and part of it was improvised, which is a lot of the way I come up with lyrics. I have some lines but I don’t know what will fit, and things just come out of my mouth sometimes.”
Much of the rest of No Home Record is a little more abstract in its lyrics, with Gordon taking snippets from overheard conversations, magazines and even from other songs, using this collaging process to shed light on life in 21st-century LA. “There are so many homeless people, and the tent situation is everywhere – you can just see a tent in the middle of nowhere on a corner. It’s kind of outrageous, the contrast. I guess ‘Sketch Artist’ is about that – on the one hand you have Airbnb transitory living, which is lifestyle-oriented, and then you have homelessness, where the lifestyle is on the street, and it’s just horrible. It’s a very transitory city.”
The clanging abstraction of closer “Get Yr Life Back” paints a superb picture of modern life, even specifying the soundtrack: “Hash away at Twitter,”
Gordon whispers. “Take out the voiceover/the Fleetwood Mac song.”
“Kim’s some kind of Forrest Gump of leftfield art”
SHAWN EVERETT
“It seems like I hear Fleetwood Mac everywhere I go,” she explains. “I thought it was funny to create that feeling that some music is cutting into your life all the time. I wanted the lyrics to feel random, as if overhearing different conversations. This idea of how you feel free in LA, the idea in the culture that you have choices, that anything’s possible, it’s kind of an illusion.”
“Kim’s not afraid to say things that are current,” says Steve Gunn. “There are a lot of people who don’t address what’s going on with social media. But this LP encompasses the current times, and it’s quite brilliant. It feels real, and it reflects the madness of the times and the strangeness and the sadness.”
“Don’t Play It”, meanwhile, echoes a line from Gordon’s favourite Neil Young song, “On The Beach”: “I hope the world don’t turn away.” “I like that song, so I just thought I’d throw it in there. I feel like it’s personal, as in no-one wants to feel lonely, but it’s also global – the world is so fucked-up right now. Yeah, I cooked for Neil once while we were on tour with him. I made this chicken dish for him, as Poncho was complaining he had to cook for him every night.
The driver was so sweet – he’d forgotten to get the ingredients so he ended up going out to a fast-food place and getting raw chicken wings. I was so freaked out that Neil was gonna get sick!”
WHEN we next speak, Gordon is at home in LA, after a holiday in Cape Cod where she hung out with J Mascis and his family. Syd needs another visit to the vets –
“It’s part of the breed, they’re poster dogs for obesity and bad teeth” – but Gordon has plenty of activities to take her mind off this; not only is there the imminent release of No Home Record, but she’s been employed as a consultant on an upcoming TV show, an adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s fictional oral history Daisy Jones & The Six.
“I don’t know how much I’m supposed to talk about it,” Gordon laughs, “but it was weird to have a day job, it was very busy! I was only contracted for a number of hours a week, but I felt like I had to be there three days to feel part of it. I’m learning about the writers’ room.” There’s also a follow-up to Girl In A Band in the works, yet it’ll be “more of an art book”, and deliberations on whether she should take her new songs on tour. “Maybe. I have to put a band together… I dunno… we’ll see.” Fittingly for an artist whose creative pursuits are forever evolving, Gordon is pretty relaxed about No Home Record, an album that she never planned to make but, like everything else in her artistic life, appeared naturally. “It is strange to be releasing my debut solo album now,” she muses, “but life is unexpected. I’m a slow developer, that’s what I meant when I said, ‘I’m still becoming.’ I think my music is much more linked to my art than I thought. They’re merging together. “I’ve really been unfair with other people [in the past],” she says, as if confessing a dark secret, “thinking that their career’s over, thinking, ‘Oh, why are they still doing that?’ And now I realise that, even though you’ve reached a peak of what you’re gonna be known for in the culture, you still like to do things – you’re not gonna retire.”