How did the Corin
Tucker Band come together?
Well, actually back in I think 2008 I got asked to play a
benefit show for my friend, and I did a couple of songs and ended up playing
with my friend Seth Lorinczi, and just encouraged me to make a solo record. And so that turned into the Corin Tucker
Band. We made that record over a year
and a half and put it out in 2010.
How did you meet up
with Sara Lund the rest of the band?
Well Sara is someone I’ve known for a long time from Olympia
days, and our bands played together. We
asked her to play on the first record, not know if she would say yes, if it
would work, and it worked out really well.
So that collaboration worked out really well and we toured a little bit
off of that record and played some shows, and ended up collaborating some more
to write this second album that we put out together.
When Sleater-Kinney
broke up, did you take a break from playing music, or was it something you just
kept at? And has your writing since then
changed?
Yeah, I really took a break, focused just on my family life
for a couple of years, and I really hadn’t written very much, but I did I ended
up writing a couple of songs for that benefit show, thinking it was just kind
of a project. But it changed. It definitely was an exploration of different
instrumentation, trying out different things with my voice, trying different
styles. It was a really interesting
project to work on.
What was writing Kill
My Blues like, because as you said, the other one you spent a year and a half on,
and it was people you hadn’t really collaborated with before, but now after you
toured, how did the writing style change, if it did at all?
Yeah it changed a lot for this second record. We would sometimes just jam in the practice
space, we came up with some of these songs that way, and that was a really fun
exploration of everybody’s different talents.
Mike Clark and Sara Lund really have a groovy rhythm section thing
happening, it’s really fun to play with.
Seth and I have a lot of fun doing guitar stuff together. I feel like that sort of natural
collaboration can happen between the four of us.
Is a big difference
working with a bassist?
Yeah, really big, it’s been really fun, actually, to work
with Mike and to play with that rhythm section.
It’s been really fun to sing with too, for me. And it’s just been fun exploring more
different music styles. We’ve almost
gone for a sort of disco sound in “Neskowin” and it was an unexpected pleasure.
On the album you
switch to more of a storytelling style, as opposed to the lyrics being more
personal and introspective. When you
played the songs from the last album live, did you see them not connecting as
well with people as you expected them to?
And in the past, how much of a mix of storytelling and personal stuff
was in your lyrics?
I think that I’ve always kind of mixed personal and
storytelling styles, but I think for the last record because I was writing by
myself so much, the songs were more personal and just about things I’m thinking
about in my head. But for this record,
because we all were writing together, it did feel like I was coming up with
something that was more of a story format.
That just seems to really present itself to some of the audiences that
we played to. I noticed that they really
wanted to come out and dance. People,
when they come out to a show, they really want to have an experience where
they’re listening to music and dancing around, and when you’re playing a really
quiet acoustic song, it doesn’t really lend itself to that kind of experience,
and so I kind of thought about these people that come out and want to dance and
move around at these shows, what kind of album would facilitate that? And I think that definitely played a part in
the songwriting for this record.
Now as a parent and
someone with a fulltime job, has your approach to, and your appreciation for
touring changed?
Well, I think that it’s still something that I’ve always
viewed as a part of the music business.
To me it’s always been a part of the job, an important part. But when you have little kids that are
depending upon you, it just made it so much more difficult. The kids are school age now, and I’m hoping
that will make things a little bit easier this time around. They have their routine and their friends and
the things that they’re into.
Did they like touring
around?
Well, they both have done it, but I wouldn’t say like is the
operative word there.
I saw in the materials
that this album was being referred to more as ‘riot grrrl’ than the previous
one, and I guess my question is: do you connect with the same music and ideas
as back when riot grrrl was more of a movement, and less of a genre?
Well, I think what is actually so frustrating is that a lot
of those same issues that we were talking about are still so relevant
today. When I was in college it was all
about reproductive rights and worrying about overturning Roe v. Wade, and it’s
like ‘wow, we’re still arguing about those same issues’, and it’s still the
woman who calmly gets up and requests that her insurance pay for birth control
pills gets slammed as a slut by Rush Limbaugh.
It’s mindblowing that as a culture we’re still there, and so I think
that frustration is still a part of my mindset, and the kind of frustration on
some of the music I write too. But I’m a
different person now, 20 years later, and I think that there’s different
perspectives that I have, but I think that a lot of the same issues that we
were fighting for are still relevant to women in our country and around the
world.
The lyrics to
“Groundhog Day” definitely seem to be expressing this idea of the frustration
of the terms of the debate regressing and refusing to move forward.
Yeah, well unfortunately, some of these same things are
being repeated, but we need to move beyond them. But that’s the younger generation. When I look at younger people, I’m just so
hopeful for them that they will move beyond some of these issues that we
have. I think it’s a lot of older
Republicans that would have that kind of mindset that are still in power. They’re still the ones with talk shows and
who are running Congress, but that’s not going to be forever. It’s taking longer than I think it should
have, but I think, for the younger generation, for future generations
hopefully, they’ll keep changing things.
I just think that we have to keep talking about these things so that, in
the future, these things will be different.
I’m kind of stealing
this question from an NPR interview I read between a bunch of metal musicians,
but why music? Why choose that as an art
form or form of expression?
Hmm, I think that to me, music always moved me more than
anything else. It’s a very deep form of
communication for many people. And I
think with research they’ve found that, truly, it’s the deepest form of
communication in your brain. Music is
one of the last things you lose when you lose your mind, like when you have alzheimers,
you still have music in there. That
rhythm goes way down deep in your limbic, your core of your brain. Human beings respond to music very deeply. It’s a really intense way to communicate with
people, it communicates a lot more than just thought, just discussion, it
communicates emotion. You give people
that emotion, especially when you play a show and you’re in a room with them,
you can make them feel something. That
is a super powerful event as an artist.
I was lucky to be able to find that out at an early age, and it changed
my life forever.
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