Carrie brownstein quotes

I think when you're writing from your own life, it's hard because you realize that people have their own assessment of how they look, and they don't know how you will describe them.

I have to erase my Google search histories, because they always lead to an obituary.

I'm interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young... I've never quite been able to shake that.

I've learned to really enjoy video games. It's really toxic to have in your house, because it's really distracting.

I'll admit that I'm not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast.

You'd hope that no writing about music could supersede the music itself. But I do think that blogs mirror the way that we are listening. It comes at you fast and it's timely and then five minutes later we're on to something else. It caters to our desire for instant gratification. And I think blogs also have fluidity that's exciting. You have a lot of real enthusiastic music fans for the most part that are writing sometimes for a large audience, and I think certain blogs have a little too much power over what someone likes or doesn't like.

I've never been in another kind of midlife crisis. I don't know what it feels like when you're through that, but I definitely feel that changing a few things, like being on a different label and having things kind of settle back into a sense of normality, helps to feel grounded.

There are foods you should avoid. For me, sugar is a no. Because it gives me a spike and then a crash.

Just invest in apps. Just download apps and then pay yourself the dividend.

The school systems at my childhood had enough money or enough parent involvement that they felt like learning music and songs, and exploring the whole pop or classical canon, were just as important as algebra or biology. Music is such a visceral and tactile experience for a kid, and to just replace that with video games or something that doesn't have the same sort of physical impact would definitely be a poor choice, and have a negative impact.

You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.

I don't think I would live outside of the Northwest. I think the quality of life in Portland is really good. People move from intense, high-powered jobs, and move to Portland, work half as much and live twice as good.

I think we as people struggle for what is meaningful in our lives, and I think that modern, contemporary life is as easy as it's ever been, for many, many people, and the amount of physical exertion, for most people, is less than it's ever been. I think that there is something about the ritual of making things more difficult that people find meaning in.

It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.

Living in Portland, which is a predominantly white city, the privilege and the luxury to be able to obsess over a certain kind of minutia, that I think, if you did not have that privilege, would never be bothersome. When people are worried about whether "local" means 100 miles, or 50 miles, or 10 miles from a grocery store, I just think, "Wow. What a privilege it is to have that as a major concern in your life." As opposed to, "Can we afford food tonight?" Sometimes I'm just shocked at what becomes concerning in these kind of communities.

With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.

From a self-conscious standpoint, it's hard to see myself on a screen in a way that isn't just me playing music or doing something silly.

I'm always trying to encourage people not to limit themselves in the same way that many of our parents stayed with one job forever.

No matter what people are struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don't wish smallness for anyone. It's a terrible place to live.

If your whole world of a band or music is taking place in a digital realm or on technological devices, it's all mediated through those things. That takes away from the experiential and sensual nature of music. That's a lot less exciting for me to think about. It's not my ideal way of living with music.

I don't think I would live outside of the Northwest. I think the quality of life in Portland is really good. People move from intense, high-powered jobs, and move to Portland, work half as much and live twice as good. They can afford bigger houses, or they can actually afford to buy a house, they can work the minimal amount and still get by. I think there's a really strong sense of community there. It's beautiful.

The internet is just a scary place. It's better to just go to the doctor. Don't let Google get inside your head. It will do bad things to you.

To me, the grotesque is like a sonic manifestation of reality. I don't know how you could look out onto our world and see only beauty. And I like beautiful things. I like the aesthetically harmonious. But I am much more attracted to something that is off-kilter. It is a truer reflection of not only nature, but the human spirit - the state of the world. I just think everything feels a little off.

If I have a strong dislike for something, obviously that garners an equal amount of derision, towards me from the audience. And that's fine, as long as it's within the bounds of decency and isn't too personal in the vitriol. That's what makes the blog interesting, and that's what makes reading it interesting and that's what makes writing interesting. You don't want everyone to agree.

It's very common to think that we're always evolving, that we've changed so much from our younger selves, that within decades we've transformed into these different people. We like to think that. I feel in some ways that I am still so much my younger self. There are ways that I'm different: I feel like I'm wiser and kinder. But I think a lot of the impulses are still the same. I learned that.

I feel like I came in comedy's side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways.

I'm all about being prudent. And I've started to appreciate experiences more than actual objects.

When I'm cynical, I seek out bands that are fully participating and trying to push something forward. Or I can just start playing music again - which is happening with a new project. But I think it's always a challenge to overcome cynicism and not get bogged down by a sense of nostalgia. That can be such a stifling feeling.

I would not call myself an optimist, even though I would aspire to be. I am innately a skeptic. There's kind of an incessant dissatisfaction that I have, that I'm always trying to either expose or fight against or wrestle with.

A lot of music for me was about - I mean aside from the fun and challenge of writing and being really good friends with my bandmates - getting to perform.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

I don't think you need to sound like from where you're from. But I think there is something magical and powerful about encompassing something fully and singularly.

I've mostly been focusing on writing, and I've really enjoyed not playing music. It will always be part of my life, but I don't feel the immediate need to be playing for people.

I think grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it's feeling. You're not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.

Nothing is as nice as plugging in your guitar and turning up the volume really loud, just seeing what kind of beautiful noise you can make with it.

To me, that ugliness, that grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things.

It wasn't just like, "I want to make a record that sounds like classic rock" at all. It was more like, "I want to make a record that is a little more unsettling and maybe isn't as easily understood now." That just seemed more important, like, for me to make as an artist, than it was to make something to make people feel safe right away.

Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I'm not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

I think a lot of the intention of bands, especially in the last year, is to spread themselves out geographically and borrow from different cultures and different sounds, and to be eclectic. And that's great in terms of dynamics, but it also tends to not have that torpedo and fire running through it. If you're spreading yourself out across the globe, you're also not emphasizing a singular point, which I think great rock music has always done.

I need a template of a template

Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock 'n' roll - it's the same steps with different degrees of difficulty.

I'm pretty horrible at relationships and haven't been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on - returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy - is what I know; that feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a different kind of person to stay.

I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.

"We can't name it, but we can sing along." That is my ultimate relationship to any art form, but especially music.

After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.

I've noticed that as someone who has done music and creative things in Washington state and Portland, to kind of toot your own horn, or admit, "I'm going for it. I'm hustling," is not exactly the norm. Which is weird, because you go to New York, or LA, or anywhere else, you've got to be gunning for it - and you should be - you're part of a fast-moving stream of other people who are really ambitious. People move here to work less. So, to say that you're hustling all the time, and going for it, is kind of a little bit against the grain here.

Practice. Learn and then unlearn - that's the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can't merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process.

It's so nice to have a band name you don't have to explain.

We brainstorm an idea and then we do flesh it out a little bit - we come up with a script, mostly to have beats and a sense of a story and a narrative arc. Often when we get into the space and onto the location, that changes and something we discover in the moment becomes the moment, becomes the story, becomes the character.

I've realized that I have a lot of different loves, and I want to pursue writing, but I can never divorce myself from music.

The enemy of any artistic statement is to create something that no one cares about, in the sense they have no opinion either way.

I like to take things incrementally, and strive for something that feels more attainable.

I got kind of tired of playing, I think. But I think it will be part of my life again, maybe.

I always felt that the most common thread in my life from when I was young until now has been a highly observant, very analytical mind.

I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

What I value most in new music today is strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that.

I don't want to mislead people.

I like to connect with people through my work. That's my favorite way - meetings of the minds, fans at a show. Those are nice mediated ways of hanging out.

I love coffee. I love a midday espresso on set, just for the energy.

You do have to live through things, and to live through things is to observe want, and to observe lacking. Even if the hunger is a curiosity.

I think in some ways, whether you've ever actually been to Portland, people definitely understand this highly curated niche lifestyle, because a lot of people are sort of striving for that now. Or they're hating on it.

For film and television, it's interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It's not just about being a fan, it's about how you perform your fandom. That's always been interesting to me.

Even if, personally, I'm in a place of contentment or solidity, I feel like it's hard not to look out into American culture and see vast inequity, widespread institutionalized violence and racism and transphobia and environmental destruction. It's hard to be in this world and feel a sense of innate satisfaction at all. There's plenty of things to feel unsettled about.

I'm kind of a hermit. it's almost easier for me to write about connection than to actually connect.

You can't bury a part of yourself that's so innate to who you've been, even if it's not for the sake of anything other than a pure enjoyment of it.

If you always want to look relevant, just be CGI-prepared.

For me, being in shape means, like, not having cynicism out-weigh optimism on a daily basis.

Wholeness is sort of a dubious concept. Because in terms of the human body and literal wholeness and structures, you think: "here are the structures that help make me whole." Family, or school, or the city I live in. When those structures are dysfunctional or decaying, you end up kind of Frankensteining pieces from everywhere in order to make yourself sated and comfortable and alive.

I'm really drawn to the uncompromising realness of natural process: It's unadorned. It's not very pretty.

There was a clarity to the Nineties. It was pre-9/11, before that anxiety kicked in that exists right now about the financial crisis or terrorism. We were all just going to move forward into the millennium and everything was always going to get better. Then, whoops, that didn't happen.

The hedonistic lifestyle is difficult to achieve when you're still carrying your own gear. Trust me that you don't feel glamorous with a 60-pound amp in your arms; it's a lot less sexy than toting a vodka gimlet and impossible to do in heels.

I have no desire to play music unless I need music.

To really be tortured by a song, it needs to be more than just something you don't like or don't get; it has to make your skin crawl by getting under it. Strangely, that last clause could describe provocative or daring music, as well.

I've honestly always been an overly analytical, highly observant person. I was playing music but thinking about it at same time, which was sort of exhausting. Aside from the pain of writing - you're not really in a gang like you are in band, it's a little bit lonelier - I think it was always something that I'd wanted to do. So the transition wasn't abrupt or painful.

I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.

The idea of self-effacement, the idea that you feel so powerless that the only tiny morsel of power you have is over your own ability to deny yourself food - that to me is a very profound and sad methodology and indicator of how powerless a lot of people feel in this world. That they will turn that onto themselves until they are physically smaller. I think it's affected my worldview a lot - just being sensitive and empathetic towards the ways people want to be small. I don't wish smallness for anyone.

I grew up outside of Seattle, and have lived here my whole life, and I think that there is a culture of questioning, and guilt. Almost an "anti-ambition." Like, an awareness, and then a subsequent guilt. But sometimes that progressive, liberal guilt is really obnoxious, too - in some ways, I think it's better to just own it. It's weird, that actually, the acknowledgement of privilege or the enactment of guilt can be as obnoxious as anything else. It's a never-ending rabbit hole. We're really in a rabbit hole right now, with this conversation. We're just spiraling down into the void.

The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music.

People are wearing fleece, which is a hard fabric to be angry in.

I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.

Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.

Twitter is sort of version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It's the way of calling things out for what they are, wearing badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.

I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself.

Over the years, music put a weapon in my hand and words in my mouth it backed me up and shielded me, it shook me and scared me and showed me the way; music opened me up to living and being and feeling.

I think proteins are really good for your brain. And your brain is where comedy comes from.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

I think you should be prepared for a green-screen CGI at all times.

Music has always been my constant, my salvation. It's cliche to write that, but it's true.

I think one of the reasons that we are able to actually keep making music that we want to make, and that we're inspired by, is because there is a certain amount of instability constantly, and I think that mirrors the instability of any given life.

These new bands sound like Gang of Four — if Gang of Four sucked.

I have no problem spending money on a great meal with friends or a flight to see somebody that I love, versus something like a fancy car. I don't need a fancy car. I don't need a giant TV.

With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.

Florida is such an unlikely place for a band, unless you're an emo or hardcore band. In terms of the touring route, or even the way the geography works in terms of bands and communities, Florida's always been this appendage that you either cut it off and dismiss it, or you somehow include it in your scope.

I like how blogging emulates fandom because it's so completist and spontaneous. It really mirrors the way people listen to music, and I like that fluidity with online content.

I am a horrible visual artist. I can't fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don't do than do.

To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness... Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degrees of experience - to immerse without judgment. It's like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.

I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic.

For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.

The fact that people go to Portland to visit a tiny feminist bookstore-no matter what the impetus is for them getting there-the fact that they go in there and look around and shop for books or stationery or whatever, is a major source of pride for me.

There was this kind of wackiness that was really embraced and put on a pedestal. It was before the millennium. We were envisioning a future that was mostly idealistic. I think that came crashing down a little bit in 9/11, or a lot. There is something about Portland that does seem to still exist in this total idealistic world and total idealistic mind frame, and I think that's what Dream of the '90s is talking about.

As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world.

I think short-term goals are important. Trying to set a missive for yourself for the entire year can be daunting, and it can feel too easy to fail or fall short of that.

I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres.

I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now.

It's hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.

People give the words life through their own adoration or relationship to the work, and that's true of everything. You can't divorce critical or fan reaction. Once it exists, you forget that the words are arbitrary, or you start to remove value.

The natural world operates by its own set of rules. The animal world, all the places that are feral and ungovernable, that's where I find a lot of inspiration. There is just as much beauty there, but there is also decay and violence.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

[I hate] the ways that people want their special needs to be met, whether it's their food allergies or their special lotions or shoes. Or the ways that people want their neighborhoods and restaurants curated in a way that's really tailored to them. Growing up with someone who was living by these very strict, repressive rules for themselves - it made me very allergic to the idea of denial.

I would love to do a reunion tour if it only involved basements across the U.S.

I've always been a fan first and foremost - obsessing over bands and seeking out bands, and spending hours and hours listening. When I played music, the scope of my fandom became more myopic; I was focusing on the bands we were touring with, or the bands on the label. And you're always positing yourself in relation to other bands. Since I haven't been playing, I feel a little less cynical. I'm able to seek out music and approach it strictly as a fan.

I think hypochondria always plays a part in the healthcare landscape.

To me, curiosity is married to optimism. And that's where a lot of my motivation comes from. A lot of my way out of depression and anxiety is that intersection between optimism and curiosity. Because it means taking a step forward with the hope that there will be discovery.

I think that the intentions are genuine in the search for authenticity, but it can tip over into absurdity so quickly. I just start to wonder, like, what authenticity even is, and whether we can even start to define it in such a globalized world.

Once you're away from music, I realize that's as intrinsic to who I am as anything else. That's the part that takes me out of my brain.

I think one of the reasons I haven't been doing music is because I think that some of my performance, like, needs are being taken care of in other mediums.

I've always loved writing. Doing that at the same time as playing music can be tiring.

I think that there's always an assumption, when a band goes on hiatus or stops playing, that there's some acrimony brewing under the surface.

I've always been interested in queerness and underground and fringe and periphery, and who and what flourishes in those spaces. Those spaces that are darker and dingier and more dangerous, more lonely. What comes out of there, to me, is the life force. I'm excited when the center reaches over to those places and pulls inspiration from them, and translates it for a lot of people.