eMusic’s Tobi Vail caught up with Maricich over the phone to discuss the New York City art mafia, hugging the audience and squeezing her heart into a meat grinder.

What has changed for The Blow since you put out Paper Television in 2006?

[In 2006] I lived in Portland and worked with Jona Bechtolt [of Yacht] and then I moved [to NYC] with Melissa Dyne. Working with Melissa is super different because we’re girlfriends — also because we’re girls, and girls communicate differently on creative projects. We talk about everything. My experience with boys is like, “I’m just gonna do it and it’ll be cool.” At least with us, we like exploring, philosophically and theoretically, all the options of how things could be —we’re as interested in the process as we are in the outcome. [Melissa] hasn’t done albums before. She’s a sound artist and works with physics and sound waves in her installation work, and she used to play cello. We treat it as a total experiment, and sometimes we make one version of a song and go, “Huh, what if we try it completely New Wave this time?” and redo it. So it’s a process of building models. Sometimes we build one model and then we look at it and say, “Let’s completely renovate it and try it in a different way,” as opposed to being like, “OK, we’re gonna make an album and we’re gonna go about it the most direct and businesslike manner.” Our endurance for working with the process and playing around with it is vast.

Can you talk about the technical process of arranging the songs electronically?

We didn’t feel committed to a particular identity as music makers. IYou’re starting with the void. We both really tripped out on that, the fact that you can put any sound from any source anywhere. We knew we didn’t want to take the sounds out of a computer program, so we sampled different live instruments and perfected the samples so they sounded really clean. We would use generic computer sounds to make a beat and then find sounds to replace so that it [sounded] three-dimensional and rich. We inherited a couple of really weird synthesizers and Melissa just played around with them and tried to find the weirdest things she could.

How has your approach to performance changed over the years?

Music audiences can be so unruly, like a mob. We are learning how to sculpt the mob — make connections and take [the audience] to interesting places. During the live show, [Melissa] performs on a riser that’s at the back of the room in front of the sound engineer and I perform on the main stage and we have the crowd in between us. On my stage, there’s generally nothing besides myself and maybe some lights. The live show is us just hugging the audience in between us. We use that as a platform to see what cool stuff we can make happen. Melissa has a really strong role, but doesn’t want to be the one everyone is looking at all the time. We’re both working the room. She is making the room super high-fidelity intimate; she sets it up so it sounds really good. Little modules of sound are penetrating as deep into people’s ears as they can and opening people up a lot — and then she’s playing the electronic instruments — like manipulating samples and fucking with delays.

How would you describe your music to your cool aunt?

I come from a history of being super influenced by Kimya Dawson, but over the years, and in the process of making this record, we’ve both leaned more toward the experimentation of the ’70s — Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and Brian Eno are big influences on this album. Also Bjork — she kind of led the way for talking about emotions in abstract and really intimate ways in her lyrics, not even rhyming sometimes, just straight-up describing. But the impetus from where I started from was definitely Kimya Dawson — the idea that you just pick up your guitar and you don’t have any resources and you don’t need any because your emotional honesty is enough to form a bond with the listener. She’s a really awesome songwriter, she can play guitar and she’s really perceptive.

But the swashbuckling adventure story of what it was like for us to make this record is that we basically just decided to squeeze our hearts into a meat grinder and see what came out. It’s still hard for us to describe the music. We didn’t think of about a genre or a style until after we were done. We were [essentially] jumping out of a plane or, like, taking pictures of ourselves falling and then seeing what they looked like. Style-wise we have no idea what this is, but it is emotionally resonant and honest so we feel like we are on track.

Are you still involved in a DIY or any kind of community in New York?

Community is hard to come by in New York. Everybody doesn’t live in the same neighborhood, so you have to unite along events, and the events we found ourselves uniting around are mostly within the queer art scene — what I call the “lesbian mafia of New York,” or I guess the “lesbian-trans-queer art mafia.” They don’t call themselves that, but that’s how I’ve thought about them. It’s a scene where they were like, “We need to make space for ourselves,” and really went about doing it and were successful and smart. To me, that is DIY: They didn’t see themselves represented in the world they were a part of — the art world — and were like, “OK, we’re gonna make ourselves be the people you wanna know.” That is super inspiring.

So what’s next?

The process of how we’ve been able to make sounds has arched through the sky and we’re watching it morph and change and grow. It’s like we wanted to create a planet but then it took massive time and energy and force just to get the materials and raw elements. And then they develop to a certain point and then you stop it and box it up and send it out to people. But that planet is still developing and growing and new things are evolving, because as we play the samples, looping and combining them with sounds from other songs and putting them all together — it’s all still changing. It’s super fertile. After the album was done, we got way better at it. It’s a growing living thing, it’s not a product. Now that things are all greased up and moving, we’re just gonna keep recording and capture more of it.

File under: No-wave hardcore; harmony meets disharmony in an unpadded cell; the sound a Kathy Acker novel would make if it was a band instead of a book

For fans of: Free Kitten, Arab On Radar, Destroy All Monsters, Scissor Girls, Magik Markers

From: Oakland, California

Personae: Marissa Magic (guitar, vocals), Jaime Clark (drums), Vanessa Harris (guitar, vocals)

Oakland’s Stillsuit mix experimental noise rock with punk politics, creating a feminist soundtrack to the confusion of sex and violence in a gendered world. Loud treble guitars in weird tunings duel while drums pound away in another time signature. Their live show lays waste to squares who cover their ears, clear the room and even pull the plug.

Stillsuit is the best band in America, and their legitimacy is not predicated on outside approval. Like all great underground groups, they make up their own rules. Listen and learn.

On noise vs. punk:

Marissa Magic: Sometimes I describe us as noise-rock, but I also kind of hate that [term].

Vanessa Harris: [Noise] is where a lot of my personal history lies, but it can be limiting. My conception of a punk band means that you care about things. I want to be explicitly feminist and care about the ways in which we do things. We are a punk band in that sense, but maybe we don’t totally sound like one.

On moving beyond the “man/woman” show and intersectional feminism in 2013:

Jaime Clark: The feminist scene in the Bay Area isn’t just about women or cisgendered women, it’s about gender-non-conforming people and people of color. It also considers class dynamics and so many aspects of people’s backgrounds that are not necessarily directly related to gender.

Harris: There’s also a lot of non-feminist punk stuff that’s going on too and that can be a bummer — some of those “man/woman” shows that happen —

Clark: — as in, “men” and “women” are at the show, and that’s it —

Harris: And they are very much acting out roles that are traditional. Being in consideration of all those things is what good feminism is. What inspires me about feminism is that it can encompass anything. It should be asking questions about race, class, gender, queer — I don’t know, everything.

Magic: Sometimes we get asked to play bigger noise shows and we are the only women on the bill — or it will be, like, very man/woman situations — I think it’s important to play those shows but it can be challenging.

On what they dislike most in popular music:

Magic: I don’t like music that sounds like it’s made by hippies on cocaine. Like ELO, Steely Dan — I just hate groovy-talented-guys doing groovy-talented-things in really expensive studios and everything sounds slick. Also a thing that bums me out is that a lot of the music I really like sonically is either lyrically or aesthetically really fucked up.

Clark: Generally I dislike Bruce Springsteen and I dislike “Don’t Stop Believing” — things that are sort of like “songs for every guy out there.” Also, drums or percussion really make or break a band for me. I don’t like music where it feels like whatever percussion has no life. I like a lot of music that has drum machines or pre-recorded beats, as long as it seems like life got put into creating it.

Harris: I hate ’80s synths. I hate the new ’80s noise dudes doing ’80s synth-music thing. It’s so unappealing to me. I love Steely Dan. I don’t like Journey, but I like Boston. But I would pay money if I never had to hear that song “You Spin Me Right Round” again.

Magic: The other day she said “I would pay $5 to never hear that song again.”

Harris: Yeah, I don’t care that much. But I could do without it.

File under: Ethereal and understated punk shoegaze; transformative, cathartic feminist art rock; a hallucinogenic soundtrack to radical punk adulthood

For fans of: Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Unwound, Ride, Helium, Kristin Hersh, Thalia Zedek

From: Olympia, Washington

Personae: Kanako Pooknyw (drums, vocals), Jon Hanna (guitar, vocals), Abigail Ingram (bass, vocals)

A few years ago, Olympia had a vibrant punk scene full of talented young bands and, while I was excited by the energy of a new era (Gun Outfit, Milk Music, HPP) and liked some of the music quite a bit (White Boss, Sex Vid, Son Skull), I wasn’t into how male-dominated and retro it all felt. Not only did it evoke the sound of ’80s hardcore and art-rock it also brought back the trend of guys-in-bands taking up too much space at shows. Suddenly, being a woman in a band started to feel tokenistic again. Jon Hanna and Kanako Pooknyw formed Broken Water with their friend Abigail Ingram and things changed. Pretty soon feminist punk bands (Hell Woman, Weird TV, Hysterics) took over Olympia and obliterated the dude-centric vibe.

I didn’t consider Broken Water a punk group until I saw them at a local hardcore festival. Before playing their set in a room of clean-cut kids dressed in identical skinny black jeans and brand-new ’80s-hardcore-band T-shirts, Pooknyw took off her clothes, protesting the idea that punk is a uniform that can be bought and sold. This performance was probably pretty freaky for the crowd of mostly teenage boys to witness — who had likely never had sex or even seen an adult woman with body hair naked before — and established Broken Water as a radical feminist punk band with a political agenda. Listening to their noisy, experimental take on guitar-driven shoegaze in this context, the music itself further interrogated the idea of punk as style. The music is loud, but it’s often slow, with pounding bass and drums that build and crash like cresting waves. The vocal melodies are pretty and memorable, but are almost subdued next to the roar of electric guitar. It’s hard to decipher lyrics, an aesthetic choice that emphasizes sound over meaning and creates an atmosphere where pure emotional chemistry is laid bare.

It was fun to sit down and talk with Pooknyw and Hanna about the ideas behind political strategy and reflect on what it means to be a feminist DIY band in 2013.

On DIY ethics and sustainability:

Pooknyw: We’ve self-released our records or collaborated with other independent labels so that we get half of our records. We’ve negotiated alternative terms with smaller labels where we pay for half of production and get half of the record — so if there is a pressing of 1000 records, we get 500 and when that’s done we get the plates and can press the next 4000. That is what has made us sustainable.

Hanna: We book all our tours. We try to make an effort to play all-ages shows in towns that can actually support that. A lot of cities don’t seem to have a DIY all-ages scene.

Pooknyw: We prefer to connect with people who put on shows that have similar politics to us but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes we just play with bands we are into and realize we have a different ideology and I’m actually open to that.

Hanna: There is a line we’d draw about commercialization and what kind of shows we play — I don’t think we would play a festival sponsored by Scion.

Pooknyw: No.

On their favorite places to play on tour:

Pooknyw: I wanna talk about playing in Minot, North Dakota. They had all these really political books and punk-rock posters and it was just like, you walk into a space and you could tell it was a punk space and you could tell it was a feminist space and you just were safe — and they lived in a working-class neighborhood in a town that has been completely overrun by the fracking industry. That show reminded me of what it was like to live in El Paso and live in a scene where there weren’t that many punks and you stuck together and there was a reason you were on the outside and didn’t fit in because you had criticism of the status quo.

These kids really have each other’s backs. The girls we played with had never played music a year prior, they really wanted to play with other women. They all had kids and were really young and all worked really shitty jobs but they lived to be in their scene and bring bands in from out of town and host — in a really supportive way — and were totally political and totally against fracking and all this fucked-up shit that is going on in their town.

Hanna: I’m gonna talk about the show in New Orleans that Osa set up for us. It was a really good show and we were really stressed out at first because we got a call as we were driving into town that the show had been moved from where it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be in an abandoned strip mall, a generator show — but because someone announced it on the radio there were already like five cop cars when someone went there to start setting stuff up. But it got moved to a punk warehouse and it was great. It was a huge show: There were at least 100 or 200 kids that showed up and the power kept going out during everyone’s set but it felt like a real scene.

Pooknyw: There was a pony in the yard! It was bonkers!

Hanna: There was a pony in the yard. I was pretty blown away by how a show could get so fucked up and then come together as one of the best shows on tour.

On feminist performative strategies for subverting “male freedom”:

Pooknyw: You already have a target on your head, if you are female-bodied in certain audiences. My response to any kind of fucked-up behavior from male audience members — it was always male — was just to yell “male freedom” really loudly at the top of my lungs until they stopped.

Hanna: It happened a lot.

Pooknyw: It would happen a lot. I would yell it in this like kind of monster-truck-rally monster way where you couldn’t talk over my voice because it was just so loud and I would just repeat “male freedom” over and over and over again and there would be giggles from the girls in the front and you know, total embarrassment on so many men’s faces — embarrassed because they know what I’m talking about — and embarrassed that the sound person who is telling me to get naked or something is completely oblivious to the fact that I’m calling him out and making fun of him. I’m just stating, frankly, what I’m experiencing — his ability to not care about anyone else. When I see people laughing I know they are laughing at him they are not laughing at me. A few people were completely stunned. I wasn’t calling them out in a way where they could shut it down or deflect it. It was in a more manipulative or subversive way where they are gonna question what “male freedom” means — that is my hope. There was one drunk dude that just looked so dumbfounded and I was like, I think made a little fissure in the way he’s behaving. I don’t know, am I being too hopeful?

Hanna: No, but it is really frustrating to try to communicate with drunk people, it doesn’t really come across, you can’t really get through.

Pooknyw: Maybe I was just being more obnoxious than them!

File under: Dreamy and infectious, fiercely independent angry femme-core; experimental art-pop that's anxious and danceable

For fans of: Wire, The Raincoats, The Clean, The Plastic Ono Band, Mary Timony, U.S. Girls, Grass Widow

From: Oakland, California

Personae: Lillian Maring

Ruby Pins is the recording alias of Lillian Maring, best known as the drummer from Grass Widow. On her debut for Portland label M’lady’s Records, she layers her voice and instruments with effects, creating a magical, psychedelic backdrop over which she unleashes personal angst and articulates her politics using humor and vivid, nuanced storytelling. The record is an introspective masterpiece that also manages to feel whimsical and free. Maring’s lyrics capture the chaos, absurdity and pain of life as a woman under patriarchy. But instead of feeling depressed and constrained, Maring offers hope and optimism.

Tobi Vail spoke with Maring via phone and email on the eve of the Rub Pins’ first West Coast tour.

On the difference between Grass Widow and Ruby Pins:

I’ve been writing songs since I was a teenager. It’s like meditation or anything a person does alone to get their head straight. Grass Widow’s collaborative process teaches me to get outside of that realm and use a different part of my brain. [bassist/vocalist] Hannah [Lew] and [guitarist/vocalist] Raven [Mahon] and I have this method of making decisions based on what a song needs, not feeling attached to our own ideas. We’ve been writing this way for five years now. Last summer, I spent a month in Port Townsend, Washington, at my friend’s house just being alone and writing songs. Hannah makes music videos and Raven is a fine woodworker, and I was sitting on my desires to play more music.

On anxiety-as-parody & Ruby Pins’ sonic impulse:

Sonically, I was aiming for those moments in a song where it starts to feel out of control, like a guitar solo that doesn’t seem to know where it’s going, or the build-up in “A Day in the Life.” Those moments best represent my anxiety. When I translate those feelings into music I’m creating an enjoyable experience for myself, which is a way to acknowledge my feelings, process them, expel them and not let them rule me. It’s like I’m parodying my anxiety in order to live with it. Sometimes I feel like a stand-up comedian hiding behind a guitar. Like, “Hey everybody, doesn’t the world suck? Haha! Let’s rock.” I was thinking about Syd Barrett, Brian Eno, John Frusciante, Catherine Ribeiro, Jacque Dutronc, Wire and Yoko Ono a lot while writing and recording these songs.

On finding a voice as a feminist artist through pop music:

Art is exciting when it is political. I don’t have to scream from a soapbox to express my discontent. It’s a very angry album with a sense of humor to make it palatable. I like to think the songs stand on their own from an aesthetic standpoint, but they are all the more satisfying to me for the lyrical and conceptual content. I’m expressing a lot of anger and criticism, I hope that can be unifying for me and the audience. That’s what I love about pop music: It creates a space to introduce new topics of conversation by abstracting personal experiences. So much of this album is about me finding my voice as a feminist artist and being really overt with it because that’s what I feel inspired by. I wanted to represent some kind of supreme feminine idea that even draws on negative aspects — ways that women have been represented negatively.

On the name “Ruby Pins”:

“Ruby” represents red, like blood — and ruby is also my birthstone and I just feel special about it. And then “Pins” — I was looking through this book about witches and witchcraft, The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft by Rosemary Ellen Guiley. It’s about both current practicing witches and also about the history, and it includes a lot of weird, supposed [facts], because everything was destroyed. There were a lot of stories people would make up about women they wanted to burn, and the kind of shit they would say — the weird side effects that people had as a result of witchcraft. One of them said was that they’d puke pins. It just sounds so terrible, and I wonder what actually happened, or if that was just a descriptive way of explaining what it felt like? Puking pins is just such a jarring image. Ruby Pins kind of fell together.

On being femme and the song “Gagging on the Obvious”:

“Gagging on the Obvious” is about walking around in public as a woman and seeing other women and knowing the danger of being who you are and still going about our day as if there weren’t terrible imbalances at play. In the last couple years I’ve been sinking into being really femme, accepting that is how I want to dress and that it has not much to do with what other people think. It was a conscious decision, and I took into account the fact that I would be treated differently. On any given day as I walk to the post office or the train station, men are yelling “compliments” at me. If I dye my hair blonde there is a 40 percent increase in street attention. Literally. So I mentally prepare myself for that. I figure it’s everyone else’s responsibility to treat me with respect no matter how I look or what I’m doing, ideally. But the reality is far from that, because it is still generally assumed that women do everything for the attention of men. You have to embrace a subtle denial in order to get anything done, because when you start to consider how fucked everything is it colors your world and suddenly you’re embittered. I feel very fortunate to have a community of so many strong-willed, radical people.

On the state of underground punk culture and gentrification in the Bay Area:

There’s a lot more underground punk culture in Oakland than in San Francisco. Bands I really enjoy in Oakland include Daisy World, Stillsuit, PRCSRS, BAUS, and Pang! There’s Thrillhouse Records, there are all ages shows at 1-2-3-4 Go! Records. If you wanna play an all-ages show at a bar, tickets have to be more expensive, so it kind of creates a divide. I wish bands could easily play lots of all-ages punk shows that were accessible and that would be enough to support them. But the economy doesn’t allow for that, the cost of living in the Bay Area certainly doesn’t allow for that, and it seems that the communities that spring up around those ideals remain very insular. It creates an exclusive atmosphere and the aspect that is exciting to me about playing music, disseminating ideas, is kind of lost. Although the industry is fucked it’s worth it to challenge yourself in order to reach a wider audience. It’s fun to play shows for your friends and know that everyone is going to “get” what you’re doing, but it’s also kind of boring and not really instigating change. It’s an interesting challenge to play for people who don’t get what you’re doing.

Their successful blend of experimental guitar noise, aggressive melodic bass and dubbed-out drumming created a distinct sound that both sublimated and celebrated each individual member’s contribution to the group. Justin Trosper’s searching vocal lines and existential lyrical riddles landed them squarely in the long tradition of transcendent northwest trios — among them, Nirvana, the Melvins and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

It was my pleasure to sit down with Trosper, one of my most treasured friends, to discuss the history of Unwound, starting with their high school genesis, Giant Henry. We talked for hours, trying not only to get the cultural context down, but this to hammer out a kind of introduction to a story that spanned over a decade and has a seemingly infinite number of chapters.

[Those looking for a more complete history of the group would do well to investigate The Unwound Archive. — Ed.]

Let’s talk about when Giant Henry started. The ’80s were over and the ’90s were just beginning.

1990-91 is the time of big changes here. The whole evolution of computers and the software industry…

Also, Desert Storm happened — which foreshadowed all the changes that were to come politically.

Yes, and Fort Lewis and Mcchord Air force base (now Joint Base Lewis-Mcchord) that growth is a big change — the influence of the military-industrial complex.

You grew up in Tumwater, one town over from Olympia, where this underground music scene was happening that you were aware of from listening to the radio and skateboarding.

Instead of being involved in the real music scene in Olympia we created our own scene in Tumwater where we would record every weekend. We didn’t really go to parties and probably didn’t really know about shows that were happening, but every weekend we recorded on the four-track or watched movies. We started making fanzines as we started going to more shows and meeting people in Olympia. But in the very early days before we were able to drive, we were really involved in music. But it was very insular. It was more of a high school clique than anything. Giant Henry was me, Brandt [Sandeno] and Vern [Rumsey]. We started when we were sophomores in high school, like 1988-89, and then it kind of fizzled away.

You were going to Tumwater High School with Vern and Brandt.

We went through the cycle of doing all these project bands and then we started actually learning how to play our instruments. Brandt was already a good guitar player. He became the drummer by default. None of the drummers we were playing with worked out and he had a drum set. Brandt had all the equipment at first. We eventually got our own stuff. He also had the practice space. It started in 1988 but we didn’t really play shows. I’m still trying to figure out the first Giant Henry show. We played with L-7. Bikini Kill played too, right?

We only played one song. We asked to borrow your instruments because we wanted to play with L-7 but we weren’t actually on the bill. That’s when we were a three piece. Can you describe what was going on in Olympia?

Bikini Kill had just started. Nirvana was playing a lot and there was a lot of excitement about them happening.

Right. Dave Grohl moved to Olympia (from D.C.) and was living with Kurt. He joined the band that September and moved here right away.

They hadn’t signed to a major label yet. There was a lot of Sub Pop hype. The Nirvana demos were circulating so we were all listening to that stuff before they recorded [Nevermind] and we knew they were going to be huge. Not as huge as they actually got, but huge like, “Wow they are gonna be bigger than Mudhoney, they are gonna be bigger than The Melvins!”

Yeah. Because it was good.

It was really good. And bands were touring a lot and playing in Olympia. There were shows every week. It seemed like more people were starting bands than ever before.

Giant Henry had the exact same members playing the exact same instruments as the early Unwound stuff, right? Is it the same band as Unwound?

No…it’s the same members but it’s different musically. The first era of Giant Henry was sillier — making fun of grunge music, but we actually sounded grungy. The second era is a little more influenced by like Black Flag and stuff. We were just getting better at our instruments — like, “This sounds kinda good,” but, yeah, just being able to take some of the bands we liked and emulate them.

Which bands?

Melvins, Nirvana, Black Flag, Flipper — stuff like that.

How did you feel about K Records?

When we were younger, we thought K was lame. And then I realized, once I got to know Calvin [Johnson], that he knew more about hardcore than anyone I’d ever met.

He can quote The Germs’ live album crowd banter word-for-word.

Yeah. If you look through his 45 collection, it’s all there.

He’s from that generation.

Yeah. But that’s just one aspect of music that he knows about that impressed us. It turned out he was not the guy we thought he was. Same with the other people (pointing at me) like, “Oh people have nerdy glasses and yo-yo’s” and shit. And then we realized it’s not what we think, it actually is cool.

So it was your senior year of high school and all of a sudden we had this amazing scene. Riot Grrrl started that summer and then in August The IPU (International Pop Underground) festival happened in and the first Kill Rock Stars compilation came out. A month later, Nirvana’s Nevermind was huge and everything changed really fast, right?

Yeah, it was crazy.

Isn’t this right when Giant Henry broke up and Unwound started?

Unwound started that summer. We played IPU.

Was that one of your first shows?

I think it was our third show. Giant Henry developed a set of songs. Then we decided to scrap the songs, thinking that no one would take us seriously if we were called Giant Henry.

Why not?

It was a just such a dumb name.

How is Giant Henry different from Unwound?

Giant Henry was our band in high school, so it reflects what we were then. Unwound was a step towards universal ideas, exploring the world outside of our little bubble. Musically speaking, Unwound was clearly inclusive of more influences, which you can hear in our first demo tape. DC bands and more melodic stuff like Husker Du and the Wipers — more ability/techniques to perform what we wanted.

How long until you were asked to do a 7-inch on Kill Rock Stars?

Slim [Moon, founder of Kill Rock Stars] asked us in December ’91. It was after we recorded [our eight-song demo] with Pat Maley in October. IPU was in August — that was our third show. We were on the [International Pop Underground] comp, then we recorded with Pat and left on tour — our ridiculous first tour. We played like two weeks worth of shows in a month. We had too many days off and a lot of times we were like, “What the hell are we doing this for?” Then we came home and recorded the single and booked another tour to California that spring. When we got back from that next tour we recorded our first record.

Right, the first album you recorded (Unwound) didn’t come out first. (It came out later on Honey Bear.)

Brandt quit after we recorded the first album. Before we finished it, actually. He had pressure from his family to do something besides play in a band, like to go to college and get a job. He ended up going to school the following year.

And then Sara [Lund] joined. Would you say she was a riot grrrl?

No. I would not say that. [Laughs.]

She’s in The Corin Tucker Band now.

She’s a really strong individual. A lot of women I know that were around then — that maybe were resistant to that wave of feminism at first — are way more accepting now of that time and that scene.

Well, riot grrrl also got turned into a cartoon by the media.

Yeah. And Sara is a really individualistic person too. She was an outsider from the Midwest even though her dad lived here.

She went to my high school. She played in the school band.

For a little while. But she had an outsider identity and was a bit reactionary to the music scene here.

That’s ironic. She’s easily one of the best musicians from that time period. What happened when she joined Unwound?

She was given carte blanche. We said, “Do what you want?” We came up with song ideas but we never told her what to play or how to play. We just let her play in that weird way that she plays.

How did the lineup change of Unwound affect your sound?

We became less derivative. Sara had a really distinct style. She has a way of playing the kick drum that is pretty unique. It’s funny: The Giant Henry stuff eventually got pretty tight, and then when Unwound started, it was kind of crappy. Then Unwound got really good, and then Brandt quit and it got really crappy again.

It wasn’t crappy at all.

Tightness-wise. I completely changed my guitar playing style, too. Sara had a totally different approach to drumming.

Were Giant Henry and Unwound doing something political, or do you think of it as a purely musical endeavor? Personally, I put Unwound in the same category as the Minutemen.

Less overtly political, but yeah. Maybe it’s not really obvious to the rest of the world — but we took that whole Fugazi thing seriously.

What do you mean? Not being overly commercial? You guys didn’t even sell T-shirts in mail order until you broke up.

We sold them at shows. But yeah, being aware of commercialism and mass marketing. We were a part of DIY culture. What I learned from other people — like you or Calvin or Fugazi or other intelligent, knowledgeable people in bands — is that while you may not have an overtly political message, the personal is political; you conduct your personal life, your band life, in a way that reflects your politics. So you try to play all ages shows and make an effort to be cool and fair. Like if there’s a choice between bands to put on the bill and there’s a choice between an all-male band and an all-female band, we’d choose to play with the all-female band because we were trying to support feminism.

Gender parity?

Yeah. Business practices. We were influenced by the culture here — DIY, co-ops, elements of radical or liberal politics.

We’ve talked about this before but I think DIY comes naturally to people with a similar background as us — our families are both from Kansas, right? When you live on a farm, you make your own entertainment, just like you grow your own food. I see that continuum happening from folk and country western music, to ’60s garage to punk/ independent/ underground music. For me that is where the DIY ethic comes from.

It is. That’s DIY before it was self-consciously called “DIY.” It makes me laugh when I go into a restaurant and there’s “artisan” or “handcrafted” food, because that’s what my grandma did. That’s not fancy, it’s just normal! People are like, “This is from the farm” or “I canned something!” My grandma had a whole pantry full of food she canned. All this “artisan” stuff — that’s just farm food to me. It’s cool, but it’s no big deal.

Before we discuss the dissolution of the group, will you talk a bit about Leaves Turn Inside You?

We did a lot of touring on Challenge [for a Civilized Society] and we hit a burnout. Every record, we tried to raise the bar to some degree by asking, “What can we do to make this better?” Usually that was just increasing the amount of time we spent in the studio. So the idea with the last record is that we would build a studio to record ourselves and break out of the pattern we’d established with [longtime producer] Steve Fisk and we’d have as much time to do it as we wanted — for better or worse. And there were life changes going on with the band members too. It became a long project. It’s totally different than all our other records. It’s way more “inner.”

But it also seems like a pop album in some ways. If I had to choose any of the records as my favorite I would pick that one. I can’t think of another band where I like their last album best. But the songs are so economical and you are working with themes.

There’s a lot of depth to it. We layered the tracking. It’s sort of a weird mix of lo-fi and, well, not hi-fi — but there’s a lot going on — and a lot of that stuff I worked out on my own because we weren’t really practicing as a band.

Why did Unwound break up?

Unwound was evolving toward something new and different in its last couple of years, but our sense of purpose was weakening. It crashed really hard for me when that band broke up. I was like “Fuck, what am I gonna do now?” Unwound was my whole thing. It was my identity. That’s who I was.

Do you think you had to be that way in order to make it work?

I think somebody did. Sara was in school. Vern had his family responsibilities. On the surface, it was like, “Oh they’re a band, they write songs together,” but the reality is that that was my whole life.

I read the interview where you talked about Vern’s substance abuse, which was pretty harsh, and why the band came to a stop when it did, as I understand it.

It is. But you know, thinking deeper about that, where I could stand back and blame Vern for things like that — while, yes, that’s the problem — we could have gone like, “Hey look, we’re gonna send you to rehab, we’re gonna keep the band going and you’re gonna get cleaned up and we’ll keep the band together. Let’s deal with this directly.” Instead, I saw it all happening a couple years before that and I was like, “Maybe I don’t actually wanna be in this band anymore…”

So you don’t think the band broke up because of Vern’s substance abuse?

That was the conflict. But the conflict could have been resolved. We could have been more direct. But we could also just have tried harder. But in the face of the shit that went down, we actually bowed out pretty nicely. So many details that I don’t wanna get into — but these are the kind of things you hear about where bands get into fistfights with each other and somehow we managed to avoid that. It could have ended worse.

What did you do next?

I didn’t wanna be in a band. So I decided to move to Los Angeles. If you really want to disappear, that is the place to go. You can go there and never be heard from again. It’s so vast. Unless you go to a show, you don’t ever run into people. So we moved down there in 2004 and I decided to go back to school. I was also beginning a long-term relationship. That was part of it. And I gave up on playing music. I did a couple recording projects, collaborating with an artist friend, Slater Bradley, and that was it. I didn’t play in a band until 2011.

Then when I was living there I got sick. I ended up in the hospital. I had a mystery disease. That prompted me to get out of L.A. I was living in a really polluted place. Sarcoidosis is an autoimmune disease but it usually affects the lungs. We ended up coming back and I finished school in Olympia. Now I’m in a band with people who are all 40.

What inspired you to start playing music again? I remember seeing you after the Wild Flag show in Olympia and you were like, “Fuck it, I can do this. Why aren’t I in a band?”

Yeah! I was like “Why am I not playing shows!?” They were so good, they sounded great; Mary Timony was great. But I think I was still in school then so I didn’t have time. After that, Brandt and I started playing again.

Who is Survival Knife? What are you trying to accomplish?

Survival Knife is myself and Brandt Sandeno on guitar, Kris Cunningham on drums, Meg Cunningham on bass. I do most of the vocal duties. Musically, people that have followed Unwound closely will probably notice that it has similarities to Worst Case Scenario and Young Ginns. I sing, so it sounds like Unwound. With two guitars the songwriting is a little different — complex harmonies and that sort of thing — whereas with Unwound, the melodic interplay was mostly guitar and bass. Kris is a way different drummer than Sara Lund, so that has a big effect on how songs end up being arranged. Personally, I’m trying to refine my songwriting craft and raise the bar on guitar playing.

What is happening with the Unwound back catalog and reissues on Numero Group?

Ken Shipley from Numero Group approached us with the offer to do a career-spanning series of reissues. I think he kind of saw that our catalog was stagnating or disappearing, which it is. So we are basically putting out everything worth putting out in a series of reissues, which will culminate in a box set. There is a complete band history being written. Everything is being re-mastered and packaged. It’s pretty epic. If you have seen the Codeine box set you will get an idea of what it will be like.

File under: Classic guitar pop. Glitter girls who like to skateboard and make art. Stylish and sharp. Bubblegum punk. Love rock for heartbreakers who don't mess around.

For fans of: The Buzzcocks, The Breeders, Blondie, Best Coast, B Girls, Beach Boys

From: Los Angeles

Personae: Jennifer and Jessie Clavin

When women and girls listen to love songs written by and/or performed by men, we have to filter stuff out, switch pronouns and, often, navigate a sexist point of view. After a lifetime of listening to male-dominated pop music I’m used to making these kinds of adjustments in my head, but I still feel starved for love songs that I can actually identify with and dance to without a power struggle. This drives me to write my own songs and actively seek out pop groups that give voice to a female perspective on desire. I want to know what girls want, not just what guys tell us we want.

Bleached’s Ride Your Heart is quickly becoming my favorite American guitar-pop album since The Breeders’ Last Splash. Upbeat, infectious melodies are enhanced by minimalist arrangements reminiscent of power pop by Nick Lowe or mid-period Ramones. The songs explore the tension between narcissism and objectification, desire and attraction, longing and sweet sadness, real feelings and true crushes. It’s the sound of a girl’s fast-beating heart. You don’t have to be a teenager to feel like one; just put this album on repeat.

It was my pleasure to chat on the phone with Jennifer and Jessie Clavin about their evolution from Mika Miko, their visual aesthetic, and the L.A. music scene.

On playing in the all-teenage-girl punk band Mika Miko:

Jennifer: We would tour so much, but we were all like best friends. We learned how to play our instruments playing in that band; I learned how to book our tours. Also the hard parts of touring: how to deal with being so close to people all the time and work through situations. Just a lot of crazy things would happen, and we’d have to deal with it on tour and being really young. One night in Texas — it was our first tour around the U.S., and we stopped at SXSW and met this guy who invited us back to his house to party. So we went, and like — we know, you know, “don’t eat like shit, drink water” — but we were smoking weed from this huge bong and all of a sudden the cat started throwing up all over the house and the guy who lived there came out of this dark hallway and he was totally green and someone in Mika Miko started freaking out. I think there was something else in the weed, and we had to take her to the emergency room.

Another time this guy was like, “Oh come play our festival” and we had a day off so we were like, “Why not, we’ll just go play our set.” So we finally get there — and it was so out of the way — and he’s like, “You’re playing in the living room.” So we play in the living room and he was literally the only person in the living room watching us, the only other people in there were just walking by to go to the bathroom. Finally, he was like, “Sorry I can’t pay you guys any money because I had to buy the keg just to get people to come here.” We were like “whatever” and ended up stealing one of his pedals.

That made me realize that maybe doing everything yourself doesn’t always work out. At that point I was still booking the tours myself. I realized that if we wanna keep doing this, we have to get a booker.

On the musical aesthetic of Bleached:

Jennifer: In Mika Miko we were just playing straight punk. My favorite bands were Black Flag, Redd Kross, Circle Jerks, TSOL, and that’s what Mika Miko was trying to do. Jesse and I started getting into different kinds of music, like Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stones, Gun Club. We’re writing songs that are punk, but also rock ‘n’ roll with a little bit of pop. We’ll pretty much write the whole song and I get to sing whatever I wanna sing. With Mika Miko, I was kinda scared to sing about what I wanted because there were so many people’s opinions. In Bleached I feel comfortable and we can experiment and we get to have a lot more control over everything.

On making stuff look cool:

Jennifer: When we first started, we didn’t know if we were gonna take Bleached seriously or not. We didn’t know where we wanted to go with it. We were really excited to have a visual side that wasn’t just live. The record art I really wanted to have a similar look and feel. I think when you look at all our record art, you kind of get the same feeling from each picture. They’re beautiful, but also dark in a way and they say something about love. I got that from the bands I grew up liking. They all have a visual side. It’s also just like taking what you have and expressing it. Like the Smiths records, you know [by looking at it] that it’s a Smiths record or like Black Sabbath art or Rolling Stones. Those are all my favorite bands, so I was inspired by that. If you have a band, why not take the art side of it seriously too, and make it look just as cool as you want it to look?

Jessie: Growing up, our dad was working in the industry as a sound engineer at Universal, so he was around movie sets a lot and we were always visiting him. Someone always had a video camera. I remember even just being in a car and playing some punk song, and someone would just push record on the camera. Sometimes we’d go film our friends skateboarding. Most of it was just fun, but then we started doing little shorts and did some videos for Mika Miko. I have a box of so much footage of us, but I have to find the equipment to set it up to watch it again. There’s so much Super 8 footage from tour that I keep because I’m gonna use it for something.

On making the record:

Jennifer: When we record we have a drummer, but me and Jesse do everything else. I play rhythm guitar and sing and Jessie does lead guitar and bass. When we first started, we just wanted it to be Jessie and I, because we had already been in a band where it was so hectic trying to get everyone together all the time. We were like, “We’ll just do it ourselves.”

On hanging out in the L.A. music scene:

Jennifer: It’s actually been really fun lately. There was a period where there weren’t that many fun bands, then it just started up again. FIDLAR are really good live, and Tangea are really fun live, too. And our friends Chad and the Meatbodies. There was just a festival in Santa Ana called Burgerfest because Burger Records is a label from Santa Ana and it was all these bands that are on Burger, like Gap Dream and they’re so good. That festival was soooooo fuuunnn, just so many kids going crazy. It was insane. I don’t know how many people that place holds, but it must be at least 1000. It was so crazy.

On where they will be 10 years from now:

Jessie: Jen will have her own clothing line. Possibly lingerie. She also wants a flower shop. Next to Jen’s flower shop, I’ll have a restaurant and it will be, like, all the food we ate on tour. Our band will still play shows. Maybe not tour as much — festivals would be cool. In 10 years we’ll be ready to do things at home.

But right now, we’re in this moment with Bleached. This is what we are doing right now. This is what’s in front of us to do. If you wanna go back to school, you can always do that later. This is the right time to be doing Bleached. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

File under: Noisy crash pop for art-school kids who like to dance to live music. Melodic guitar-driven songwriting with DIY/punk sensibilities. Scottish nerdcore for girls who put on all-ages shows and collect vinyl.

For fans of: Veronica Falls, Look Blue Go Purple, The Pastels, The Vaselines, Brilliant Colors, Grass Widow

From: Glasgow, Scotland

Personae: Eilidh Rodgers (drums, vocals), Ruari MacLean (guitar, vocals) and Rachel Aggs (guitar and vocals)

I interviewed Golden Grrrls before their show with Brilliant Colors in Olympia; they had just flown from London to Seattle to start their first U.S. tour. We ordered pizza and sat on the floor of Bikini Kill Records HQ to get to know one other. I quickly discovered they’re record nerds who prefer nothing more than to geek out about music: Drummer/vocalist Eilidh Rodgers works in a record store owned by Stephen Pastel where my band, Spider and the Webs, hung out for a day when we played Glasgow. We bonded and immediately started arguing about the Beatles.

Guitarists/vocalists Rachel Aggs and Ruari MacLean picked George as their favorite Beatle, which Rodgers thought was a total cop-out. (Aggs was about to write Harrison a fan letter when he died, so she wrote it and then ceremoniously burnt it in memoriam. At this, MacLean changed his mind and chose Paul.) Rodgers confessed that when she was younger she always picked John, but went with Ringo in the end, possibly for comic relief. In a way, their choices make total sense: Golden Grrrls are interested in pop music and experimenting with forms — like Paul — and in musicianship and aesthetics, like both Paul and George. They have a sense of humor (Ringo), and while they want to be taken seriously, they don’t wanna seem “too serious” (John).

After the interview, we headed to the show. Watching them made me remember hearing the Pastels for the first time, and illustrated an unlikely continuum from ’80s underground to today’s DIY, an international network that connects Olympia to Glasgow.

On the origins of Golden Grrrls:

Rodgers: I started playing the drums in high school. I used to just sit in the front room and play the drums. I used to play along to that film with Tom Hanks, That Thing You Do! It’s pretty silly. I think I really just loved the song. It all started with Tom Hanks didn’t it?

MacLean: The first band I ever played in was my dad’s cover band. Kind of like pub rock — classic jukebox hits. I was 15 or 16 and got to go into a bar and not be thrown out and got paid at the end of the night. My history teacher was the singer.

Aggs: My family plays music too. My mom just started playing double bass and my dad plays banjo and guitar. We play old timey bluegrass music. I play fiddle and mandolin.

On their troublesome name:

MacLean: My grandmother was from West Virginia and I used to watch Golden Girls with her. When I finished University I had to have surgery on my knee so I couldn’t work for like a month or two and I thought, “Now’s a good time to record some songs.” I didn’t think there would be any shows involved. It was just me messing around, like playing the drums and everything. I just thought that’s a silly name because, like, I’m a young guy, I’m not an old woman, there’s one of me, there’s four of them and then somebody had a side project called Golden Girls so I had to change the spelling and now it’s just a big load of trouble.

Rodgers: It’s fine. Who cares, fuckin’ hell!?

MacLean: Then we actually started playing. As stupid as it sounds, when we started playing live, I hadn’t made the connection between there being women in the band and the name at all.

Rodgers: I think it’d be a really bad name if we were all girls. I wouldn’t be in that band.

Aggs: I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s funny and if people do associate it with riot grrrl that’s not bad. It’s not like that’s a terrible thing to be associated with.

MacLean: I think it’s more that it’s related to a cheesy TV show.

On music and community:

Aggs: I make zines and stuff, I do drawings. In school I studied fine art and I made sound art but I actually just wanted to play music so I felt like I was wasting my time.

Rodgers: I think it’s easier to start playing music than it is to establish yourself as an artist.

Aggs: Music is so instantaneous. If you have an idea and you wanna do something with someone it’s so easy to make a demo and put it out there. It’s easy to communicate in that sense, because you know where the community is gonna be. You can just go play with your friends’ bands. If you make some art, it’s like, “Oh what am I gonna do with this? Where am I gonna exhibit it? Who’s gonna care?”

MacLean: With music there’s a really immediate response.

Rodgers: I think we used to joke that the minute Rachel met someone she liked, she’d say, “Let’s start a band.”

Aggs: Yeah, I need to stop. I’m already in too many bands.

On the ’80s indie-pop aesthetic:

MacLean: It’s easy for people to go “Glasgow, mixed gender…they sound like The Pastels or The Vaselines,” but I don’t have a problem with that.

Aggs: Before I joined the band I really liked Golden Grrrls, but I knew very little about indie pop except for New Zealand stuff. I’d actually never listened to the Pastels before and not really the Vaselines much. So I’ve listened to loads of new music since joining. But I like the band, because it’s really tuneful, fun music and I actually had no reference, which is really nice for me. It’s been fun coming up with guitar parts. What were we listening to? The Byrds and stuff like that.

MacLean: We like a lot of ’60s music, and I’m sure those bands did as well, but I can’t play guitar like [The Byrds'] Roger McGuinn. So maybe if you try and fumble along a little bit, it comes out sounding a little bit like us.

Aggs: When I used to go watch Golden Grrrls, it was really noisy and loud and fun live. I was going to see hardcore punk bands and stuff as well, and it was a similar thing. Me and my friend put them on in his bedroom, in a really small bedroom, and people were moshing and stuff.

Rodgers: There weren’t enough mic stands, so there was a mic attached to a mop or a broom or something.

Aggs: Golden Grrrl’s has a soft side but it has a crazy side too.

On the current DIY scene:

MacLean: The UK scene is looking pretty healthy just now with some cool new spaces and promoters doing shows, like Riots Not Diets in Brighton, Neen Records in Newcastle and the Audacious Art Experiment space in Sheffield. And promoters like Upset the Rhythm in London and Comfortable on a Tightrope in Manchester are amazing.

Rodgers: Before Rachel joined Golden Grrrls she was on tour in Glasgow with her band Trash Kit and Grass Widow, and we played in Glasgow together, and it was really great.

Aggs: Silverfox are one of my favorite bands in the UK at the moment.

MacLean: I think people like us like a broad range of stuff from different years. We toured with Edible Arrangements from Brighton.

Aggs: They’re amazing. They’ve got organ and guitar. They play spooky horror-movie music.

MacLean: We played with another band called Sex Hands, from Manchester. They sound completely different than us and completely different than Edible Arrangements. All the bands are totally different but there’s a love of melody and using that as a basis for making something.

Rodgers: I think it’s more interesting when you play with people who are into different things and you can meet in the middle somewhere.

Aggs: I had to learn to play guitar properly to join Golden Grrrls. Scales!

Rodgers: If you actually know how to play, you’d just play the same as the next guy. But if you’re kind of struggling —

MacLean: I’m constantly struggling.

Rodgers: — It sounds nice.

File under: No Rave. Ethereal chant-pop. Surreal dance music for lucid dreamers, industrial and pretty.

From: Oakland, California

Personae: Kelsey, Natalee and Joey

Oakland’s Uncanny Valley occupy a corner of the electronic underground that takes place in illegal venues under low-budget conditions, yet their aesthetic is hardly makeshift. Their recording is skillfully well-produced and their minimal compositions are fully realized, while the live show borders on performance art — exploring the line between self and other, body and mind, being and nothingness.

When I saw them live they looked like Victorian ghosts. Dressed in long, flowing gowns and loose-fitting, sheer material, they wrapped themselves up in a massive piece of fabric that acted both as a veil and a net, inviting the crowd into the giant, fort-like cocoon and obliterating the line between performer and audience. It challenged the notion of an atomized, individual comfort zone, creating the possibility for communion. The kids went crazy — as kids tend to do when they are at the dawn of a new counter-cultural moment. It stimulated my curiosity in this scene I knew little about.

I talked with Uncanny Valley via email about Speaking in Prosthetic Tongues, their debut release on Night People, and about the ideas and motivations behind the “No Rave” aesthetic.

On the origins of Uncanny Valley:

Kelsey: I grew up in an idyllic small town on the central coast of California, an only child who spent most of my youth out in the nearby state park, catching frogs and picking fleas off cats while my hippie parents and their friends gutted freshly caught fish and made crass jokes while naked in the hot tub. I made up stories to entertain myself and personified the inanimate objects around me. My father built harps for a living, and my mother was always singing songs while cavorting around in our weird fairytale life. I was infatuated with the relationship between that which is light, and that which is inevitably dark — music and songwriting was my way to exorcise my feelings about these integral parts. I mainly made bedroom music until I started collaborating with Joey and Natalee.

Natalee: When I was about 16, I started going to underground experimental/noise shows in Chicago. I started doing performance art, making psychedelic plays and puppet shows. I wanted to make music but I didn’t even know how to begin. There was a strong male presence in the music scene. Joey and I moved to California around the same time. We became good friends and had messed around with music a bit, and then Kelsey and I became friends and started talking about the minimal wave music. Right before my 21st birthday I bought my first synth, and the three of us started experimenting together, not really certain what the outcome would be.

Joey: I have performed solo for a long time as Joey Casio, making politically-leaning punk house where I sing and rant and bash at electronic hardware. Uncanny Valley is the first time I have collaborated with other people in such an ambitious context. Natalee and Kelsey approached me with an idea, to start a new band that was a bit darker, but still fully synthetic sounding. What came about when we combined our aesthetics and ideas surprised me in a really beautiful way, and really seemed to connect with the people around us.

On how the creative process combines disparate influences into a new sounds:

Natalee: Joey has a lot of experience and knowledge of the technical side of music production. A lot of bands we like from the ’80s were produced by men with female vocals. I refuse to fit that mold, and have demanded that each of us play a balanced and integral role in the writing process. Kelsey may be the primary vocalist, but she also contributes to production and aesthetic decisions.

Joey: Natalee grew up in the Chicago noise scene and believes in the importance of bringing experimental sounds to people’s ears to push boundaries. I’ve been pretty deep in dance music theory for the last few years, examining how certain sounds and rhythms resonate with the human mind. Kelsey is more free-form in her creative process; a lot of lyrics start with her basically speaking in tongues until the words becomes poems.

Kelsey: The creative process with Joey and Natalee is often sporadic and spontaneous. Sometimes we craft enough material for a new tape in one sitting, other times we spend several days working on the skeleton of a song. No one has just one set role — we swim together through the collective conscious.

Joey: When we practice often we’re just putting seeds into the machines; when we play live, something else really special happens. There is a fair amount of improvisation that is difficult to capture. Playing live is an ongoing conversation with an audience.

On creating an oppositional youth culture in 2013:

Joey: Young people today experience music in a much different way than in the past. The internet has allowed memes to emerge divorced from localized subcultures, and this often creates flash-in-the-pan trends that don’t resonate with the same timeless effect that previous sounds had. The way fake genres like “witch house” and “seapunk” get turned into jokes is quick and cruel. “No Rave” can avoid this by being explicitly opposed to the hegemony at large, and by being self-referential and critical to the systems which propagate its existence.

On the emergent No Rave scene:

Joey: No Rave stands in opposition to the anonymous, apathetic, apolitical stance that electronic music so often takes. In the last couple of years, people who were previously involved with punk and noise scenes started making electronic dance music. Not surprisingly, a lot of times it turns out quite weird. I would say groups like Extreme Animals and Eats Tapes are the precursors to this scene. In Oakland, TECHNOC, YRUD and Body Glove have been making sounds I’d call No Rave. A lot of other folks have started to make new music that leans that direction — like Black Jeans and REDREDRED. In other cities, I’d include Ginseng from Iowa City, Sewn Leather, Chrome Windows from Olympia, Diamond Catalog from Portland, Container and Unicorn Hardon from Nashville.

Uncanny Valley went through a big shift toward No Rave on tour. Playing live every night, our set got more free-form and dance music-oriented but also more experimental — leaning toward the weird end of acid house, but adding a personal element with the vocal elements that was always lacking from so much of that music.

Natalee: I am trying to create an electronic music scene that is not male-dominated, trying to encourage and assist women making electronic music. I want to present electronic music in all-ages, all-welcome underground venues and avoid bars/clubs as much as possible. I never have fun in bars.

On a New Age trip to the desert:

Joey: I jokingly referred to Uncanny Valley’s “genre” as “new age body music” for a while. There is a heavy influence of early industrial dance music such as DAF, Front 242 — what’s often called “electronic body music.” But that kind of music is often very tough and hyper-masculine while Uncanny Valley has this other much more dreamy aspect to it. Are we New Age? Perhaps. We listened to a lot of Enya on tour. There have definitely been Tarot readings at band practice.

We have played and met up numerous times with friends out in the desert, and there have been some very amazing experiences. It’s mostly just weirdos meeting up at an abandoned farm with a giant PA and lot of ideas and music making machines. We make up bands for the night and use it as a chance to explore new ideas.

Natalee: Getting out into the elements with a bunch of friends, hiking up a mountain with birds soaring below and then staying up as long as possible, listening to the weirdest sounds resonating in the weirdest ways in the desert air is invigorating. It’s probably not what you think — no one is doing Reiki — but we do like to find obsidian flakes and talk about crystals and stare at the endless stars.

On living in the realm of the unreal:

Kelsey: I’m heavily influenced by the surreal, and the ability to transcend my body through performance. Some of my favorite Uncanny Valley shows have been the ones where I have covered myself entirely in white paint. I then feel like I don’t have to be confined by my humanness. I can make up words and move in a way that takes me elsewhere and away. As someone who doesn’t identify as a person of faith, performance functions as my ritual. Ceremony is of utmost importance to me. I want to honor that. Through performing, I feel that energy is put forth. I’ve been reading and researching female artists and performers extensively the last few years, and I find that their work also helps aid in inspiration — Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Judy Chicago, and Marina Abramovic are among my personal favorites. They make me study the connection between mind and body, and what it means to choose to live in the realms of the unreal; balancing reality and fantasy.

Natalee: One of the most exciting things about playing music is this experience I have of phantom voices singing in between frequencies. We’ll be generating a sound, and I’ll think Kelsey is singing, but I look over and she isn’t even in the same room. I’ve started to hear these voices singing in all kinds of music and sounds. I like to think of them as some kind of ghost voice trying to speak to me or of my own unconscious singing a song to me.

Joey: This is fantasy music. We get lost in it. We make a space and jump though, hopefully taking anyone within earshot with us. I want to make music that makes people have a transcendent experience, to be taken outside the self, to get lost in a crowd and feel good about it — to look to my collaborators and build a ship in the ocean of collective consciousness and invite the water in. The music is already there. When we get lucky, we can tune in.

The next day at the coffeeshop you see a girl you vaguely remember from the night before. She is writing in a notebook that’s full of her drawings. She shows you a comic depicting prey vs. predator, demanding to know which one you are. Determined to survive, you ask her to sing for your band, which doesn’t exist yet. She has a leather jacket and shows you how to apply liquid eyeliner like Mary Weiss from the Shangri-Las. Together you are invincible.

I am always looking for that girl — the one who can save me with her words, the one who will reflect the world I see back to me and encourage me to resist. She is who I seek in music, in writing, in a friend. At their best, White Lung evoke that rare moment of tough-girl solidarity that exists behind genuine female camaraderie. Singer Mish Way is a punk poet in a lineage that extends from Exene Cervenka to Kat Bjelland to Kathleen Hanna, telling stories of existential angst that use addiction as a metaphor for life under capitalism. Her lyrics document the rampant alienation experienced by those who seek refuge in nihilism as a way of refusing culture that turns people into objects through mindless consumerism. I talked with her via email while the band was in the throes of a European tour.

I saw you guys play Olympia several times early on, and still listen to the early singles — how has the band changed since then?

Obviously, the addition of a new guitarist has changed our sound. I think that Kenny [McCorkell]‘s style of playing is a lot more aggressive, nervous and anxious then our old guitarist, but it works much better for us. When you saw us play in Olympia, we didn’t have the musical and personal unity we have now. It’s just time, you know? We are a band that knows how to write together, tour together, just be together. I have changed as a frontwoman. I feel much more comfortable on stage.

Do you consider yourself a feminist punk band?

I am a feminist and I am proud to declare that. I believe my bandmates have feminist attitudes, but they would not necessarily label themselves as such. I do not feel the need to call us a “feminist band,” because it’s not something that we have ever discussed. Yes, feminism bleeds into my lyrics because it’s a part of my life, but I am not consciously trying to relate a very obvious message with my lyrics.

Anything I say could be considered a feminist issue if you really dissected it. For example, let’s say I’m singing about men in my life, complaining about them hate-fucking girls they don’t respect. The listener could just read that as a song about hate-fucking and that’s it — just a moment in a bed that is complicated. Or, it could be a song about gender imbalance. Why do men commonly hate-fuck? Well, because men fuck and women get fucked — then it’s an issue of biology mixing with our common social understanding of heterosexual interactions and, boom, feminist issue. You know?

Can you name a band that inspired you to play music?

Well, your band Bikini Kill inspired me. I used to cover “Capri Pants” in my first band. We did a lot of covers because we couldn’t actually play our own songs, or we were too afraid. I was the main songwriter — it was like Liz Phair threw up all over a really, really distorted guitar. I was like 19 years old, I was writing super graphic lyrics over simple, loving chords then just cranking it up. The Wipers inspired me — they still do. They did it right. I can’t think of one song of theirs that I don’t like. The Replacements. I get really inspired by the attitudes of certain front people, the performance, Paul Westerberg is one of those influences, so is Cristina Martinez. Hole, Babes in Toyland and L7 inspired me. The ’90s alt-punk scene just sucked me in. I just kept uncovering more and more and more and then the influences of those bands. When you first discover music, it’s like this onion you just keep peeling. It never ends. There is always something new to find.

Do you all have day jobs?

Yeah, we do. I am a writer who focuses mostly on music journalism.

How does economics inform the band?

I remember being in Atlanta, Georgia, two years ago on tour. I was so broke. I had so much debt waiting for me at home. I was constantly scared about money, because I had none. We had just played a show and had found out that the promoter had totally fucked us on payment and paid the other band way, way more because they were aggressive dudes who demanded it and we didn’t. I just felt so defeated and annoyed. I remember calling my dad on that tour, just begging to borrow $100 so I could eat for the next few weeks and he was like, “Nope, you chose this life so you deal with it.” I’m glad he said that, but at the time, I just cried.

Anyway, I was at this guy Ruby’s house, and there was an old zine with some piece Kathleen Hanna had written, and it was talking about the exact things I was going through. It just made me even sadder. I wrote a lot on that tour because I was constantly defeated. I was letting the bad outweigh the good. Being in a band is not a desirable ‘career choice.’ It’s the most expensive sport. But there is nothing like it, and I wouldn’t trade my life choices for anything. If I wasn’t in a band, I’d be very unhappy. I went into this knowing that being in a band would never be something I could make money from. But I loved playing music. I loved being on stage.

What is the point of punk rock in 2013 from your perspective?

The point of punk rock is to be exposed and vulgar. To get shit out. For me, it always has been.

While Kill My Blues includes songs that explore what it feels like to be a mother and a wife, it also takes stock of the current state of grrrldom: “Groundhog Day” references Excuse 17′s song of the same name, “I Don’t Wanna Go” is dedicated to the memory of punk feminist pioneer Natalie Cox, and “Newskowin” is a dance number for grrrls (and their allies) of all ages.

I spoke with Tucker via email a few days before I saw her band play a fantastic show in Brooklyn. The new album came to life, and by the end of the show I was in the front row, skanking uncontrollably to a vibrant and lively cover of The Selecter’s “Three Minute Hero” with an old friend. It was the first time I’ve seen The Corin Tucker Band and not compared them to Sleater-Kinney. I look forward to what comes next.

Kill My Blues is so different than 1,000 Years. It sounds like you wrote the new album after touring, thinking about it would feel to play the songs live. It also sounds like a solid group with experience playing together rather than a singer/songwriter with a back-up band. Can you talk about the difference between the two records in terms of process?

We did decide to write collaboratively for Kill My Blues. I think on the first couple of tours, we came together as a band and realized what our strengths are. With the addition of Mike Clark to the band, he and Sara Lund formed a really strong rhythm section. We did a couple of dancier covers on the tours, and people seemed to love really dancing and moving around. We sort of said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to write a record more like that?”

Listening to Kill My Blues I hear a lot of the ’90s – especially Sleater-Kinney, Unwound and Circus Lupus – because your musicianship is so distinctive. But I also hear ’80s pop, from Pete Townshend to Talk Show-era Go Go’s to The B-52′s and Blondie. There’s even a song that kind of reminds me of Big Country, which is not a bad thing. This mostly just makes me wonder what your contemporary musical influences are.

I think most of our influences do come from earlier eras, truthfully. I do like current dance music, like Daft Punk, and current artists like PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple. There’s definitely a Slits album up on the wall in Seth’s studio, and I think they were sort of a guiding light. I think there’s a lot of music we referenced like Patti Smith, the Replacements, Blondie and everything else you mentioned above. I’m not sure about Big Country though.

Clearly, “Groundhog Day” is a reference to the Bill Murray movie. Before we talk about the song itself – do you remember when everyone in Olympia got obsessed with this movie in the ’90s? What was going on? Anyway: Assuming you are fans of the movie, what do you like about it? Do you think it has a hopeful message or is it just depressing?

I love that movie. In the end of the movie, Bill Murray finally gets it right, doesn’t he? So that’s positive.

In my reading of “Groundhog Day,” the song, you’re frustrated with the lack of progress women of our generation have made. Does this frustration make you question the narrative of progress that is so often applied to feminism? What if things aren’t getting better for women? How should we get off what Kathleen Hanna calls the feminist “hamster wheel”?

I think we need to start thinking differently, just like Bill Murray has to in the movie. Maybe feminists need to work harder at building coalition with other activists to achieve our goals.
Certainly I think that more women need to have political power. Women are only at about 19 percent in Congress but are 51 percent of the population.

What do you think would change if we had a woman in the White House?

I think it would just crack open the glass ceiling. It would just really give us a chance to see a woman in the highest job in the land. It wouldn’t change everything overnight, but it’s the symbolism that is important for people.

Is there a story behind Kill My Blues you’d like to share? It feels solid as a love-as-redemption tale, but I’m wondering what shape “the blues” is for the Corin Tucker Band in 2012, as the country is facing epidemic unemployment and heading towards another presidential election.

I think “the blues” for me is more personal. It’s about feeling really grateful for my family and my close friends, that love keeps us going through all the ups and down of life.

Tell us about “Newskowin.” I am kind of hoping this is a true-story song, but either way I’d love to know what made you decide to name a song after Newskowin, Oregon Also, the video is really cool and looked like a lot of fun to make.

Well, the first verse is true, it’s about going on vacation with my best friend’s family when we were 13, to Neskowin. Her family got to use a condo one week a year, and that year, I was the friend that got to go. It seemed very fancy to us at the time. The rest of the story about our “adventure” is just made up in my mind. The song is meant to describe that change for girls when they leave childhood behind and live in a woman’s body for the first time.

“I Don’t Wanna Go” is my favorite song on the record, but after I realized what the lyrics are, it’s been difficult to listen to it. It seems to be about a mother who dies of a terminal disease and leaves behind a young family. I’m guessing it’s at least partially inspired by Natalie Cox [who died in 2010 after a battle with a rare, aggressive form of cancer].

It is about Natalie. It is for her, it is also for all of her friends.

Where do you find the emotional courage and strength to write a song like that, knowing that you’ll be expected to play it live night after night?

That song tumbled out of me at the practice space one day. Different people pray in different ways. I pray in my songs, sometimes. It was so hard to watch and read Natalie’s blog about battling cancer and yet she was so graceful and so inspiring as well. She continues to inspire me.

Who is Constance? Real or imaginary? It’s haunting – it reminds me a bit of “Candy’s Room” on Darkness of the Edge of Town crossed with Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Constance is imaginary, but it definitely touches on the idea of my children growing up and leaving home.

Who is Joey?

Joey Ramone. But this song incorporates a lot of musical and personal grieving in it too. Joey came to a Sleater-Kinney show once at Irving Plaza, but he left before the show ended, so I didn’t get to meet him.

Portland has changed a lot in the past 10 years, and has recently gotten a lot of attention – with both the Keep Portland Weird festival in Paris
as well as the success of Portlandia. How has that impacted your community in Portland? Is it something that people talk about on tour more than at home?

I think Portlandia has brought international interest to the counterculture of Portland and the Pacific Northwest in general. I get asked about it in press interviews, but I don’t think it has really affected my daily life that much.

What bands do you feel a kinship with in terms of the Portland music scene and/or feminist community?

I love Quasi, Wild Flag, the Thermals, Hungry Ghost, Rebecca Gates, the Jicks, the Golden Bears – all my friends, basically. I don’t go to shows very much these days, but I still feel a community with the folks playing music.

What bands are you most excited about that you are playing with on this tour? Have you been surprised by any of your opening bands?

We’ve had some amazing ones. In Milwaukee, Pussy Collector opened for us. Three 19-year-old girls, and one disgruntled 30-something man wearing a Star Wars t-shirt and playing bass. Rachel, the lead singer, had a shaved head and a mini-dress on and shouted lyrics like, “I broke your bong, you burned my thong, white trash love affair.” Amber, the guitar player was wearing a plaid kilt with fuzzy red leg-warmers, her guitar had a tail, and she was wearing a coon-skin hat. It was their last show ever, because Amber is going off to school.

In Birmingham, Alabama, a band named Belle Mina opened for us, all young women. They reminded us all of Tiger Trap, they were all great musicians, and their songs had fantastic pop sensibilities.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

I think the interesting thing about this tour is finding young women all across the country that have been inspired by the activism and music of riot grrrl, the Northwest independent scene and the international pop underground. Young people get it, and they use it in their own work in a different way. They reincarnate that spirit.

At the end of Bikini Kill’s first US tour in June 1991, Ian MacKaye offered us a free day at Inner Ear Studios after he saw us play at the legendary punk venue DC Space. We were touring on borrowed equipment and hadn’t slept in at least three days, but soon found ourselves in a real studio making our first record with someone we admired. It was a great opportunity, but it was also a little intimidating: Recording studios are traditionally male-dominated environments, and we had little-to-no experience in that setting.

Listening to the record now, our discomfort is audible. Kathleen nails it, but the rest of us sound a little hesitant. Ian remembers us being nervous; that was probably due to our decision to record live, without overdubs, in as few takes as possible. But that wasn’t the only reason. As much as we were thrilled to be given access to the tools necessary to make a record, I remember deliberately wanting to create a document that emphasized process over product.

In short: Bikini Kill wanted to inspire other girls to start bands. We left our mistakes on the record because we wanted girls to listen to it and imagine themselves in a recording studio. Like the early D.C. hardcore bands that recorded at Inner Ear before us, we also left in the bits between songs where the singer talks to the engineer as a way to document the process of making a record. We wanted you to hear us talking in the studio so that you might be inspired to make your own record. We didn’t want to gloss over anything. That was our aesthetic. It was political.

In an article I wrote at the time for my fanzine Jigsaw, I called that technique “the impetus of imperfection.” You could also call it “daring to suck.” It’s a way to demystify the myth of perfection that a more polished product perpetuates, and it’s also a way to say, “Hey! You at home! You can make a record, too! You don’t have to be a prodigy. It’s not about that. It’s about figuring out what is possible with the tools you have and the place you’re living in. You don’t even have to wait until you know how to play your instrument. Just start a band, play a show, make a record.” There’s a part on the Rites of Spring album where bass player Mike Fellows misses a note. As a kid listening to that record in my bedroom on repeat, that mistake opened up a whole world to me. It made me imagine the space where the band recorded, and it made me feel OK about making a mistake at my first recording session with my first band, The Go Team.

Our visual aesthetic corresponded to that idea. You can tell we laid out the records on a Xerox machine, stayed up all night, worked under fluorescent lights. We didn’t have our lettering typeset by a professional. We did it ourselves using old typewriters, Sharpies, rub-off letters and stencils. We crossed stuff out and rewrote it and left it looking messy. Words fell off the page and got taped back on. You can see the tape, you can see our fingerprints and you can see coffee stains. We used snapshots and blown-up color copies. We look weird. You can imagine the photographer and create a story around the situation the photo captures. You can see the dots, you can see the process the printer used and you can see the lines we drew on the page to guide us. When we used a professional quality photograph, we made sure it was off-center, so you could imagine someone laying it out by hand, in a hurry. Nothing is straight. Everything is crooked. We didn’t want our relationship to the means of production to be invisible. We wanted to incite participation.

The first Bikini Kill record is an insurrection. We didn’t set out to create a masterpiece. We weren’t interested in perfection. We didn’t want you to feel satisfied listening to a record. We were agitators. We wanted all girls in all towns to start their own bands. We thought if that happened, the world would change.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Did the world change? You tell me.

Watching Beth Ditto grow up to become an internationally known feminist icon and pop singer has been amazing. But I miss seeing her band play raucous basement punk, and I miss hanging out and shooting the shit. This interview gave us a good excuse to catch up. As a Beth Ditto fan, I couldn’t wait to talk to her about how she navigates the world as an uncompromising radical feminist working in the pop realm.

Where are you today?

I am in Portland, in my living room!

Oh that’s awesome I’m at The Capitol Theater (in Olympia) using a landline.

That is hilarious.

I know, right?

“Hi. Can I come over and use your landline?”

Exactly.

That’s like coming over to use somebody’s microwave.

So what do you wanna talk about?

I don’t know, I’m just excited and nervous – I’m like, “What is she gonna ask me?”

Well, I have to ask this question because I’m always very curious. Are there any stories behind the new songs that you’d like to share?

I wanted to make a really bitchy song – I don’t feel bad about it. It’s called “Get a Job.” When Olympia moved to Portland, all the same people were still roommates. There was one really rich kid who didn’t ever pay bills and never took care of anything. And it also gets at this idea that I’m like absolutely sick and tired of being called “Girl.” If something devastating happens and someone comes in and says, “I’m sorry girl”, I’m like “What? Are you kidding me? Seriously? I’m 31 years old.” Casually, like “Girl, that is hysterical“, that’s great, that’s sincere. But this is different.

So, “Get a Job” is about this one person who didn’t know what it was like to worry about money. They never had to live with that fear of poverty. Living with that worry is what the song’s about. I’m like, “You know what? You need to get a job. And pay your bills on time. It’s not fair what you’re doing. You’re my friend.” Explaining this to other people has been very hilarious.

Well, it’s interesting to hear your story, because that song works on other levels too. It could be about female economic empowerment. It could be about a woman who is getting divorced who has to get a job as a matter of survival, but also as a means to independence.

I like that take. The record was going to be called Get A Job, but I didn’t want it seem insensitive to people who couldn’t get a job. Coming from someone who is obviously really privileged – in what I’m doing, and on many levels, for many reasons – I just didn’t want it to seem insensitive.

A Joyful Noise is very descriptive of the album.

Thank you. That is from the Bible.

Can I ask you a feminist question?

Yeah. Make it hard.

Last night Spider and the Webs played a show in Olympia, so I asked if anyone had any questions for you. The basic thing that people on the street want to know from you is this: What is the difference between being a radical queer feminist in a punk band, and being a radical queer feminist in a pop group?

Oh wow. Well first of all, The Gossip turns 15 this year.

Congratulations.

Thank you. As someone who is a feminist and who was influenced by radical feminism, not mainstream feminism, I’ve learned 1. You can’t live your life to please other people, and 2. There’s all different kinds of approaches. The beauty of punk feminism was that you never really had to explain yourself. We were lucky enough to come along when we did, obviously, because it was summer of ’99 and 2000 and – I don’t have to tell you this – but what y’all did for us [the decade before] – you have to keep that going, hoping that people pass it on and keep it alive. When I hear stories about Team Dresch going on tour and things like that, I’m like, “You know what? I didn’t ever have to deal with that,” because so many of the barriers had been broken down already. Kicking the barriers down must be really interesting.

And that’s the thing. Being a feminist in a pop band is really hard, honestly. Sometimes you feel extremely lonely. But sometimes you feel really good, because you’ve exposed people to things they’ve never thought about. Getting into arguments in interviews is like – sometimes being hated never felt so good, you know what I mean? You feel like you’re really doing something when you feel that resistance. To resist means that something is pushing back against you, and sometimes being a feminist in a punk band, I didn’t feel like there was resistance.

I feel really at home there, but I also feel like I’m explaining myself to my punk feminist friends who are like, “Well, how do you justify doing this or that?” And sometimes I’m like, “I did that for money.” I will tell you blatantly. I do not want to live in poverty. I do not want to do that. I do not want my friends to have to live in poverty. But I do find myself justifying things I did or making excuses and things to people who ask. And then there are people I can talk to about the pros and cons. For me, the most important thing is being able to live with myself. Like, going to bed and night and saying, “OK, does this feel good or bad? Is it worth it on my conscience? Is this gonna hurt people, or is this gonna help people?” Or even, “Is this gonna hurt me or is this gonna help me?”

Talking to you and knowing what you know – doing an interview with you can be harder, in a way, because I’m like, “What do you say, what do you not say?” Kill Rock Stars was so welcoming, and it felt so good and such a dream to me at first. But being on an independent label is being a part of the music industry, too, and that can be really hard in different ways. Being on Sony, they are all so afraid of you – which is really empowering, but in this other way. They wouldn’t dare cross what I say. But am I thinking the reason they are afraid of me is because I can’t believe that these people actually respect my opinion or my vision and ideas? So I’m thinking, are they doing this out of fear? That’s really interesting too. But it’s just a different set of rules.

I’m sure when you first started, at 18 years old, that was really difficult because a lot of people were so much older, and all that stuff (riot grrrl, queercore) had come first. So you were walking into a lot of history. I can see that being inspiring but also intimidating.

It was very intimidating. What I think is really interesting about being a part of a radical community with political thinking is how we are so quick to judge each other and be so harsh to each other. You have to accept that life is a learning process for everyone, and we’re all the same. We’re all the victims of the same system, and we are all trying to de-program ourselves.

Have you heard Elizabeth Martinez’s term to discuss infighting? “The Oppression Olympics,” where oppression become a contest. She is a Chicana writer and activist who was talking about barriers to coalition building within anti-racist struggle.

The Oppression Olympics! That is a really good term. I really cannot just believe, being a part of the pop world and realizing how honestly, genuinely, sincerely, people don’t know. They just don’t know! They just never thought about it! It’s mind-blowing. It’s just like when you talk to your grandma, and you’re like “Grandma, that’s not cool” and she’s like, “Well I didn’t even think of that!” Ding ding ding! Of course you didn’t! I would have never thought about either it if I wasn’t reading zines and discovering Gloria Steinem when I was like 12. I wouldn’t have thought about that kind of stuff. People are so quick to write other people off. But there has to be people who are willing to put up with other people’s bullshit, or I don’t think change is possible.

Where do you find that patience?

My family. Because I’ve seen them come so far with me. And knowing how I was raised with racism – just blatant racism. We’re not talking about things that are hard to see. We are talking about just blatant racism. And my mom was a person who was not a feminist, and not exposed to anything like that. She was pregnant by 15, came from an abusive situation with an absolutely crazy story – and then having the patience to just be kind and forgiving is mind-blowing. That is really inspiring. And to see them be like, “Oh my daughter, my niece is gay…”

To see that progress is incredible. And I know that it is possible, but you can’t do that when you’re screaming at people that they are stupid and backwards and wrong. There’s a time and a place for that, but there has to be a part where you are willing to listen and be heard. That’s really important. That’s where I get it from. I know that the most backward – for lack of a better word – people are not born that mean. They’re just not. The idea is just being a good person – it isn’t hard. Even if you’re not the nicest person or the warmest person. It’s not hard to just be a decent person.

I really like that you always name-check Divine as one of your style inspirations but I would like to hear you talk more in depth about that a little bit. What does Divine mean to you?

When I first heard of Divine, I was with my best friend Jerry. I was probably 15. Hairspray was always on TV, but it never registered that that was Divine. Then we watched Pink Flamingos and that was…just….(long pause) insane. Seriously? I was like what?! My brain was on fire. We were watching it and I remember trying be cool, but inside I was like “What. Is. Going. On?!” Especially the chicken scene, the butthole scene…The end, where she eats real dog shit?! I remember thinking, “I don’t know why but that is the most amazing thing I have ever seen.” And that was the first time I ever understood art. It was the first time I ever really got it. It was amazing. I remember thinking, “I wanna look like that!”

But I was also obsessed with Mary Tyler Moore. I wanted to have Mary Tyler Moore’s hair from The Dick Van Dyke Show. You know the Huggy Bear song ["Blow Dry"] that goes “I’m the lady with the bouffant hair”? And also, Miss Piggy! A great feminist icon. She knew karate! Amazing. Where are the Miss Piggys now?

The next question is personal but it goes along with what we’ve been talking about. What would the grownup you tell the teenage you?

It’s such a hard question. Jerry and I were talking about this the other day, how we always saw the world through the same eyes that we see through now, but we’re grown. There’s so much fate involved. It would be hard to convince me, had I not met those three [Jerry, Gossip member Nathan Howdeshell and former Gossip member Kathy Mendonca] It’s hard to separate myself – the teenage me – from them. But you know what? You know what I would say to me? I would say, “Beth, Nathan is not as cool as you think he is.” [Hysterical laughter]

[Laughing] Oh my god!

Not in a mean way! You know, he’ll even tell you this, it’s not mean, I swear. When I met him I was 14 and he was 16. I was a nerd, but I was also obsessed with bouffants, I was obsessed with Gloria Steinem. You know, we didn’t have Sassy magazine, we didn’t have that kind of shit [in Arkansas] All we had were zines. That was it. And we were lucky that ‘zines made it there. Nathan was the reason why that happened and he really did hold court. I just thought he was the coolest thing ever. Jerry and Kathy too. Especially as a 14-year-old – Kathy was 17 and Nathan was 16 – they could drive, they would bring zines over, we could go record shopping, we could go to thrift stores. And all that was great, but Nathan was pretty protective of this little bubble that he had made. He was really defensive and would just make fun of you to your face. He was a mean boy, he was too cool. So I guess I would tell [the young me], “Beth you are just as cool as Nathan.”

You could abstract that to be about any guy that you look up to as a teen. Calvin Johnson was that guy for me. When we met I was 14 and he was 21. He had a radio show, he was in my favorite band and, from my point of view, he knew everyone and everything about independent music.

You wanted them to like you so bad, but they were such a hard nut to crack. But at the same time you are one and the same.

I’ve been writing a song this weekend and having a hard time. I know what I want to communicate – the song has a clear message – but I’m having a trouble with imagery and crafting a story around it. Which is something I think you’ve always been really good at – you make it seem effortless.

Thank you. Thanks Tobi, that is so sweet of you to say.

What’s your songwriting process?

Whatever is in your brain, any sentence, whatever your message is – it will come through. For me, I never think about what’s gonna happen – I don’t think about it, it just comes out. I never say, “I’m gonna write a song about this,” except for maybe on the first record. Whatever you are feeling, your subconscious is gonna come up with it.

Are there any songs you worked super hard on for this album or did they all write themselves?

There is one. [The song is "Linda Lovelace," which didn't make the final version of the record. – Ed.] It was actually about my dad. And I didn’t realize that until it was done, but I couldn’t get through it. My dad died that night. I remember thinking, “I hate taking music this seriously.” Which is another thing that comes up now that I’m older – I realize that not letting myself take things seriously was something I thought was a punk attitude: “You will not take songwriting seriously.” I don’t know where I got that. Maybe from Nathan? It was also sexism getting into my brain and not realizing it, but shutting that off by saying, “You know what? It’s OK to take things seriously.” That song about my dad, I couldn’t not take it seriously, because I couldn’t get through it without choking up. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that way, where I was like, “You know what? I just can’t do this. I can’t write this song.”

How do you balance your work ethic and ambition with burn out? What do you do to take care of yourself?

Feminism. I swear to god. It is what keeps me focused and alive. My mom and my family keep me ambitious. I tell myself I’m so lucky to be my own boss, to have all these opportunities. To be able to take care of my mom is the biggest honor. Helping Rock & Roll Camp for Girls and being able to help different groups like that financially really inspires me. I come from a place of actual poverty. We are not talking lower-middle class, we are talking “Do you choose electricity or do you choose groceries?” Living like that from a very young age, I never want people to have to worry about that. And that always goes back to feminism for me, and empowerment. Every time I get burned out I’m just like, “I’m so lucky that I get to have all these experiences that have made me this way.” I’m really lucky that I was born at the time I was born and that I got to move to Olympia and actually meet you. That is a big fucking deal.

Thank you.

I hope you realize that, because it’s really fucking cool. Even in interviews, all the time, in interviews people are like, “Who changed your life?” and I’m like, “Fucking Tobi Vail,” and you are still doing really cool shit all the fucking time. It’s really inspiring!

What are some of the other musical influences of the new album?

On the new album? I was seriously obsessed with Paul Simon and Loretta Lynn. I was really obsessed with rhyme schemes. What I love about Loretta Lynn is that she can write the hokiest shit. “The Pill” is a hokey song, but it’s so important and so empowering. I was getting the idea that it’s OK to take myself seriously, and listening to Loretta Lynn, I was like, “Now see, that is someone who does not let [those thoughts] get into her brain.” You can tell she thought, “The first thing that came into my head is rhyming garbage with yardage and it works!” Actually, I have a question for you. When you write songs is it melody first or lyrics first?

I actually got this from Kurt Cobain – we were close friends for a short time when he was writing a ton of pop songs and listening to The Beatles a lot. The first thing I do is choose the singing style I’m going to use.

Yes, me too.

It’s definitely singing style and melody first, words second. Actually, I often come up with a list of song titles first.

But not lyrics first?

No, never. Singing style and melody come first. OK, so, we’ve been talking for a while and I don’t wanna take up too much more of your time but I would like to ask another question I got from people who were at the Spider and the Webs show in Olympia last night: What’s it like to be a fat activist in the world of high fashion?

It’s awesome. I’m gonna be honest, this is my thing. Like I told you before, it’s that thing with resistance – when you are discussing fat activism with Nomy Lamm, you feel sisterhood, but I need more. To me it’s another side of performing. That’s my personality. I’m such a ham, such an exhibitionist. Even my astrological chart says, “This is what you were born to do.” Also because I do have feminism and I do have radical context, things don’t hurt my feelings. Feminism has always been my filter. When someone says, “I hate this song,” that is a different thing than saying, “That fat bitch.” Being called a bitch doesn’t hurt my feelings. Being called fat doesn’t hurt my feelings. Things like that don’t hurt my feelings, because I come from a punk background.

Another thing: I feel way more at home in the fashion industry than I do in the music industry, because so many of those people also came from punk backgrounds, believe it or not. One of the most amazing people I’ve ever come into contact with is Vivienne Westwood. She is incredible. Talk about punk – she is so serious. The falling out between her and Malcolm McLaren? I am so obsessed with it, and I’m almost sure it has to do with something really awful.

Also the idea of “all these skinny models” – I don’t understand how people can talk about sex-worker activism and at the same time talk [negatively] about size zero. I know there’s a huge difference, there’s a huge income difference, there’s all of these things we are talking about – racism, sexism, classism. But on this basic level, women have so few options to make a substantial living without going to college, without having to climb some crazy fucking ladder. I am really glad I was exposed to it, because I’m not hating from the other side without knowing what’s going on. There’s a huge level of sisterhood that’s really incredible that I never would have seen had I not seen it firsthand.

I also learned that there’s a lot of skill to modeling. We’re not just talking about body size but actually what you’re giving. There’s a lot of knowledge about where to put your face and how to hold something – it’s really crazy. You start to see the actual talent that goes into what they do. You have to separate these things and then put them together and then you can decide what your feelings are about it.

I refuse to hate on models, because they are also women and they are also victim of the exact same body standard that I am. I refuse to hate people for being thin and I refuse to hate people for feeling the absolute pressure to be thin. If anybody knows how that feels I totally fucking get it.

It’s almost like being a journalist and getting to sneak into this secret world that you hear people talk about constantly, but they’ve never even seen. I always think about Gloria Steinem working at the Playboy bunny mansion and how awful, how amazing and bad ass that was. There were times when she was like, “Sometimes it was fun.” But she actually got to see what it was like, and the appeal, and why it was awful and why it was appealing. And I see that now.

The next time I saw Ian was a year later. He was on tour with his group, The Nation of Ulysses, who I considered to be the most powerful band in the universe at that time. I had just started Bikini Kill, and we were preparing for world domination. Within a year, our groups would join forces and bring the sound of revolution (girl style now) to the deadbeats of young America. We shared a group house called The Embassy in Washington, D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Having access to Ian’s extensive record collection and getting to hear his take on politics, music and aesthetics at that time was like being given an opportunity to earn an honorary Master’s Degree in the history of righteous youth culture.

Fast forward 20 years. We are both still active in a DIY underground that supposedly died around the time we met. It is my pleasure to share a snippet of our ongoing – and usually secret – deliberation with a wider audience.

Additional commentary comes from Chain and the Gang’s latest chanteuse, the lovely and loquacious Ms. Katie Alice Greer.

Who is in Chain and the Gang? Is it a revolving membership?

Ian Svenonius: Everyone is permanent in Chain & the Gang, though Katie and I are the only constants. We made this record [In Cool Blood with Brett [Lyman], Fiona [Campbell], and Chris [Sutton] for the most part, but some other Gang members chipped in.

What is the aestheto-political imperative behind Chain and the Gang?

Katie Alice Greer: We’re anti-debt, pro-corruption, interested in hairstyles, supportive of homelessness and vagrancy.

What is your favorite part of being in Chain and the Gang: practice, recording or playing shows?

Svenonios: Recording and playing live. Chain & the Gang don’t really practice.

Do you have any daily tour rituals?

Greer: We like to tie the newest member of the band to the hood of the car and drive for at least 80 miles as a test of their endurance, and to give them an opportunity to consider the journey from a different perspective.

Ian, what is your role in the creative process making songs with Katie?

Svenonius: Chain & the Gang is an assortment of slogans, sung with the slightest hint of melody. The emphasis isn’t on passion or tunefulness but on banging on things hypnotically, like shoes in the dryer.

How did you write the album? Did you have the songs before you went into the studio?

Svenonius: The songs start with an idea we want to get across. Everything else just falls into place instantaneously once you know what you need to say.

Was there any specific musical inspiration for the sound of the new album?

Svenonius: We wanted to make something more dancey and upbeat, less introspective than the previous two Chain records.

The song “Certain Kinds of Trash” makes me wonder if there’s a difference between trash and garbage? I’ve noticed that thrift stores today are kind of a drag compared to the thrift stores of years past. Thanks to the eBay economy, thrift stores are now actually more expensive than chain stores…

Svenonius: That’s a good question. You rarely hear a defense of “garbage,” but [the notion of] “trash culture” is used as a rallying cry for enthusiasts of bubblegum, B-Movies and the like. In a sense, punk rock is the child of trash connoisseurs like John Waters and Andy Warhol, who were archivists, curators and appreciators of lowbrow, or “camp,” forms that were dismissed by the bourgeoisie. This culminated with the Ramones. Now, [we have] the rampant triumph of trash everywhere – gross-out films, the internet, reality TV, George Bush, Killing as a national sport, i.e. Qaddafi. There is really no “highbrow” in America anymore.

Americans’ defense of trash could be read as nationalist posturing, since “good taste” was, and still is, typically determined by a European standard (as evidenced by the yuppie’s affection for artisanal espresso, Italian cooking, and hand-crafted housewares as well as the critic’s veneration of Euro sensibilities in film, art, etc.).

Either way, “trash” has been utterly assimilated by the culture at large. There are no longer art films, and the art shown in galleries is as grotesque, lowbrow, and kitsch as can be. TV news is interchangeable with pornography and the populace – of every class – flaunts its illiteracy, ignorance and idiocy at every possible opportunity.

The bourgeoisie has taken up the trash trend quite literally, with the “eco,” “recycling” and “green” trend, where people hoard trash on their porch and in special bins which are set outside for conspicuity, in classic “Keeping Up With the Joneses” style. All this trash-loving and trash hoarding, while the garbage is just shoved in landfills, stuck in lakes and rivers and compacted mercilessly. Garbage goes unloved, unappreciated, despised. Garbage still stinks and includes old diapers, rotten eggs, medical waste and coffee grinds.

Since punk themes are tired, toothless and tedious, garbage power might be the next revolutionary front – switching trash for garbage. Lauding garbage, collecting it and putting it in galleries while rejecting trash would be a real kick in the pants to all these self-satisfied trash collectors.

The song “Surprise Party” begs the question: What is Chain and the Gang’s idea of a good party?

Greer: Well, I really like board games, and I’m very fond of structured or themed activities, I am really bad at “hanging out,” I think.

Svenonius: I think lighting is the most important thing for a party. It should be dark, but not too dark. Think Claudine Clark’s “Party Lights.” Also, the party should take place in one room ideally, or on one floor of a building at least.

What’s the story behind “I’m Not Interested In (Being Interested)”?

Greer: We live in Washington, D.C., which is full of advertisements. I think one of the many billboards that advertise shit that is totally irrelevant to our lives inspired this sentiment. Like, “OK, well, I’m really not interested in being interested in that.”

“Where Does All the Time Go” makes me wonder if being in a band impacts your concept of time passing.

Greer: It doesn’t, because someday I will still be dead.

Svenonius: Pre-industrial, agrarian humanity had the seasons to mark their time. Each one required very different modes of work – planting, weeding, watering, harvesting. The modern group is in the post-seasonal era and is oblivious to the traditional months, but has replaced them with their own seasons; writing, recording, releasing and touring. This endless, repetitive cycle can eventually become mind-numbing, and sometimes the band member wants to jump off the Ferris wheel. But the sudden, “seasonless” existence of post-group life can make for confusion and depression.

“If I only had a brain” references The Wizard of Oz! What’s going on there?

Svenonius: In The Wizard of Oz, they’re saying the agrarian proletariat has no brain, while industrialism has no heart. These are old fashioned aristocratic sentiments, leaving us to wonder about Frank Baum’s possibly revanchist political tendencies. Chain & the Gang, though, is saying post-industrial electro-magnetic life is both brainless and heartless!

“In Cool Blood” sounds a bit vampire-esque. Would you say that is inspired by hanging out in the Pacific Northwest?

Greer: I think I am very sensitive to environments – just sensitive in general, really. Are there vampires in the Northwest?

Svenonius: Possibly! It is quite blood-sucking out there. Lots of goths in Portland.

Being a mom while maintaining a career is full of economic hurdles, but being a mom in a band seems particularly challenging. There’s the countless late nights, the endless touring required to promote records — not to mention the added strain that comes if your partner is also in the band. With that in mind, I tracked down a few rock & roll moms I knew to talk with them about the rewards and challenges that come from trying to balance a life in music with motherhood.

Being a mom is a big part of being female. Eighty to 82 percent of American women are moms by age 44. So, all of this is really a part of feminism. Obviously, there’s an economic side to being a mom as well. Plus, moms rule, and are often not represented in print. But domesticity is supposed to be the opposite of rock ‘n’ roll. How does being a mom in a band complicate this dichotomy?

Kristen Hersh (50 Foot Wave, Throwing Muses): You’d think creating life would get us a lot of points, but more often than not, it’s a rationalization for the “chicks are at the mercy of their biology” argument. Which, of course, is true. And it’s true for the other half of the population as well. Being true to one’s body and nature is the definition of physical and psychological health. Every time a child is born, this becomes clear to the person responsible for bringing a new life into the world. This responsibility means being willing to sacrifice for a biological imperative: we lose sleep, we spend money, we turn apartments and houses and backyards and cars and trailers and bus rides into Home. And we do this for children. That’s far from being the opposite of rock ‘n’ roll — that’s the essence of rock ‘n’ roll.

How can you stay out late? Don’t you have to wake up early?

Sara Lund (The Corin Tucker Band, Hungry Ghost, Unwound): Yes, staying out late and getting up early are hard. But playing shows is not the only late-night job that moms have. And, frankly, once you have a kid you don’t get as much sleep as you used to, anyway. The super late shows can be challenging to get through, but playing is such an adrenaline rush that the playing is not the hard part. Honestly, what is harder about being a mom going to see shows. Staying up late for a show you are not playing — that’s exhausting.

Robin Indar (Severance Package, Black Fork): We’ve played quite a few “school night” shows, where we get a babysitter and we’re usually home by midnight. Sometimes if it’s a weekend show that’s all ages we bring them and they mosh around while we play. Which can be a little distracting, but it’s also funny as hell.

Kristen Hersh: On a 50 Foot Wave tour, I can be loading out at 4 a.m. and then up with the baby at 6. But losing sleep for these reasons just makes me feel like the luckiest woman alive.

Gina Birch (The Raincoats, The Hangovers): Occasionally it’s possible to burn the candle at both ends, because adrenaline kicks in when you play a show, but it obviously doesn’t sustain. I’m in a stable relationship with school-age kids, so now I don’t bring the kids with me when I am on tour. They stay at home inLondon with their dad, to go to school and live their regular lives. I have a hotel room to myself: peace and quiet, with my own choice of TV channels and someone to make my bed! It’s a heavenly holiday in many ways.

Corin Tucker (The Corin Tucker Band, Sleater-Kinney): We brought my son Marshall on the tour bus for the [final] Sleater-Kinney tour. He would sleep until noon just like all of the musicians.

Viv Albertine (The Slits): I am exhausted. No matter how late I get in from a gig, I always get up the next day to make my daughter breakfast and see her off to school. Sometimes I sneak back to bed, but I feel guilty if I do this — which is ridiculous. I’m passionate about my work and passionate about my daughter, and I think the two complement each other in many ways. My love of her keeps my disappointments and failures in my work in perspective. And she is — sometimes indirectly — fired up and motivated by my apparent energy and commitment.

Kim Gordon (Free Kitten, Sonic Youth): When we were touring and Coco was a baby, it was very difficult, even though we had someone along to help take care of her. After the show, our nanny would, of course, want to go out. So one of us would have to stay with Coco. It’s difficult on tour to find time for yourself, to be with your child and to be together as a family and with your spouse. In the end, I would stay with Coco, because I wanted to be with her.

If you were in a band before being a mom how did having a kid affect the band?

Alicia Velasquez aka Alice Bag (The Bags): When my daughter was in elementary school I was in a band called Stay-At-Home Bomb, which is a play on stay-at-home mom. I named the band that because I felt like a ticking time bomb when I gave up my musical endeavors to become a full-time mom. I experienced a weird isolation. I couldn’t go out all the time, and many of my friends just stopped calling or inviting me places because I often said “no” to their invitations. It’s not that I didn’t want to go out, but I couldn’t always find or afford a sitter, and children were frequently unwelcome at parties and/or concerts.

Robin Indar: Black Fork was a lot more obnoxious than Severance Package and did a lot of cussing, flipping the bird, and trashing the place. One of the first things I stopped doing was swearing in my songs. I don’t mind swearing; it just doesn’t seem as necessary somehow.

Corin Tucker: For Sleater-Kinney, it was definitely a struggle — especially at first. I think at the time I felt guilty that I wasn’t superwoman, that I couldn’t do it all, and was overwhelmed. My bandmates were as supportive as they could possibly be, and somehow we made One Beat after Marshall was born. I’m still impressed we were able to do that. We really worked together in order to pull it off with a baby around.

Sara Lund: For me, and I think for most of the people I have played with, music was always the number one priority in our lives before we had kids. Then, by necessity (and the power of hormones and love and nature and all that) your kids become No. 1 and music becomes No. 2. Or maybe No. 1 1/2.

Gina Birch: After some time being a mom and not playing live, I reluctantly went and played a solo show. It felt so strange, even being out alone in the evening. I was disconnected from that part of me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reunited. But after playing, I was overwhelmed and thrilled and I weirdly I suddenly felt whole again. After that, my kids would come with me, sometimes dancing in front of me, or playing percussion.

Viv Albertine: I had my daughter way after the Slits broke up, but I picked up the guitar again when she was seven years old, and she was totally open and nonjudgmental of what appeared to most other people to be an insane act. Once when I’d just started learning guitar again, I let go and played something wild and inventive. She came into the room and said, “Mummy, you were born to play guitar!”

Kim Gordon: Well it’s pretty exhausting, especially the whole jetlag thing. I remember being in Japan and Coco would konk out at 2 p.m. and then wake up at 2 a.m. I stepped back a lot from wanting to be involved in every little decision and debate in the band. [But] it’s also more fun to have a kid along on tour; it keeps perspective on things.

Does your kid /do your kids like that you play music? How does that affect things?

Kristen Hersh: I’ve discouraged all four of my children from playing music for a variety of reasons. They ignored me, of course. They all play.

Kim Gordon: Coco, up until last year, didn’t want to have anything to do with anything we did. Then one day she came home from her summer arts camp and said that she and her friends did a cover of “Rebel Girl.” I was so over the moon. Then she and some other friends formed a band — just went down in the basement and came up with a bunch of songs. She still plays in Big Nils, and they are really good!

Corin Tucker: My son is old enough now to understand how much playing music means to me and he encourages me to do it, and to go on tour again. My daughter is four and thinks that all moms are in bands and that she has her own band with her friends.

Alicia Velasquez aka Alice Bag: When my step-daughters were little, they used to sing along with a CD of my band, ¡Cholita! They, along with a couple of the neighborhood girls formed a fake band called Super Cholita Junior! They, sang, choreographed dance numbers, and took a few guitar lessons from me.

Julia Cafritz (Free Kitten, Pussy Galore): My daughter thinks it’s cool that I was in bands, and she has even likes quite a bit of the music. It was really wild to have her come to this one-off Pussy Galore show we did in December. That band was so angry and aggressive and transgressive, so I had to prepare her for the show by talking to her very openly about how unhappy I was when I was 20, and why I was so mad at the world. It was really nice to be able to say that I can still connect to those songs, because they’re a part of me, but I’m a different person now — happier, less angry at the universe. My son also came to the show. He thought it was terrible. Everyone’s a fucking critic.

Lynn Truell (The Wrecks, The Dicks, Sister Double Happiness, Imperial Teen): My kids like that I play music. We have a piano, guitars, keys and a drum set in the basement. They have little bands during their play dates. They like Imperial Teen well enough, but they’re really into pop music right now, which had long been rather unlistenable for me, but I’ve found that I like some of the mainstream pop music a lot! We’re teaching each other, sharing and talking about music. For the first time in my life, I am watching American Idol. We watch it together. We watch The Voice, too. It’s been great to talk about songs, voice-pitch, musicians, stage presence, emotions — all around the topic of songs and music.

Robin Indar: Our oldest likes to carry the equipment and gets a dollar for good roadie work. I also personally love the rare occasion when I hear one of them humming one of our tunes. Sometimes it’s a drag for them being lugged to a sitter on a school night so we can practice or play a show, but they really like hearing mom and dad on the radio or seeing us in the newspaper.

Gina Birch: My youngest daughter was eight months old when I adopted her. I had no idea what to do with her, so I took her to baby music classes. As she was able to sit up and do stuff, we would bang on little drums, sing and play to CDs. And now she is brilliant at singing, and has fantastic rhythm. They do like my music, but they like pop more. I have a performance art group called the Gluts, and we dress in strange costumes and do more interventionist stuff and that’s too embarrassing for words in their view. But my solo stuff and the Raincoats, they enjoy.

Sara Lund: My son is just about to turn three. We have a lot of instruments in our house and my fantasy is that he will grow up surrounded by music and people playing music. That isn’t exactly how it’s been so far, because his parents are rock musicians and rock music is loud and not all that conducive to a quiet living room jam. Also, I’m a drummer and can barely make my way around a guitar or piano, so I’m not that great at providing my fantasy. I try to get my son to sit up there and play, but he only wants to for a couple of minutes before it’s “Mama play drums?”

Julia Cafritz: But what’s most important to me is not that my kids know that I was in bands, but that they see how much music means to me — how much I like to listen to it, talk about it, share it. They need to recognize that women in general (and their mother in particular) do not exist solely to produce and nurture and wait on children. They seem to inherently understand this about fathers, but I think mothers need to consciously model it. I think that being a girl in a band prepares you well for having to constantly assert your identity and challenge conventions.

Rebecca Odes (Ma’am, Love Child): My kids are conceptually very into the idea of me playing music, but I wouldn’t want them at every show. In general, I think kids’ ability to appreciate their parents’ non parent-related activities is pretty limited. Kids see their parents mostly in relationship to themselves.

What advice do you have for moms who want to start a band?

Robin Indar: Define your expectations early: Do you just want to play a party now and then, or actually cut records and travel? I hate to be negative, but realistically, the chances of “making it big” as a rock mom seem kind of slim. Maybe that’s because on top of everything else, I’m old and live in the sticks. Don’t listen to me, young talented urban moms!

Kristen Hersh: A song is like a child: It asks you to scramble the eggs and put on the sweaters, kiss it good night and never tell it what to say. If you find yourself telling a song what to say, or writing a song that you’ve heard before, scrap it and start over.

Sara Lund: Playing in a band with other moms is like a mom support group, except you get to rock out. You can bash out all your frustrations, you can transcend the banal drudgery of daily parenting life. You can also sit around and talk shit about your kids.

Viv Albertine: You better want it badly. Be truthful in your music and words. Be truthful to your children. You can’t live a double life pretending to be someone middle of the road if you’re not. They will appreciate and respect the truth, no matter how wild an artist you are. Male artists never hide their wild sides from their kids. You don’t want to bring up a stranger. Children are smart and intuitive. They know the difference between real life and art. Be as extreme as your mind lets you, otherwise it’s not worth doing.

Rebecca Odes: I think joining a band is an excellent thing for moms to do. It’s a way to relate to people that has nothing to do with your children, which I think is important for maintaining sanity when your life seems to be all about servicing your adorable need-buckets.

And the inverse of that question — what would you say to a woman in a band who is thinking about having kids?

Alicia Velasquez aka Alice Bag: Know that it is difficult, and that you will need the help of others. You must make time to nurture your creativity or you will not nurture your own soul. I always think of the airline attendants who tell you to put the oxygen mask over your own face before adjusting your child’s mask. You have to take care of yourself if you want to be able to take care of others. Also, know that not everybody likes kids. That doesn’t make them bad people; we just have different things in common with different friends. Know who enjoys your children’s company and who doesn’t, and keep both kinds of friends. You need adult-only time in addition to family time.

Kristen Hersh: This world tends to pale in comparison to our babies. Real work reflects their beauty, bullshit is drowned out. If your band is good, it will get better after babies. If your band sucks, this will become clear.

Corin Tucker: I would say that although it’s a lot of work, it’s the most joyful thing I’ve done in my life.

Gina Birch: It’s such a great thing to do. I loved going to the Hip Mama workshop at the first Ladyfest inOlympia. The world is not set up for moms to do stuff, let’s face it. But we have to try to change that.

Viv Albertine: It will slow you down. Set up a support network. You never know how motherhood will take you until you have a child. I could not do anything else for seven years. I was utterly consumed. Utterly in love. I could never have predicted that response. Other women I know couldn’t wait to get back to work.

Julia Cafritz: You are not salmon. You do not have to reproduce to survive. It is hard. Remember that.

Rebecca Odes: Be prepared to let it affect you. It’s hard to say how because it’s different for everybody, but the chances are your relationship to the things you do and love doing will change, at least temporarily.

Final thoughts?

Gina Birch: My mom didn’t get the chance to express herself artistically — or otherwise — too much, because of her background and the time of her birth. She is a great, beautiful, intelligent woman, and in many ways, so many of her talents have been wasted, and her self-esteem is often low. It sometimes makes me angry, and then I work even harder to be a nuisance and radical.

Kim Gordon: Coco doesn’t know any other lifestyle. There was a time when she just wished I had a conventional job, but I think the older she gets the more she appreciates what I do.

Sara Lund: My husband is also in a band, but his band is gone on tour a lot. For the past two years, he’s been gone more than he’s been home, and he’s gone for really long stretches. I know a lot of dads travel for work, but they are not usually gone for months at a time (unless they’re in the military, of course). So I’m on my own a lot of the time. Meanwhile, I have two bands that I love and that are putting out records I’m super proud of and would love to tour with and play tons of shows with. But I’m limited by the fact that my husband is mostly gone, which means I have to squeeze my tours in between his tours — which means we are not together as a family as much as we’d like to be.

Don’t get me wrong: Being gone so much is very hard on him. It kills him to miss so much of our son’s life, and he feels terrible for leaving me alone for so much of the time. People often ask me how I “let” him be gone so much. Thing is, I get it. I totally understand why he does it. He’s following his dream and playing music he loves to people who love it, and is on an upward trajectory with the band so that they are starting to make a little bit of a living at it.

This is the core of my frustration: Since the current confused, clusterfuck of a music business still thinks the only way for bands to be viable is to tour all the time, it is nearly impossible to be viable as a band. I make a record I think is good. Maybe a label likes it, but they won’t put it out, because I can’t commit to touring six months of the year. So I put it out myself, but I can only tour for a week or two at a time. I live on the West Coast, so to tour, I have to fly to different parts of the country and rent gear and vans, which is crazy expensive. And I already owe thousands of dollars on this record. How can I play enough shows in one or two weeks to pay for the expense of the tour, let alone the record?

Being a musician, being in a band and being a mom is so challenging, it hardly seems worth it. But, goddammit, I love playing music. Without it, I would shrivel up and die. Playing rock ‘n’ roll music is my spiritual salvation. And, I gotta say, having tasted what it feels like to make music you love and play it for people who love it back, it is intoxicating. I want to rock, and I want to rock to a crowd that is rocking along with me. It is not solitary, silent meditation. It is a tent revival with the Holy Ghost moving through everyone there. I want it, I need it, I have to have it. Like every other red-blooded American, I’m just trying to figure out how to have it all.

Pussy Riot is a Moscow-based anonymous feminist collective who play unauthorized “flash gigs” to protest Vladimir Putin’s conservative rule. They claim their average age is 25. Formed in September 2011 as a response to Putin’s decision to run for re-election, Pussy Riot occupy the space where creative protest, political art and punk meet. There are approximately eight to 10 women in the collective who perform, and 15-20 others involved in their technical crew who create videos of their shows. Members cover their faces with colorful balaclavas when they play live or do interviews and don’t reveal their real names, choosing to identify by shared pseudonyms that rotate among members along with their outfits.

Pussy Riot haven’t made any records yet, but they have released several songs as soundtracks to YouTube videos of their guerilla theater actions. Each performance shows them seizing control of public space and jumping up and down in colorful costumes to wild, frenetic punk songs with aggressive female vocals, singing political lyrics that question authority and challenge the status quo. The chaotic, celebratory nature of their shows is invigorating. In an interview with Miriam Elder for the Guardian in early February, the band said they were interested in creating a “culture of protest,” arguing that there’s a need for many different kinds of actions, explaining, “We want to create a new form of protest — maybe not such a huge one, but we compensate for that with the bright provocative and illegal nature of our performances.”

Their uniform not only disguises their identities, it congeals their individuality into a unified set of symbols. Their neon balaclavas clash with the individual pieces of clothing worn by each girl, but also express a visual unity. Bright purple, pink, green, red, yellow and blue; one girl’s tights clash with her dress, but match another girl’s balaclava, which match a third girl’s tights, whose balaclava matches the first girl’s dress, and so on. The result is an image that is striking and memorable.

Their music is fucking fantastic. The sheer kinetic life force in their sound brings a fresh urgency and exhilaration to punk. They use repetitive riffs as tools to create and release tension. Pussy Riot songs communicate, in a single instant, both the joy of freedom of expression and an anger at tyranny. Their tight, tense song structures highlight their multiplicity of female voices — the audio equivalent of their visual strategy. Both techniques work together to celebrate the annihilation of the self while allowing each girl to reconfigure her individuality in service to the group, which in turn serves a larger political purpose.

In a February interview with VICE Magazine, Pussy Riot explained that anyone could be in their band, inviting new members to join either by coming to Moscow or by starting their own local chapter of the group. When asked about the possibility of getting arrested, they said, “We have nothing to worry about, because if the repressive Putinist police crooks throw one of us in prison, five, 10, 15 or more girls will put on colorful balaclavas and continue the fight against their symbols of power.”

At the time of this interview, members of Pussy Riot had been detained and cited for participating in an action onRed Square, but they were let go later that day. In early March, three women associated with the group were arrested for allegedly participating in a “punk prayer” on February 21 that took place inMoscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior (see video below). As of this writing Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Irina Loktina have been held in solitary confinement for two months in pre-trial detention, which was recently extended for an additional two months in a controversial court hearing that resulted in 30 Pussy Riot supporters being arrested. If convicted, the three women face a possible prison sentence of seven years for “hooliganism.” Two of them are mothers of small children, and have spent at least part of their incarceration on a hunger strike. Recent articles report that Tolokonnikova is being denied medical attention.

The women’s imprisonment has sparked actions of solidarity around the globe. After FreePussyRiot.org put out a call for an international day of action, videos began to appear on YouTube made by Pussy Riot members in Poland, Germany, the U.S. and the Czech Republic. Rallies have been held in Moscow and St. Petersburg to protest their imprisonment.

Amnesty International is demanding their immediate release, claiming that the incarcerated women are political prisoners: “The entire action lasted only a few minutes and caused only minimal disruption to those using the cathedral…Instead of prosecuting members of Pussy Riot for their political opinions criticizing the Russian government and some Church officials, the Russian authorities must recognize that their protest is protected by the right to freedom of expression, guaranteed in international human rights law.”

The fact that three alleged members of Pussy Riot are being treated as if they are a danger to society proves they are genuinely subversive. They’re in prison for questioning authority and, as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s Manifesto states, deserve to be given a chance to participate in the discussion their work has inspired. What is Putin so afraid of? Nobody was hurt and no property was damaged during their actions. No one deserves to be imprisoned for her convictions and no little kid deserves to be separated from their mom because she’s in a feminist punk band. Make your own balaclava, hit the streets and demand the immediate release of Nadezhda, Maria and Irina. Free Pussy Riot, the only band that matters in 2012.

Tobi’s Top 10 for April, dedicated to Pussy Riot and political punk rockers and revolutionary feminists everywhere:

1. Flux of Pink Indians, “Progress”
2. Vice Squad, “Angry Youth”
3. Mecca Normal, “Fight for a Little”
4. Chrome, “March of the Chrome Police (A Cold Clammy Bombing)”
5. OOIOO, “Right Hand Ponk”
6. Black Flag, “Police Story”
7. Articles of Faith, “Prison”
8. Dicks, “George Jackson”
9. Team Dresch, “Hate the Christian Right”
10. Sleater-Kinney, “Combat Rock”

In the early ’80s, I saw Tina Turner in concert. I didn’t know who she was at the time — I went with my family — but I was blown away by her electric and infectious live show, which included costume changes in the middle of songs (some of which involved gold fringe), wild choreographed dancing and fearlessly raunchy stage banter. I recognized “Proud Mary” (I knew The Osmonds’ version) and “Honky Tonk Woman,” but the rest of the songs were new to my young ears. My parents, on the other hand, were less impressed; they thought it was “kinda schmaltzy.” Today, comparing YouTube videos of that tour to Turner’s earlier live shows proves they weren’t wrong. Ultimately, what we saw that night was a theatrical, medley-driven Las Vegasshow tune version of Tina Turner’s early rock ‘n’ roll act. But my experience was entirely in the moment — not a simulation, or a lesser version of something from another era. For a younger audience being introduced to her for the first time, the show was authentic and, in my case, formative.

After witnessing Tina Turner as an assertive, sexy, female rock ‘n’ roll goddess in action there was never any question in my mind that girls belonged in rock ‘n’ roll. I was not surprised to later find out that she taught Mick Jagger how to dance. I might think of her solely in terms of this footnote if I hadn’t seen her live but what I saw with my own eyes and felt in my body is something I will never forget: Tina Turner is the living history of rock ‘n’ roll, and there’s no denying her central place in the canon. By taking her show on the road, she put herself back on the map, which led to new opportunities. Private Dancer was released a few years later, solidifying her place in rock history.

In 1982, the Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat, their debut, held the No. 1 spot for six weeks in a row, and would go on to sell 2 million copies. According to Rolling Stone’s Book of Women in Rock, they were “the most commercially successful self-contained all-girl band in history.” Inspired by Gina Schock from the Go-Go’s, I started playing drums when I was 12. I went to see them live, I joined the fan club (I still have the Let’s Have a Party newsletters) and I bought their records the day they came out, standing outside in the rain waiting for the record store to open. To this day, I have a framed, autographed copy of Beauty and the Beat hanging above my stereo.

But despite legions of devoted fans and massive chart success the Go-Go’s were not well respected. Critics complained that they couldn’t play their instruments. Guys judged them solely by their appearance and their female peers put them down. On the whole, the prevailing attitude was dismissive. As a young girl drummer, this angered me and awakened my feminist consciousness. It motivated me to fight against double standards in rock and build a community of support between girls in bands, which eventually led to helping found the riot grrl movement in the ’90s, an international grassroots feminist network of punk girls who made fanzines and encouraged one another to start bands.

One of the biggest honors of my life occurred when my band Bikini Kill was asked to open for the Go-Go’s at one of their reunion shows in ’94. I was thrilled to get to thank them personally for inspiring me to start my own all-girl band in high school. More importantly, their performance that night was a collective affirmation of their legacy. By reuniting in a decade when their massive contribution to the history of rock ‘n’ roll was celebrated, the Go-Go’s assumed their rightful place in history as groundbreaking trailblazers for female musicians.

Oh, in case you’re wondering: No, Bikini Kill is not getting the band back together.

Not yet, anyway.

Tobi’s Top 10 Tunes for March

1. Ike & Tina Turner, “Mojo Queen”
2. The Puppets, “Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart”
3.Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”
4. The Runaways, “Cherry Bomb”
5. The Go Go’s, “How Much More”
6. The Pretenders, “Precious”
7. L7, “Shove”
8. The Breeders, “Iris”
9. Sleater-Kinney, “Let’s Call It Love”
10. Dum Dum Girls, “Just A Creep”

In 1973 The Who recorded a double-album about a character named Jimmy the Mod. Set in post-war England, Quadrophenia documents a slice of 1960s working-class youth culture that The Who were involved in creating. Critics gave the ambitious project mixed reviews. As a musically elaborate prog-rock-opera about mods – who generally prefer the upbeat minimalism of frenetic R&B – it’s formalistically awkward. Coming on the heels of Tommy and Who’s Next it seemed confusing, murky and second-rate. Roger Daltrey famously disliked it, getting in a fistfight with Pete Townshend which landed the less than street-savvy guitarist in the hospital. A late-’70s film version of Quadrophenia starring Phil Daniels clarified the storyline and Jimmy came to life, inspiring the mod-revival in England and connecting with a cult audience of American teenagers in the 1980s, who viewed it at late-night screenings or on home video.

Although there was a small mod revival in the U.S., the kids who discovered Quadrophenia as a midnight movie were just as likely to be rockers, theater kids or punk-rock skateboarders. Reagan-era suburban downtowns were deserted, as the centers of commerce shifted from local shops to malls, mirroring the desolate decay of boarded-up city centers leftover from the urban riots of the late ’60s. Street kids and weirdoes flocked to old movie theaters, hung out at makeshift all-ages show spaces and dug through the cultural trash of the ’60s and ’70s that filled thrift stores, searching for both cheap entertainment and larger meaning. In this pre-internet era, this was the only way for curious youth to map out a chronology of pop-culture history – as if connecting the dots would lead to some hidden treasure. Along with the DIY ethic of hardcore, this rummaging inspired kids to create their own youth culture, defining themselves through music and style. As one of these kids, Quadrophenia captured my imagination.

Born to teenage parents at the end of the ’60s, The Who is the first group I remember. As an infant, I appeared in a (pre-Ken Russell) home-movie version of Tommy. I recall listening to Quadrophenia in the rain on my Walkman and totally identifying with it. Although The Who were not from my generation, Jimmy’s sense of rage and hopelessness resonated with my own despair at not understanding how to fit in at school or get along at home.

Like the Clash movie Rude Boy, Quadrophenia is told from the point of view of the fan. By making Jimmy the hero, the Who shined a light on their audience, including us in the cultural narrative. It empowered young listeners to consider their own story. The mentally unstable Jimmy is a lost, alienated kid trapped between institutions of conformity: doctors, family, church, heterosexuality, work, school – even mod, his chosen subculture. The album’s message is that we are social creatures, that we experience our life individually but it’s society that forms us. We aren’t separate from it, though at times we may feel so disconnected from it we feel suicidal. Quadrophenia‘s central question is, “Will Jimmy live or die?” It is a story that demands contemplation, especially if you’re a kid who doesn’t experience Jimmy as a symbol of youth, but one that identifies with his plight. It’s no wonder that ’80s teens connected with it more than baby boomers.

Revisiting Jimmy the Mod as an adult moves me to grab my black-and-white Rickenbacker guitar and play it at a volume too loud for my apartment, or for the middle-aged lady version of ’80s-teen-me to walk around town in an oversized mod parka obsessing over Quadrophenia rarities on my mp3 player: “I wear my wartime coat in the wind and sleet!” “We are the Mods We are the Mods We Are We Are We Are the Mods!”

I look forward to the next chapter of the story.

Tobi’s Top 10 Tunes for February:

1. The Who, “Cut My Hair”
2. Pete Townshend, “Dirty Jobs (demo)”
3. Television Personalities, “I Was a Mod Before You Was a Mod”
4. Booker T and the MG’s, “Green Onions”
5. The Small Faces, “Own Up Time”
6. P.P. Arnold, “The First Cut is the Deepest”
7. Comet Gain, “An Arcade from The Warm Rain That Falls”
8. Beat Happening, “Foggy Eyes”
9. Talulah Gosh, “Steaming Train”
10. The Wildebeests, “Rowed Out”