Kim gordon.
Welcome to apple music.
Thank you for stepping into the studio to have a chat and talk about this new record in life and what's going on.
How are you pretty good?
Yeah, you know, just starting to rehearse and um, i've just been kind of busy also with everything seems to happen at once.
I feel like this music in rehearsal at least, or getting ready to perform it live.
Um fun, this record is easier than the last record.
The last record was a real puzzle.
Um, Because the band doesn't play on the –, doesn't record on the – On the music.
Yeah,
Yeah, so that record was a real puzzle figuring out this is a lot more straightforward.
When you were in the studio working with Justin Raisin on this music and, to your point, there's a little bit of separation.
There's a lot of separation going on now.
One's a recording experience and then one is an interpretation of that for live and it becomes something else.
So just getting into the creative side of it before it becomes a live show – how did you and Justin land in this place where distortion is beautiful and the drums are?
You know?
You've tapped into this wonderful program space and it's just the whole thing.
Over the last three records has been building.
And I just would love to go back to where it kind of started for you and Justin on day one.
Yeah.
I'm pretty motivated by rhythm and I've always liked rap music and um, you know, I'm not like a real singer.
So um, you know, i use things like space and dynamics and things like that and um, i don't know, like we just kind of um somehow like it's unlikely, we're an unlikely pair but um, he somehow gets uh, my sensibility and he does come from sort of a punk rock background And he's really up for trouble.
You know, like he's up for breaking things down and screwing with people's expectations.
And especially like he kind of gets a kick out of kind of putting me into sort of kind of like rap situation.
Like, you know, like, take this.
What do you think of this?
And um, so I dunno, it's kind of um and then I like bringing distortion um in my sensibility to to it.
You know, like a lot of I think when rappers reference rock a lot of it is just kind of like more conventional rock and roll.
And so for me, that actually doesn't, it's not so interesting.
You're a fan of rap music and I feel like when I got to know you through Sonic Youth, that was at a time when rap music was really finding its audience in an uncompromising way.
And it's always been an uncompromising art form.
But obviously as it became more commercial, it found multiple lanes to reach people.
Back then I felt like Public Enemy was the most successful band on the planet in rap music at that time and they're one of the most uncompromising in the history of music.
And it must have been just really exciting for you to see it changing in real time and be at the center of that, because you and Sonic Youth, and subsequently right up to the present day, it's not an uncomfortable place for you creatively to be.
I feel like you on that bill in any festival made total sense when I was in it in the 90s.
You know what I mean?
It must have been a beautiful time thinking back on it, watching that just take shape.
Yeah, it was exciting because we were suddenly having a bigger budget to record with and getting more recognition.
It was such a gradual process, evolution with Sonic Youth, sort of looking for more distribution, which is why we signed a major label.
Um, we didn't entirely get that um, but we somehow did.
It did elevate our name in a way that we we didn't really expect.
And, um, it was just really perseverance.
But it it's kind of like, you know, when we first started, and I think a lot of bands feel like this.
Even if you're in the middle of New York City, you can feel like you're in the most banal part of a american suburb.
You know, thinking of all the the cool things that happened that are over, that you've missed, and how to be a part of that, or how do you?
How do you get there and and just kind of having this feeling of uh, you know reaching for something or just wanting to, to kind of make a mark, somehow that makes a difference.
And I feel like I still have that feeling of just reaching, and I'm never anywhere really.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
It's sort of one foot in to your point what you missed and then the rest of it is focused on what can I contribute and how can I leave a mark on that?
And jumping from then to now.
Listening to what you've made on this music, did it surprise you as much as anybody else when you listen back to it and find out where you are as a creative and the kind of music you're making?
Do you get a surprise from it?
Yes and no.
I mean, I'm kind of just doing using all the kind of vocabulary of things that I was initially interested in when I first moved to New York.
What inspired me to want to play music to begin with, like with no wave bands, you know, bands like DNA and Mars and Glenn Branca and yeah so
In a way, I haven't really changed that much.
Did you ever realize it at the time?
I'm not going to stay back there because I want to get back here, but they're all intertwined to me.
It's all one life.
Where you would sit there and go.
Huh where we started and what inspired us and what made us want to make music.
And we're headlining a festival in front of 60,000 people and everyone's wearing our t-shirt.
This is interesting how things slowly start to seep into consciousness that seems unrealistic.
It amazes me all the time the way people use the word noise.
Because that was a derogatory term when we were, you know, in the eighties, like it was, like we were dental drill music.
And um, you know, and uh Thurston um curated this uh festival called the noise fest, because at this art space cause there was nowhere to play.
And and there was a great quote um from the owner of um her Oz, this club uptown.
They were closing and he said Well, all the bands just sound like noise now.
That's where we got the name for that.
But, you know, now it's kind of people making hip hop or listening to like shoegaze music.
For sure.
It's really interesting.
This album in particular, when did you decide that you wanted to follow up The Collective, which was obviously a pretty eye-opening experience for everybody?
And to your point, you solved a lot of problems with that how to play it live and it reached people.
When did you go, okay, let's make another one?
I don't know.
Justin just kept bugging me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When are you going to come in?
I've got some ideas.
And you know, I guess at the time, I mean, I did have some potential art shows on the horizon, but I didn't really have anything else to do.
Do you like being in the studio?
Do you enjoy that process?
I do.
Yeah.
It's kind of, I mean, I approach it pretty performatively, I think.
And I don't sit there with him and wade through things.
I kind of hate listening to my voice like that.
So you know I'll go in, you know like he'll send me stuff and I'll see what there is that I feel like I can do something on.
And then write some lyrics and go in.
Usually put some guitar down because it's like a painter having a white canvas.
You need to dirty it up before you can do anything on it.
And then I'll sometimes just I don't know exactly how the lyrics are going to go, but I'll improvise often while I'm doing it and other things will come out of my mouth.
Where the hell did that come from?
And do you ever listen back to the music that you make, or do you set it free?
When you've done it, it's done, the process is done.
You know, I'll be excited about it.
I mean, so I will listen a few times, but then Yeah, like I won't listen to it and I don't even want to learn the lyrics.
So you have a complicated relationship with your voice as an instrument?
Well, I just kind of just start thinking, you know, that's dumb.
I don't know.
No, I like the sound.
Actually, I do like the sound of my voice, but I don't know.
I just don't want to get to the point where then I start being self-conscious about what I'm doing.
It's a short window.
Yeah.
I mean, this record was done last May.
Wow.
We did it really fast.
Yeah, so it's hard to, it's been hard to keep excited.
I feel like that's very much in line with how things are.
The relationship that you've developed on this, these songs with technology, is really interesting and and and exciting and kind of vicarious to listen to.
Like on dirty tech, the way you're talking about it, almost like okay, if it does have a mind of its own then, like anything else with a mind of its own, it's going to have intentions that I'm either going to be submissive to or otherwise.
It's fascinating to me.
Can we just elaborate a little bit on that and what went into that song and your thoughts about that?
Because it is just the way you're describing tech is like.
I think part of the problem is we still think tech's over here.
And it's really not.
It's here.
Yeah, I mean people, I think, have always thought technology is cool and sexy and seductive and always kind of welcomed it, you know, from the time of like the idea of streamlining.
Yeah, efficiency.
Even in the way something looks, you know, like in the atomic age.
And recently I was kind of rereading these D.H.
Lawrence books and the characters are actually sort of bemoaning post-industrial life and, you know, after World War I and, oh God, now we're, you know, people are going to factories and working all the time and wasn't they didn't know that that's what they were buying into feeling and i was like wow that's really interesting i first read those books for the sexual excitement as a teenager but now you know it's actually anyway i just thought it was um interesting how it was so relevant to today and and um You know, we do have a complicated relationship with technology.
It's kind of, we wanted it and wanted it and wanted it.
And without actually knowing, like it just came so fast, it came faster and faster and faster.
And you're right.
It is, it's here.
I feel like we've been a frog in a pot of boiling water and now it's really hot.
So the relationship with it is not maybe what we thought it would be.
I saw this wonderful, I wouldn't even call it a documentary.
It's just a wonderful collection of images and thoughts from back in 1995 that Tamara Davis has made, called Best Summer, which I saw.
And you play a part in that because you're on a tour in Australasia with Sonic Youth.
I was at that show in Melbourne.
Really?
Yeah, I saw the show.
And I was at the Auckland show that you played with Foo Fighters, I think at Logan Campbell Center, just before you went on that tour.
OK.
What struck me about that, and the reason I raise it, is because it speaks to this idea of what life was before.
We're both old enough now to remember what the summer felt like before the internet and distraction.
Have you seen the documentary?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I bet.
Isn't it amazing how everyone's reading?
And I know that seems like a weird thing to say.
Everyone's reading something interesting because we're not on our phones.
And when you pack your bag to go away, you take a camera maybe and a book.
It's funny, yeah.
We actually, we did a lot of touring with Mudhoney in Australia and they would make fun of us.
Because you're readers?
We were reading.
Because we got a group of readers here.
And they were such partiers.
What are you guys going to do?
Go read a book?
Yeah, exactly.
But you know, did you have the same feeling when you watched it?
That it was like wow, really within a couple of years everything had kind of changed and we were really in the internet age and it felt like we didn't have that presence.
Yeah, well, I was also surprised.
You know she shot it with this high eight camera.
That was pretty high definition and The colors looked amazing and the sound was incredible and everyone looked really good.
Well, everyone is really young, but it also it didn't you know like overly define the imperfections.
But yeah, it was, it was just that last sort of glimmer of what it would be like for us.
Yeah, that was, yeah, before the internet is true.
Getting back to this wonderful record.
Uh, where did the, was there a sort of starting point for you on this album?
Was there a song or a piece of music that you made where it was like, okay, we're off to the races.
This is good.
Do you remember?
I think dirty tech was actually maybe the first song, and yeah, it just really uh it.
It all really came together very quickly.
We wanted to do short songs, kind of like no wave songs almost.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess I've been surprised, like in a couple reviews that I've seen, they refer to it as a kind of a pop record, and I know I just didn't really think of it that way.
I don't care, but I mean I really don't like genres and I just sort of thought that was kind of interesting.
Did you have any desire when Sonic Youth finished?
Did you feel compelled to make music or did you see it as an opportunity to go explore other things that you perhaps hadn't had time to go do because it had been such a full-time occupation?
Well, I definitely didn't think I was going to make a solo record.
I had this improv-based duo with Bill Nace called Body Head, and that's mainly what I thought was going to be my musical outlet and, um and other than that, just pursuing uh, visual art more intensely um, as a practice.
And yeah, it wasn't.
You know justin, when i moved out here i i met him by accident and yeah, he just kept bugging me.
Were you excited about moving back to los angeles?
I'd imagine, based on the timeline because i'm a parent my kids in 1917.
It was probably around the time when you weren't full-time parenting as much.
So was that kind of the motivation for coming back to the West Coast and changing the scenery?
Yeah.
Well, Coco was in college.
And so I didn't have to be in Northampton anymore, which we had sort of moved up there as kind of like a good community to raise a kid in and close to New York.
And I still have very, very my closest friends there.
Yeah, I just, I had to leave.
And there were things about LA I missed.
As someone who I kind of like and I know you spent a lot of your childhood in Los Angeles and California, a little bit of traveling, but I see so much of what you do artistically as being this kind of city experience.
I feel like Sonic Youth really reflects and your music and you really reflects this idea of like okay, I'm in it.
And I remember when I read somewhere years ago that you'd moved into a more sort of like quieter area to raise Coco and to build a different kind of lifestyle.
I thought, I wonder if I'll ever get to ask you this question.
I've always wanted to ask you sort of how that felt or what the motivation was behind that, as somebody who probably has taken so much from an urban experience and from a citywide experience.
And what prompted the decision to have a quieter experience from a parenting point of view?
I couldn't figure out how to be a parent in New York.
I just, uh, I dunno, the nannies at the park, the competition with schools.
I dunno.
I just we had friends that lived up in North Hampton and it's kind of like a small experimental music scene.
And Jay Mascis lived up there in Amherst and we thought that was exotic.
The cows were exotic.
And it was kind of interesting, after living somewhere where you're right in the center, to suddenly not be in the center anymore.
And it's beautiful up there.
It's sort of so much nature.
And the thing I miss the most was actually the art world.
And we commuted back and forth to work in New York.
And our studio was in New York.
So we're still kind of in the city in a way.
Just to talk about your artwork for a second, and if there is any commonality between the way that you look at or feel music and find yourself in the middle of making music versus what you do in your art.
It can be collaborative too, but obviously it leans into more of a self-expression.
There may not be a Justin around you when you're deciding to do more visual art.
So how that begins and where that sort of if there's a sort of common space that you find yourself in where you're like, oh okay, I think I have something to say away from music.
I guess a way of thinking more internally and actually not having to be in public and just kind of a nice kind of I don't know something that feels it's not less complicated.
It's harder, actually, for me, because I know more about art.
I don't know anything about music, really.
But I always tried to keep them separately, but they've sort of come more and more together.
When you listen back to the record before you let it go.
Was there a piece of music or were there songs out there that really uncovered something that you didn't realize?
You felt
Were there moments?
I know it comes from a subconscious, but were there surprises for you?
Like a song that was like, okay, I've got to listen to myself right now.
That's something that's really come out of nowhere for me.
I don't even remember recording that.
I mean, that song, Not Today, I feel like...
When I did it, it was surprising even how I sang it.
I love the vocal on that song so much because it's rare that it becomes more of a melodic experience, and yet it's beautiful.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I just don't know where it came from.
That was a surprise at the time.
In a way, I guess it was sort of about transcending something.
You have some shows coming out.
We started talking, and you were saying you're in rehearsal and doing that.
Do you enjoy that side of this?
Obviously, we don't.
I don't know.
Do you need to do shows?
Do you do them because you want to do them?
What's your relationship with it?
That's a good question.
I ask myself all the time um, once i'm in it, i really i do enjoy performing um, but i'm kind of still because we're rehearsing and our rehearsals are even broken up because i have to go to new york and sell the show and i i'm not letting myself get excited yet about the tour.
Yeah, I um have thought about like well, what if I just didn't go out and tour?
You know, it just also gets harder and harder to tour and make money and um, and I don't love having people work for me.
Um, I mean, I love the girls in my band and we.
It is like this other family and I've really tried to make it feel like we're a band.
I mean, it's been easy to do that and they're great and, but it's, it's not something that I was, I had to get used to, you know, it was, I just wasn't, how am I, how's this going to be?
And even initially with the first record, like playing with people that I aside from Sarah, the guitar player I didn't know.
And it was all a new experience for me.
Yeah, that must be the first time that actually ever happened, because it's all been purposeful and by design up until that point.
Yeah, it's all been kind of organic.
And so, you know, I'm just trying not to really think about it too much.
But I'm sure we'll really love performing once I get on that stage.
Yeah, of course.
And this music is so dynamic and exciting.
The first show that I saw out of two years of not going to shows was a Playboi Carti concert.
My kid dragged me to the forum to see Playboi Carti, who I'm a fan of.
I think he's like as an artist at least.
I think he's a very, very exciting sort of artist and the noise that was coming out of the speakers I was not prepared for because I'd been off out of practice and I wasn't prepared for the energy of the crowd.
I wasn't prepared for any of it and it was the first time in a long time.
I sort of blacked out for the first two minutes, like I did as a teenager at a concert.
Oh wow, I was just like well, I don't really know what's going on, I just know it's really, really exciting And there's so much of that spirit in this music and the distortion and the chaos that you've created with Justin.
Do you listen to that stuff as well?
Or have you stumbled into this world at his recommendation and your taste?
But does it?
Has it opened that door to that world for you, to some of these musicians?
You know he's mentioned him.
Like he said, when we first did Bye Bye, he was like well, my brother Jerry and I made this for Floyd McCarty, but we thought it was too wild for him and said let's give it to Kim.
So I mean I have listened, like I, I kind of dip into it, but I, it's kind of something I mean to go listen to, you know, but I, And then I'm always actually disappointed in the records.
Interesting because to me, I hear such a connection in the way that they are painting and the way that, as a fan and you are painting like you are drawing key observations and words that mean something to you.
It is like art and you're placing it in a really beautiful way that makes me drawn in.
One of the criticisms that these artists have had over the years is they're not technically rapping, or they're not stringing sentences together or bars and things for 64 bars.
They're just taking words.
Yeah, that's cool.
I like that.
See, that's the genre thing.
It's like, oh, you're supposed to do this.
Yeah, they're not into that.
Music is just about freedom.
And people forget that.
Do you ever think about life in the in a reflective way, or are you more?
Is your?
Is your happy, happier place to be thinking about what's next?
Do you reflect much?
Are you a reflective person?
Half and half.
Half and half.
When you reflect, do you ever think about your journey as a musician or as an artist?
Do you think about what you achieved with Sonic Youth?
I mean as a fan of that band and of you, but of that band I think about the huge impact it's had on my life.
Is it one of those things that you have come to accept, or does it surprise you that where you started versus what you achieved?
I don't really reflect on it too much.
It's hard to feel others' appreciation for it.
I am totally surprised at what we achieved.
And I think it's really hard for bands now.
People don't really know what to do.
Nobody wants to get in a van and tour endlessly or any of those things.
It's so different now.
But I mean I'm secretly very happy and um like something will come up.
I'll see a video or something.
I'll pop up and I'll go, Oh my God, that was cool.
You know, but I, I enjoy it quietly.
And, um, yeah.
Is this a place that you'd like to keep coming back to with Justin?
I mean, You know, I love this music.
Well, a lot of people love this music.
How does it affect your decision making and what you want to do creatively next?
Do you feel drawn back into this because of how we feel, or has it got to be just like?
Yeah, I want to do it.
It's very fun to work with him, but I would like to switch it up somehow, but I'm not sure exactly yet.
I love this music and listen to it all the time.
The new album's fantastic.
I'm so happy.
Thank you, Kim.
Thank you.
