Carrie Brownstein goes deep on the power of sharing emotion through music

Mar. 1—It's a commitment she made decades ago to her craft and to her audience.

Carrie Brownstein, co-founder of punk rock band Sleater-Kinney and sketch comedy show Portlandia, is no stranger to mining personal perspective and emotion for her art. But this time, it's different.

The newest Sleater-Kinney album, Little Rope, was produced in the midst of a personal tragedy. Brownstein learned midway through recording the album in the fall of 2022 that her mother and stepfather had died in a car crash, and the songs began to take on another life in her mind. Now, as she performs Sleater-Kinney shows for 24 out of the 31 days in March, the songs will transform for her again from intensely personal expressions of grief to public engines of catharsis.

"Music is an interesting beast," says Brownstein, who will play Albuquerque's Historic El Rey Theater with bandmate Corin Tucker on Saturday, March 2. "You can write a song in one state of mind that might be a place of despair or loss or grief. When you perform it, you're met with the moment.

"You're met with your current self. You're met with the collective feeling of the audience. Music can transport you and transform something from one emotional state to another. I don't worry about songs being written from a place where I was feeling unsettled or unstable because I know they might end up having a completely different character in a live setting."

details

Sleater-Kinney Little Rope tour, with Black Belt Eagle Scout

* 8 p.m. Saturday, March 2

* Historic El Rey Theater

* 622 Central Avenue SW

* $29.50

* 505-510-2582; elreylive.com

Brownstein says she doesn't just know that truth as a performer; she's also experienced it as a fan of other bands and artists. The art they put into the world — created as a product of angst or even ebullience — can become something entirely different in the mind of the beholder.

Punk rock was Brownstein's first vehicle of expression, calling out to her when she was 15 years old. The Seattle native says that like many children of the '80s, she listened to a lot of pop music, and once she opened the door to punk, it changed her life — in a good way.

"It gave me a voice. It gave me direction. It gave me a way to express my teen angst," she says. "I wanted to be a part of it, to be not just an observer but a participant. So I used my hard-earned money to buy a guitar. I think my parents were wary of electric guitar as a potential fad that they didn't necessarily want to support at the time. I bought a guitar, and one of my friends in high school was Jeremy Enigk, who's in a band called Sunny Day Real Estate. He taught me a couple chords, and I took it from there. I figured the rest out on my own."

Brownstein started at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, but her creative life hit the fast lane after she transferred to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She arrived the summer before the semester began and immersed herself in the music scene, meeting people who would play a huge role in her life.

It was at Evergreen where she met her future bandmate, Tucker, as well as Kathleen Hanna, Kathi Wilcox, and Toby Vail, who had already formed the punk band Bikini Kill. Brownstein says Olympia also had a fertile concert scene when she was a student there in the '90s that attracted such performers as Beck, Rancid, and Elliott Smith.

"It wasn't too difficult to meet everyone and insinuate myself into this insular world. But what I wanted to do was play and be a part of it," she says. "There were so many amazing musicians and bands. ... It was really a special moment in time, and I think even then I knew there was something magical about it. Olympia was a small town; it certainly wasn't a place that a label or a booking agent would tell their band like, 'You need to go to Olympia.' But all these bands would come there because they knew there was something special about it."

Brownstein and Tucker named their band Sleater-Kinney for the road that connects Olympia to Lacey, Washington, and would go on to make seven albums between 1995 and 2005. At that point, they reached an intermission; they were exhausted from making music and touring and weren't sure how they could keep going as a band. So they took a break; Tucker made a couple solo albums, and Brownstein formed a side project called Wild Flag with fellow rock band veterans Rebecca Cole, Mary Timony, and Janet Weiss.

She started writing for NPR and began exploring developing her skills as a writer. She developed Portlandia with her friend, comedian, and fellow musician, Fred Armisen.

Sleater-Kinney was sidelined during Portlandia's peak for eight years, but Brownstein and Tucker came back together with renewed purpose. In retrospect, Brownstein isn't sure they needed to formally step away in order to come back again.

"I think we probably wouldn't have taken a break. Or we would've taken a break and not necessarily declared it an indefinite hiatus," she says. "I think there's so much more of a conversation now, and people are able to admit to their own sense of fallibility and exhaustion and a need for mental health and caretaking.

Pull Quote

"We were on a ride we felt we couldn't get off. We had put out an album every year and a half or two years for just about a decade, and there didn't feel like there was a way to step away for a moment. It felt like we needed a more serious rupture; but I think looking back, I wish we had just said, 'Hey, let's just take the next two years off.' We didn't have that foresight."

Portlandia originated from her and Saturday Night Live alum Armisen just making each other laugh. The sketch comedy show, which starred Brownstein and Armisen and an array of actors and musicians in cameos, ran eight seasons, and together they've kicked around ideas for another project, Brownstein says. But right now, she's not sure where it's headed and has other projects on her plate.

She wrote a memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Riverhead Books, 2016), that she adapted for a TV pilot (that ultimately didn't get picked up). She's signed on to direct a biopic about the rock group Heart but says the project is still in development and has an uncertain timeline.

But the thread that connects these projects is that they're all associated with people she truly admires.

"What feels the most mysterious to me or like lightning striking is not the success of it but the fact that they were both born of an organic friendship," she says of Portlandia and Sleater-Kinney. "Corin and I started Sleater-Kinney because we were friends in Olympia, and Fred Armisen and I were friends.

"It's amazing to me — especially in a medium like television — for something to start out very haphazard with two people collaborating. It wasn't made in a machine; we weren't paired up by studios or producers. That feels very rare, so I do feel lucky. It's two rarified experiences, and I see them as connected in the sense that it's me making something with people that I love."