Out musician Carrie Brownstein is mostly known for being one-third of the now-defunct legendary band Sleater-Kinney. Since their hiatus in 2004, she’s kept herself busy by doing anything unrelated to music. She’s kept a regular blog for NPR, written pieces for Slate.com and also films short comedic video pieces as part of a duo called ThunderAnt. (Her partner in crime is Saturday Night Live‘s Fred Armisen.)
As somewhat of a Brownstein superfan, I was psyched to learn that she’d released some new songs in collaboration with Mary Timony, except they are actually a few years old. Previously unreleased under the moniker of The Spells, the four tracks (two available for download on her blog) are a brief reminder of what we’re missing with Brownstein not playing music. In an interview with Pitchforkmedia.com today, she said she was completely happy to be doing anything but.
“I’ve mostly been focusing on writing, and I’ve really enjoyed not playing music [laughs],” she said. “It will always be part of my life, but I don’t feel the immediate need to be playing for people. Yeah, I got kind of tired of playing, I think. But I think it will be part of my life again, maybe. Maybe not right now.”
So what about a Sleater-Kinney reunion? Is that at least something that’s not only in our hopes and dreams, but our future?
“Yeah, I don’t think we’re ruling it out,” she said. “But it’s not going to be any time soon. We probably wouldn’t use the word ‘reunion’ [laughs]. We would say that the hiatus is off. It’s just semantics, but yeah [laughs]. ‘Reunion’ is a scary word. There’s some horrible connotations in the word ‘reunion’ [laughs]. It involves a lot of, like, face makeup, and everyone commenting about how much older we look. It’s precarious: the longer you wait, I think it gets worse.”
Until then, we can look forward to a non-fiction book and other freelance pieces in Brownstein’s future, and also an appearance in a Portland indie film called Some Days Are Better Than Others, also starring James Mercer from The Shins. And we’ll always have our favorite Sleater-Kinney albums to keep us company until they return to the stage.
