It was writing about music for NPR – connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community – that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical. – Carrie Brownstein
For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved. – Carrie Brownstein
I don’t think I would live outside of the Northwest. I think the quality of life in Portland is really good. People move from intense, high-powered jobs, and move to Portland, work half as much and live twice as good. – Carrie Brownstein
Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce. – Carrie Brownstein
The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music. – Carrie Brownstein
Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock ‘n’ roll – it’s the same steps with different degrees of difficulty. – Carrie Brownstein
I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres. – Carrie Brownstein
With Portlandia, I don’t think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We’re okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy. – Carrie Brownstein
Music has always been my constant, my salvation. It’s cliche to write that, but it’s true. – Carrie Brownstein
To really be tortured by a song, it needs to be more than just something you don’t like or don’t get; it has to make your skin crawl by getting under it. Strangely, that last clause could describe provocative or daring music, as well. – Carrie Brownstein
With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song. – Carrie Brownstein
Chemistry cannot be manufactured or forced, so Wild Flag was not a sure thing, it was a ‘maybe,’ a ‘possibility.’ But after a handful of practice sessions, spread out over a period of months, I think we all realized that we could be greater than the sum of our parts. – Carrie Brownstein
With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I’m able to go with ‘Portlandia’ has a wider range, but also a brighter range. – Carrie Brownstein
Over the years, music put a weapon in my hand and words in my mouth, it backed me up and shielded me, it shook me and scared me and showed me the way; music opened me up to living and being and feeling. – Carrie Brownstein
I’m pretty horrible at relationships and haven’t been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on – returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy – is what I know; that feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a different kind of person to stay. – Carrie Brownstein
With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive. – Carrie Brownstein
The hedonistic lifestyle is difficult to achieve when you’re still carrying your own gear. Trust me that you don’t feel glamorous with a 60-pound amp in your arms; it’s a lot less sexy than toting a vodka gimlet and impossible to do in heels. – Carrie Brownstein
I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself. – Carrie Brownstein
Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I’m not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing. – Carrie Brownstein
After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise. – Carrie Brownstein
It’s hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous. – Carrie Brownstein
I’ll admit that I’m not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast. – Carrie Brownstein
