5 Records with Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker

Their latest album, Little Rope, deftly threads together elements from each of these recent efforts while also tapping into the raucous energy and emotional depth of their early era more than any record since the triumphant No Cities. It’s an album shaped by grief, growth, and the maturing of one of modern rock’n’roll’s most fruitful and long-running creative partnerships. 

“Basically it boils down to two driven, nerdy people that really wanted to write music and be writers,” Tucker says. “We have different strengths, we’re kind of opposites in terms of what we bring to the writing. I think just learning to communicate constructively over the years is something that we’ve done. There’s a lot of feelings involved when you’re telling your stories and writing your songs – it’s hard to make yourself that vulnerable to someone. So I think we’ve really always started with a basis of respect, and I think we still try and do that.”

Corin Tucker: “I wanted to go with records that I feel sort of changed the musical landscape for the Pacific Northwest. Jimi Hendrix was just such a groundbreaking musician. His music did so much and with so many different layers. When he was playing the National Anthem at Woodstock on the electric guitar, he was so quintessentially American rock and roll and yet also challenged that in so many different ways with what he did. I think we should be really proud of him for the Pacific Northwest and for just kind of putting Seattle on the map as a place where a musician could grow up and come from.”

“I grew up with parents that definitely had his records and their collection, but I remember in high school, hearing ‘Crosstown Traffic,’ listening to that song and just being like, this is an incredible artist. It’s really interesting what he did with vocals and guitar. He was able to push the boundaries of the instrument and be super experimental but always catchy and just did a lot of heavy lifting with melody that I thought was really inspiring.”

“Heart are such an incredibly important band for women, but for everyone I think they were such great writers, and they had so many hits on this record. We all just grew up listening to these songs on the radio, and to have this female-fronted band that just had everything going for it – not just commanding but also sexy and slightly tormented and with interesting writing – kind of all the things that the Pacific Northwest is known for, I feel like they really blueprinted it in the ‘70s.”

“I remember when Sleater-Kinney first toured with Pearl Jam, their production manager was this guy who had been Heart’s production manager. It was just fascinating to me that there is this legacy of Pacific Northwest artists. There’s not many that have made it really big, but the ones who have I think they really have a special place in our hearts.”

“I feel like this record just blew everything open for my generation. Not that they started the grunge thing or were the first ones to do it, but this record blew up so hard it crystallized everything. It was so catchy, they were able to take this gross grungy sound and synthesize it with melody in a way that I don’t think other bands necessarily were able to achieve, and the vocals were so above everything and catchy in a way that is really hard to do.”

“And yet their songs were so specific to a kind of working class Pacific Northwest. It tells the tale of a time before Microsoft blew up and the kind of stressors that I think were happening in the Pacific Northwest before all of that. It’s like a document of Seattle and Olympia and the whole time right before everything changed.”

“And it was just right place, right time for me. As soon as I moved to Olympia to go to Evergreen, they played in the mods – the dorms where I was living – and then they played in my friend’s basement, and then the media building at the college. And it was wild. I mean, they were one of the best live bands ever. And so fun and completely free. So yeah, they definitely changed everything.”

“So number four, it’s a little bit cheating because It didn’t actually come out as an album at the time. It was the Revolution Girl Style Now cassette by Bikini Kill. It came out later on vinyl. It was all of the great live songs that they performed, sort of the core of that band just starting the whole riot grrrl thing with those songs. I feel like it was definitely a mission statement for women in music, women and culture, saying, ‘we don’t want to take a backseat anymore, we’re tired of the idea that we’re supposed to be second class in music.’ It really took those ideas of feminism and critiquing culture and put it into these catchy basically pop songs. I mean, they’re punk songs, but they are so poppy.”

“I thought it was pretty brilliant, in a way of having a real message and wanting to get it across by convincing people to sing along to it. They were so good at it, and they were such a great live band, and they influenced a whole new generation of young songwriters like myself and other people.”

“Elliott Smith, the first record, I feel like it was almost this other door opening when that record came out. I met Elliott when we played with Heatmiser in Seattle – which was not a great show for either of us, there were like hardly any people there – but I really liked them and their band. They were really funny.”

“So I was really into Heatmiser and the songs that they had, and then when Elliott started doing the solo stuff, it was different than anything anyone in our little indie scene was doing. It was so quiet, it was so intricate and soft-spoken and heartbreaking, and it changed everything.”

“It’s funny because the radical thing for girls was breaking this gender stereotype of being quiet and soft spoken and the girls were doing the loud screaming thing and pushing the boundaries on that. And then Elliott’s was like, I’m gonna be soft-spoken and quiet and emotional as possible. It was so profound, he was sort of breaking a taboo with that, there weren’t a lot of other men doing that at the time, and I think that people really related to it.”