Song Exploder - Sleater-Kinney - The Future Is Here

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Sleater-Kinney was formed in 1994 by Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein. Drummer Janet Weiss was a member of the band from 1997 until 2019. In Time Magazine in 2001, author and critic Greil Marcus named Sleater-Kinney “America’s Best Band.” Over the years, they’ve made nine albums, including this year’s The Center Won’t Hold, which was produced by Annie Clark of St. Vincent. In this episode, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein break down how the song “The Future Is Here” was made. songexploder.net/sleater-kinney

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. My name is Tau Wyn. Slater Kinney was formed in 1994 by singer and guitarist Corinne Tucker and singer and guitarist Carrie Brownstein. Drummer Janet Weiss was a member of the band from 1997 until 2019. In Time magazine in 2001, author and critic Greil Marcus named Slater Kinney America's Best Band. Over the years, they've made nine albums, including this year's The Center Won't Hold, which was produced by Annie Clark of St. Vincent. In this episode, Corinne Tucker and Carrie Brownstein break down how the song The Future is Here was made.

It began with a visit to the L.A. music venue, Zebulon. This is Corinne Tucker from Slater Kinney. And this is Carrie Brownstein, also from Slater Kinney. So Corin was visiting me in L.A. and I said there's this really great performance art slash comedy night that I go to once a month at Zebulon. It's called Weird. Night, and we saw a performer named Joseph Keckler there, who is basically an opera singer. The strangers from the internet are standing outside. The strangers from the internet have come from far and wide. There was a whole performance art aspect to his performance as well.

Yeah, it was beautiful and funny and sad. Yeah, a little heartbreaking. Anyway, I feel like you wrote this song after that. I did. It's really energizing to leave a night of performance, especially something that isn't necessarily right in your wheelhouse and think, oh, I want to go home and write music after this. Yeah, so I saw his performance and I was floored by his vocals,

and we kept talking about, like, oh, he's got such a gorgeous voice. What if we worked with him or someone like that? what if we had like a male voice on the album? You know, what would it be like for me to write with like a male voice and a female voice? What if it's a duet? And I just did it on a whim of like I got inspired by Weirdo Knight and, you know, threw this thing down on my computer. This was our first record that we had written this way, demoed in garage band.

You know, it was really the first time where I had demoed a full song. I mean, mostly Carrie and I would work on things together and come up with guitar lines. together. So this was a really different process for me. So I was kind of fumbling my way through it. That bass is just one of the like very basic Apple bass sounds that you can do. And I literally am there on my like computer typewriter keyboard. That is crazy to me. I don't think I knew that. You don't, I'm going to buy you a keyboard. I know. That's just all I had. And I was like brand new to like writing on the computer. I like the novice quality to me. I feel like we played a for so many years, and sometimes that rudimentary relationship to an instrument is actually the most

inspired one. And I think that's why we didn't, we wrote very few songs on guitar. We also needed to kind of have more of a proof of concept. You know, when you're sending things back and forth, you're not in the same room as your bandmates to say, well, this is my idea and you just start talking about it. You're really actually sending it to ostensibly an audience. They're your bandmates when they're in the room, but when they're just listening at home. They're an audience, and you have to kind of prove something to them. So I think we went further in the demo versions than we usually did. Yeah, I really loved it because I wrote the verse in a lower register than I sang on a Slater-Kinney record.

And I think I sent it to Carrie, and she was like, yeah, I like it. Yeah, I don't hear Corinne singing very low. you know, she doesn't use that register. And, you know, as someone who appreciates the high catterwall, scrawling version of Corinne's voice, we've called that the tool before in our band. It's a very powerful singing voice. But, you know, when you've been working with someone for so long

and you hear something that sounds different, I think your ear is drawn to that, and I was really enthused by it. And also, I don't know, it was kind of sexy but disaffected. I read that news. And I was like, okay, well, should we get a hold of Joseph Keckler and ask him to sing it? I think Annie was like, no, I want you to sing it. The producer on this album is Annie Clark, who also goes by St. Vincent.

She is a very accomplished singer, songwriter, guitarist, Grammy winning, actually, and a friend of ours. And this is the first album that she has produced, so we feel lucky. It was actually Janet's idea to work with Annie. She's someone I've known for a long time. We've all known her. But also has a history with this band, was a fan coming in to figure out a new way of putting things together with the same parts. When Annie listened to the demo, she really liked it. But she was like, well, definitely you should be singing this.

I was like, really? Because in my mind, I definitely thought, like, we were going to have some of their guest voice. I liked the idea of a male perspective and female perspective coming together and singing together on the chorus. It's like they both are longing for connection. So for her to say, well, no, I really want you to sing it. I was like, well, it still needs to me to be two different characters. So I wanted to make the two vocals very different from each other.

I start my day on a tiny screen. I end my day on a tiny screen. I had to connect the ones that are right in front of me. I had this freedom on my mind that I was actually writing for a male singer, but to then take that and explore, just being that character myself was very freeing. There's so many different voices that a songwriter can explore that don't have to be tied to your own gender or your own body in any way.

That's a really freeing element of writing. I walk to work. Out on the city streets, no one speaks to me that's Dony faces beat. When I hear the stems on this song, like, of your vocals, I can recall Annie trying to elicit a very specific feeling and not just let's get the notes. You can never just take for granted that your only job is to sing this melody you wrote. I was having a really hard time with a low register, and she had me come back several times, And on this one day, for whatever reason, suddenly just the clouds or whatever cleared for me,

and I could hit all the low notes that I'd written. I start my day on a tiny screen. Try to connect the words that right in front of me. The vocals kind of dictate where everything else is going to land and what sort of space it takes up sonically. So Korn has this great melody. I'll find my way into it around it. I still think with Corin and I in terms of point-counterpoint,

and even when I'm not singing counter to her, which we haven't done on a couple records, actually, I still think of my guitar as a conversational element in our songs playing off her vocal melody. Those swampy seasick chords. I think I had the tone turned down on the guitar, not having that brightness, but just really getting a sense of like

the friction and the intensity with which you like strum. You know, I think when you roll tone off sometimes, you can really sort of feel the weight of like the pick or fingers across the strings. And I like that. Yeah, that's an edit. Cutting that off.

There's a lot of little moments like that, trying to mix things that felt kind of fluid with the sense of like abruptness. And so there were things that felt sort of like prematurely stopped. That's a classic Annie production. She would just, you know, Kianne reared in was our engineer. And Kian would say like, okay, we'll fade that. She'd like, no, no, no, no. A tighter cut, a tighter, you know, like, I wanted something that was like kind of a backbeat for the song that sounded like this churning industrial city. So he had programmed something and then, and then when

Janet came in, obviously, Janet drummed on it. You know, if we were like sending stuff back and forth, we would send without drums, because it's just like you want a drummer to have a sense of possibility. So it was like you can listen to this program stuff or here's the version without it to just come in fresh. And the songs would really take a leap with the real drums.

Kean, the engineer, is great with drums and is a drummer himself. And when Janet was playing, she would ask him to put the effects in her headphones so that she could imagine and get into the world of the song. So it felt like her drum kit was not just what was in front of her, but had endless possibilities.

So I think some of the stuff you hear is probably what she actually was also listening to in order to come up with the part. Annie came up with the whole intro. I mean, she wrote this beautiful, sad melody for the intro that I think really adds to setting the scene of the song. Something that was really exciting about this record is that we were adding this song.

low end that Slater Kinney's never really done before because we are a two guitar band that never had a bass player on our records. And so by using these synth bases, we were able to just dip into this whole other area sonically that we hadn't done before and that we were really excited about. We definitely arranged with Annie in the studio. The nanos were a guitar line that I had as the bridge. Oh, right. And she was like, oh, that, we're going to do that in the chorus as a nana. Nana, na, na, na, na, na. Lots of layering of those vocals.

The verses speak of a sense of loneliness. They're sung alone. And it gets me every time when Corin says, never have I felt so goddamn lost and alone. Never have I felt so goddamn love. You know, Corin has always been able to cut through the BS lyrically and just say something so plaintive and earnest and still get you in the gut. And I just love that line. I love how she sings it.

It's so honest. It's just so laid bare. Something that I think Weirdo Night was really good. good at showing was people who are just longing to be seen as who they really are and to be accepted for that. And it definitely brought out another level of exploration of sadness, of depression, of longing for connection. So the chorus has come in and the narrator is joined by many, many people in order to uplift the song and the singer and the listener as well. This song does deal with a lot of despair and themes that are murky and a little bit hard to wade through.

So we wanted to counter that with catchiness and also with a bunch of people singing so that you might feel less alone. Here's The Future is Here by Slater Kinney in its entirety. Visit SongExploter.net to learn more about Slater Kinney and for a link to buy or stream this song. There's also info on Joseph Keckler. Weirdo Night at Zebulon and a link to Annie Clark's own episode of Song Exploder about a St. Vincent's song. This episode was edited by executive producer Rishi Kesh Hirway.

The team also includes producer Christian Coons, production assistant Nick Song, illustrator Carlos Lerma and me, Tau Winn. I'm guest hosting the podcast for the year. Special thanks to Joseph Kepler, Mac Burris, and Olivia Wood. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of independent podcast.

You can learn more about all of the shows and find out how you can support at Radiotopia.fm. You can also find Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder. And you can find me at Tao Get Stay Down. My name is Tao Winn. Thanks for listening.