Speak Easy: Corin Tucker, Sleater-Kinney

In anticipation of this month’s Sleater-Kinney performance at Bogart’s, we chatted with singer/guitarist Corin Tucker.
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The indie rock goddesses of Sleater-Kinney reunited earlier this year for No Cities to Love, the trio’s first record since 2005. In advance of this month’s performance at Bogart’s, we asked singer/guitarist Corin Tucker about playing in front of new fans, motherhood, and the band’s reemergence.

What’s it like to see so many young people out on your current tour? We hoped that a few people would come check us out that never got to see us, but the amount of young people who have gotten into the band and who are really passionate about it and sing along has been just an awesome surprise. When we made a new record and announced a new tour, it was really a leap of faith in terms of what the shows would be like and what our audience would be like this time around. But to have this whole new generation of people excited about seeing us and inspired by the band has been really incredible.

One of the distinctive qualities of the Sleater-Kinney sound is the way your and Carrie Brownstein’s voices and guitars play off and complement each other. What was it like to work with her again? It’s almost like our inherent songwriting styles do complement each other. Carrie is a very verbose guitar player—meaning she plays these incredible leads, she’s all over the place—and I’m always drawn to repetition and rhythm and the opposite side of the spectrum. So she and I pull at each other that way with the guitar lines that we come up with.

How has being a mother impacted your songwriting? I think it’s changed my perspective. I’ve always been a writer who wants to explore political and social ideas with my writing, but on a song like “Price Tag,” where I’m trying to talk about inequality and unfairness, I think I purposefully put it into the mindset of a single mother, because I have more of a perspective now on how hard that would be—and not just for the mother but also for the children who grow up in that situation.

Is there another Sleater-Kinney album in our future? I hope so. I would like to make another record, but it might take us a few years.

Sleater-Kinney, Dec 6, Bogart’s, bogarts.com

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