Top 223 Quotes & Sayings by Carrie Brownstein
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Carrie Brownstein.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
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.
I've been trying to immerse myself in the narratives of other people. I try to not isolate myself as much. It is really hard. People that are sensitive, you just feel too porous sometimes. There's this inertia that sets in, and it's hard to get out of bed. I think knowing that other people go through it is really reassuring.
Much of the music I remember from camp was unofficial: the songs a counselor would play for us on acoustic guitar or that an older camper would sing after telling us a tale of his hard-knock life. We couldn't get enough of 'One Tin Soldier' or 'Cat's in the Cradle.'
It's hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.
So many things can be filtered through fandom - joy, compassion, love.
I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.
For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.
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.
There was a clarity to the Nineties. It was pre-9/11, before that anxiety kicked in that exists right now about the financial crisis or terrorism. We were all just going to move forward into the millennium and everything was always going to get better. Then, whoops, that didn't happen.
I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres.
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.
In Olympia, Washington, many of us were writing songs that were the equivalent of bloodletting: This is the sound a wound makes; this is the screech of a scar. But Mary Timony was always more kaleidoscope than microscope, creating magical worlds replete with weaponry or sorcery.
Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.
I like to connect with people through my work. That's my favorite way - meetings of the minds, fans at a show. Those are nice mediated ways of hanging out.
I feel like I came in comedy's side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways.
I associate Taylor Swift with some pretty kinky stuff.
I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.
I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic.
'Beasts of the Southern Wild' was one of those films that I felt like I could dismiss because it received so many accolades, but then I watched it and was won over.
I went to a liberal arts college wherein grading was qualitative and we had to write our own evaluations.
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.
In the early and mid 1990s, every musician I knew was obsessed with Helium. The 'Pirate Prude' EP and 'Pat's Trick' played on repeat at nearly every gathering I attended. And we didn't just listen to these records - we discussed them, the worlds they opened, novelistic and strange.
I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.
My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that, on its own, sounds unfinished.
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.
I'm such a big fan of 'The Bachelor.'
It turns out I'm not very good at working with a traditional boss.
There is a certain comfort that comes from feeling intellectually apart from phenomena. That you have the luxury of time to reflect or apply scholarly thinking to art and culture.
I definitely love performing live because there are moments of spontaneity. And as much as you're performing on stage, I feel like the audience is performing, too.
The 'New York Times' is my homepage because it forces me to go right into the news.
When it comes to music, we should be hoping for as outlandish a Republican candidate as we can get.
I am a horrible visual artist. I can't fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don't do than do.
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.
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.
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.
There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.
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.
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.
I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.
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.
When the band first started, it was so much about carving out some space for myself and our audience and our songs.
I get mad at myself when I get news from Twitter before I get it from a regular news source. Then I'm off to a bad start: getting the second-hand, filtered experience all day long.
I felt like power meant that you had to be engaged in a certain kind of struggle by force of movement and battle - and that's very exhausting. Now, power is more about certainty and stillness and realizing that the infrastructures that we gather around and worship are the least powerful things.
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.
Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.
I grew up outside of Seattle and have lived here my whole life, and I think that there is a culture of questioning and guilt. Almost an 'anti-ambition.'
Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock 'n' roll - it's the same steps with different degrees of difficulty.
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.
I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.
Music has always been my constant, my salvation. It's cliche to write that, but it's true.
I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.
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.
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.
I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.
Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.
I feel like I live a pretty quiet life. I like to focus on work and friends, and I love being in nature.
One of my earliest childhood memories is my father taking me in the evening to Samena Swim & Recreation Club in Bellevue.
I love my friends, but I feel pretty autonomous.
I have no desire to play music unless I need music.
For film and television, it's interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It's not just about being a fan, it's about how you perform your fandom. That's always been interesting to me.
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