A Quote by Julien Baker
With my first high school band ever, we would have these breaks in the song for idiotic solos, solos that were un-tasteful and would be shredding, but I needed to put them in there, and I realize now it's because we were playing shows with a whole bunch of bands that were all male.
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Every girl is a singer. I wanted to learn the solos and play lead guitar. I would meticulously teach myself solos so when dudes were like, 'Oh, you're a girl, you can't play guitar,' I could rip these insane Telecaster blues solos and tell them, 'Yeah, I can burn up a fret board.'
I was playing in bands before high school even. My first band I was in at 14. And we were playing just Beatles.
I remember in the days when we started, when we first went on the road, we went to Berkeley and played with Exodus. We couldn't believe another band was playing the same kind of music we were playing because there was only a handful of bands that were doing it.
Me and my friends in high school were the only girls who went to hardcore shows. It was three of us, and the rest of the audience was male. We didn't really think about it. We weren't thinking we were alienated or whatever, but eventually, as there started to be violence in the scene we were in during high school, we started to be turned off by the violence.
We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.
Once I started getting mainstream people to my shows, I realized we were taking too many solos, and they were too long. I started gauging when people were going on their iPhones.
When we first started playing shows, we were all 17. Everybody started somewhere. There were guys throwing shows in condemned houses and backyards just for the love of music and for the love of what bands were standing for.
You know, I was a nerdy kid going through high school, and then I got to college and that all vanished. I mean, a lot of my good friends - when we were in high school, we would never have been able to hang out together because we were in such different cliques or whatever. Now, who cares?
All of my solos were improvised initially - I would go in and get my bearings and see what I came up with.
If you say, "Would there were no wine" because of the drunkards, then you must say, going on by degrees, "Would there were no steel," because of the murderers, "Would there were no night," because of the thieves, "Would there were no light," because of the informers, and "Would there were no women," because of adultery.
Even back then I really didn't enjoy playing chord changes, riffs, and solos when I was young. The only thing I enjoyed playing were these Robert Fripp-type double-picked loops that no one wanted to hear, including me; I just liked playing them.
I was in band that played mostly covers for a while, and the bands that we would cover were, like, the alternative rock bands of that day: we did a Jane's Addiction song and a Faith No More song. All the kind of alternative radio of that time, the late '80s, basically.
From the very beginning, I had a lot of female role models in music. I would go to shows, and there were always women fronting bands and playing guitar or backing up and playing drums or bass in a band. That probably contributed to my belief in myself to go out and perform for people.
The story of our band is that we were this relentless touring band in those early years. We were leaving day jobs and going off on the road and having fun and seeing the country for the first time. We were playing Chinese restaurants and basements and record stores and houses. We were crashing on floors and it was all new and exciting. It was like a vacation. It didn't feel like work. I couldn't wait to go on tour back then. I would be sitting at my day job or my apartment, just itching to go. There were so many adventures that were about to happen.
There were no good bands in my town. You know, there's like this magic town where every kid started a band in high school, and half of them were good and have careers based on relationships built at that time? That wasn't what my life was like at all.
I always think back to my high school days and realize all the people who were so popular then are nowhere now and all the people who were steadfast and steady-going are somewhere. So high school doesn't necessarily translate to later in life.
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