Carrie Brownstein Quotes

Even if, personally, I'm in a place of contentment or solidity, I feel like it's hard not to look out into American culture and see vast inequity, widespread institutionalized violence and racism and transphobia and environmental destruction. It's hard to be in this world and feel a sense of innate satisfaction at all. There's plenty of things to feel unsettled about. ~ Carrie Brownstein

As a woman I was taught to always be hungry...We could eat just about anything / We might even eat your hate up like love."
To me, that perfectly summed up being a young girl. It was the first time someone put into words my sense of alienation, the feeling that all these institutions and stories we'd been taught to hold as sacred often had very little to do with my own lived experiences. ~ Carrie Brownstein

[I hate] the ways that people want their special needs to be met, whether it's their food allergies or their special lotions or shoes. Or the ways that people want their neighborhoods and restaurants curated in a way that's really tailored to them. Growing up with someone who was living by these very strict, repressive rules for themselves - it made me very allergic to the idea of denial. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I think short-term goals are important. Trying to set a missive for yourself for the entire year can be daunting, and it can feel too easy to fail or fall short of that. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

It's important to redefine what it means to be ambitious. I think that ambition doesn't have to be married to consumerism or materialism or capitalism. Ambition can embody compassion. It's not just about the most for yourself. It's about creating the most for everyone, and pushing forward so that other people can come along or take over. ~ Carrie Brownstein

It was about having a box in the attic or basement or attic or garage, something we could return to over and over again, something that said, this is us, this is where we were last year, and this is where we'll stay, and this is where we'll pile on the memories, over and over again, until there are so many memories that it's blinding, the brightness of family, the way love and nurturing is like a color you can't name because it's so new. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I would love to do a reunion tour if it only involved basements across the U.S. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden. ~ Carrie Brownstein

There are times that a work exists for the sake of getting you to the next step, as a testing ground for ideas, for recognizing parts if your process that were theretofore unnoticed or undiscovered. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I don't want to mislead people. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Entitlement is a precarious place from which to create or perform - it projects the idea that you have nothing to prove, nothing to claim, nothing to show but self-satisfaction, a smug boredom. It breeds ambivalence. It's as if instead of having to prove they are something, these musicians prove they aren't anything. It's an inverted dynamic, one that sets performers up to fail, but also gives them a false sense of having already arrived. I don't understand how someone would not push, challenge, or at least be present, how anyone could get onstage and not give everything. ~ Carrie Brownstein

What I value most in new music is strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Yet I felt it was unfair to be labeled when I had yet to find a label for myself, and when binary, fixed identities held no meaning or safety for me. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I was shut off from my body; I had barely thought about sexuality or longing. Up until this point, my sexual experiences had felt business like or even transactional...I hadn't been suppressing urges or denying my needs. I didn't feel like I had any, not corporeal ones. My journal entries from that time speak to depression and feelings of isolation, fears that a friend would leave, a sense that I had been responsible for my mother's departure and would therefore cause anyone I loved or needed to leave. I was still spending most of my time in my head. I was removed from my own feelings. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

That's why all those records from high school sound so good. It's not that the songs were better - it's that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I've always loved writing. Doing that at the same time as playing music can be tiring. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation - linguistic and aesthetic - in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Sometimes I think that the best you can ever feel in a photo shoot is like a sexy clown. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself. ~ Carrie Brownstein

To me, ugliness, grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

To me, curiosity is married to optimism. And that's where a lot of my motivation comes from. A lot of my way out of depression and anxiety is that intersection between optimism and curiosity. Because it means taking a step forward with the hope that there will be discovery. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Practice. Learn and then unlearn - that's the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can't merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process. ~ Carrie Brownstein

They were like really loud librarians. And as the audience, you better shut the hell up because you're in the library of rock right now. When ~ Carrie Brownstein

I would not call myself an optimist, even though I would aspire to be. I am innately a skeptic. There's kind of an incessant dissatisfaction that I have, that I'm always trying to either expose or fight against or wrestle with. ~ Carrie Brownstein

People are wearing fleece, which is a hard fabric to be angry in. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

If we measured our affection toward others by how many nicknames we bestow upon them, our pets would be the most loved. Here's the etymological journey for the nicknames I have for Tobey: Tobito, Toblerone. T-Bone. T-bonics. Ta-T. Ta-Tobes. Tubby, for when he's gotten into the trash and gorged himself. Nicknames with origins based on appearance: Bearded Yum Yum, Handsome McHandsome, Fuzzy Face. Then this strange progression: Pooch. Poochers. Poocharoo. Poochacho. Pachune. Then, somehow, Pooch turned into Mooch, and so there had to be Moocharo. Muchacho. Manu, and most recently Man-nu-nu. All these monikers I say in voices more commonly echoed from the confines of straightjackets and padded walls. Anyone we truly love should come with their own dictionary. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Once you're away from music, I realize that's as intrinsic to who I am as anything else. That's the part that takes me out of my brain. ~ Carrie Brownstein

It turns out I'm not very good at working with a traditional boss. ~ Carrie Brownstein

You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness. ~ Carrie Brownstein

For me, being in shape means, like, not having cynicism out-weigh optimism on a daily basis. ~ Carrie Brownstein

The idea of self-effacement, the idea that you feel so powerless that the only tiny morsel of power you have is over your own ability to deny yourself food - that to me is a very profound and sad methodology and indicator of how powerless a lot of people feel in this world. That they will turn that onto themselves until they are physically smaller. I think it's affected my worldview a lot - just being sensitive and empathetic towards the ways people want to be small. I don't wish smallness for anyone. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Even then, I could still appreciate the moment of simply making sounds with a group of people. There is another place you go to in those instances, and it feels vast, refreshing, like you're creating your own air to breathe. And even though it's never going to happen again and there's a palpable sense of mediocrity, there's still a connection that you wouldn't have otherwise, to the sound, to the people. ~ Carrie Brownstein

It's important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn't come too easily. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

We would go out and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I'm interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young. I've never quite been able to shake that. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Plus, it seemed inconceivable to give someone money for a job we were capable of doing. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Back then, I was still just a fan of music. And to be a fan of music also meant to be a fan of cities, of places. Regionalism - and the creative scenes therein - played an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic. Music felt married to place, and the notion of "somewhere" predated the Internet's seeming invention of "everywhere" (which often ends up feeling like "nowhere") ~ Carrie Brownstein

You can't bury a part of yourself that's so innate to who you've been, even if it's not for the sake of anything other than a pure enjoyment of it. ~ Carrie Brownstein

No matter what people are struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don't wish smallness for anyone. It's a terrible place to live. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Eventually, I started to cringe at the elitism that was often paired with punk and the like. A movement that professed inclusiveness seemed to actually be highly exclusive, as alienating and ungraspable as many of the clubs and institutions that drove us to the fringes in the first place. One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow. ~ Carrie Brownstein

To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I like to take things incrementally, and strive for something that feels more attainable. ~ Carrie Brownstein

The internet is just a scary place. It's better to just go to the doctor. Don't let Google get inside your head. It will do bad things to you. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I have to erase my Google search histories, because they always lead to an obituary. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I think grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it's feeling. You're not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I feel like I came in comedy's side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I think one of the reasons I haven't been doing music is because I think that some of my performance, like, needs are being taken care of in other mediums. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I never wanted to feel ashamed for striving, for desiring, for ambition. And I never wanted to judge another woman, or anyone, for that matter, for their own aspirations, even if they differed from my own ~ Carrie Brownstein

Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock 'n' roll - it's the same steps with different degrees of difficulty. ~ Carrie Brownstein

The fact that people go to Portland to visit a tiny feminist bookstore-no matter what the impetus is for them getting there-the fact that they go in there and look around and shop for books or stationery or whatever, is a major source of pride for me, ~ Carrie Brownstein

I've mostly been focusing on writing, and I've really enjoyed not playing music. It will always be part of my life, but I don't feel the immediate need to be playing for people. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Finding a partner who understands the vicissitudes of travel is challenging. A nomadic life fosters inconsistencies and contradictions within you - a vacillation between loneliness and needing desperately to be left alone. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

We felt there was a creeping tepidness in music, a cloying softness, as if music were only a salve, not an instigator. It's ~ Carrie Brownstein

I'm always trying to encourage people not to limit themselves in the same way that many of our parents stayed with one job forever. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic. ~ Carrie Brownstein

The natural world operates by its own set of rules. The animal world, all the places that are feral and ungovernable, that's where I find a lot of inspiration. There is just as much beauty there, but there is also decay and violence. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I think proteins are really good for your brain. And your brain is where comedy comes from. ~ Carrie Brownstein

We want our parents to be the norm from which we deviate. ~ Carrie Brownstein

If someone didn't feel included, if someone felt marginalised, they would form their own band, write their own fanzine, or just call you out on what they deemed racist or classist, sizeist, sexist, body-ableist. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I've always felt unclaimed. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres. ~ Carrie Brownstein

A certain kind of exhaustion sets in from having to constantly explain and justify one's existence or participation in an artistic or creative realm. What a privilege it must be to never have to answer the question "How does it feel to be a woman playing music?" or "Why did you choose to be in an all-female band?" The people who get there early have to work the hardest. ~ Carrie Brownstein

My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I don't want to know what's going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it's a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it's also disheartening and usinspiring. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived. ~ Carrie Brownstein

At nineteen, you can make out for hours, that goal-less, amorphous melting into someone else. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Nothing is as nice as plugging in your guitar and turning up the volume really loud, just seeing what kind of beautiful noise you can make with it. ~ Carrie Brownstein

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I could turn up the volume on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions that seemed up until that point to be uncontrollable, even amorphous. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted. ~ Carrie Brownstein

The inexplicable is its own form of freedom. Belonging is not a form of restriction. We can't name the feeling but we can sing along. ~ Carrie Brownstein

At that age I thought apartments were built specifically to house the single or the newly single, a divorce dormitory of sorts. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I realized my yearning had little to do with place and more with the fact that I continually made a ritual of emptiness. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I would always feel a certain deficit. Like before, as a way to fill the hole, I began writing songs. Music began to restore me again. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I think hypochondria always plays a part in the healthcare landscape. ~ Carrie Brownstein

"We can't name it, but we can sing along." That is my ultimate relationship to any art form, but especially music. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Music has always been my constant, my salvation. It's cliche to write that, but it's true. ~ Carrie Brownstein

To me, the grotesque is like a sonic manifestation of reality. I don't know how you could look out onto our world and see only beauty. And I like beautiful things. I like the aesthetically harmonious. But I am much more attracted to something that is off-kilter. It is a truer reflection of not only nature, but the human spirit - the state of the world. I just think everything feels a little off. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Books grounded me, helped me to feel less alone. ~ Carrie Brownstein

As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

There are foods you should avoid. For me, sugar is a no. Because it gives me a spike and then a crash. ~ Carrie Brownstein

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. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Art communities and music scenes want to pretend like they don't care, but they will also tell you louder and more frequently than anyone that they DON'T CARE. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I felt that first awareness that there's a whole set of species whose sounds and calls you've never heard - the wonder of realizing that people are growing up with an entirely different sensory experience from yours. This whole country seemed so shiny to me. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself. ~ Carrie Brownstein

I suppose we were better observers than communicators; we were all subjects to be worried over, complained about, even adored, but never quite people to be held or loved. There was an intellectual, almost absurd distance. ~ Carrie Brownstein