Carrie Brownstein famous quotes

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

#Hands #Years #Feelings

I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Art #Thinking #Views

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

#Thinking #Knowing #Half

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

#Art #Thinking #Political

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

#Jobs #Moving #Thinking

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

#Summer #Drama #Kids

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

#Mustache #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.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#House #Band

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

#Together #Form #Process

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.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Life #Moving #Self

These new bands sound like Gang of Four — if Gang of Four sucked.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Sound #Band #Four

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

#Moving #Anxiety #Get Better

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

#Play #Npr #Fandoms

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

#Writing #Cliche #Salvation

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Play #People #Understood

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

#Life Is #Chaotic

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

#Interesting #Fans #Television

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

#Exercise #Guitar #Years

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

#Rocks #Degrees #Different

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

#Rocks #Games #Band

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

#Loneliness #Way #Underestimate

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

#Book #Pride #People

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

#Sexy #Pounds #Gears

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

#Life #Practice #Style

I need a template of a template
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Needs

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

#People #Fabric #Angry

Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Dark #Singing #Honest

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

#Jobs #Thinking #Hip Hop

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

#Dream #Rocks #Opposites

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.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Thinking #Sometimes #Intention

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

#Song #Writing #Npr

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.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Song #Rocks #Play

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

#Song #Skins #Needs

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.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Nice #Thinking #Buttons

It's hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Creating #Spontaneous #Beats

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

#Years #Weather #Individual

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

#Doors #Way #Sides

I have no desire to play music unless I need music.
-- Carrie Brownstein

#Play #Desire #Needs

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

#Artist #Car #Etc