fuck yeah, kathleen hanna!

KATHLEEN HANNA:  You know I haven’t seen much more of it than you’ve seen. I saw the same thing that they used on Kickstarter pretty much. The thing that I was most shocked about was what Kathi from Bikini Kill (and now The Julie Ruin band) said, this really sweet thing: she’s a perfect front person. I never knew she thought that. That’s not the kind of thing you say to somebody’s face. The whole way she said it was just so nonchalant. I was like, wow! That is really sweet. I don’t think of myself as the prefect front person. She just said it like, oh yeah it’s totally obvious and who wouldn’t want to be in a band with her. I was like, whoa! That was probably the most shocking thing to me.

Posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at CollapseBoard.com

(Source: fuckyeahkathleenhanna)

KATHLEEN HANNA: Over the course of the past year or so. We got together once a week and played. Kathi wasn’t in the band at first because she lived in [Washington] D.C. We learned a bunch of the songs off The Julie Ruin record because I’d always wanted to perform those songs live. Le Tigre actually started because Johanna [Fateman] from Le Tigre and I were trying to learn the songs from the record but we couldn’t figure them out [laughs]. I’ve always wanted to do them live. I wanted to flesh them out and change them because they always felt like sketches of songs rather than fully realised songs. I started working with them on it and it was super fun. We naturally started writing other stuff. Kathi came to New York and I was so scared to ask her to be in the band. We didn’t have a bass player. If she said no [pauses] … we hadn’t worked together in so long and because it ended kind of weird, I didn’t know how she felt about it. She said, “Oh yeah sure. That sounds fun”. It’s been really great, it’s nice to work with people that come over to my house (I have a home studio) and we hang out, chit-chat and have a really fun time. It doesn’t feel like a bummer.

Posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at CollapseBoard.com

(Source: fuckyeahkathleenhanna)

KATHLEEN HANNA:  It’s really exciting for me to play music with her again! It all just came together. When I needed a break and I told the members of Le Tigre (which was the band after Bikini Kill), I was like, guys I just really need a break, I’ve been touring since I was 19. I was in my 30s and I needed to just be in one place. I was really, really, really in love with my boyfriend, who I am now married to. I really wanted to hang out with him and I really love New York. I wanted to spend time in New York, I wanted to just be a person and not always be away.

During that time I thought, what will my next project be? You know just before you go to sleep and you think, what could be the best thing that could happen tomorrow? I was like, god I’d love to play music with Kathi again. I’d loved to play with Kenny from Kiki & Herb which was a famous project he was in. One of the reasons I even moved to New York was because I saw their show and I was like, this is where I need to be! Carmine used to be the lighting guy and documentarian for Le Tigre. I heard him play drums and was like, you are fucking amazing! Plus he is super fun to hang out with.

Posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at CollapseBoard.com

(Source: fuckyeahkathleenhanna)

KATHLEEN HANNA: Yeah [laughs]. It’s really funny because we’ve been recording the record for so long. We’ve been doing it really slowly partially because we’re all involved in a lot of other projects. Carmine [Covelli] our drummer was actually in that Neal Medlyn production, Wicked Clown Love. Kenny [Mellman] our keyboardist works constantly with other downtown artists making music, he is in a 100 different shows at once. Sara [Landeau] the guitar player runs her own school for guitar and drums. Kathi has a daughter and just moved here (Kathi from Bikini Kill).

Posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at CollapseBoard.com

(Source: fuckyeahkathleenhanna)

KATHLEEN HANNA: Yeah definitely! I was with Tobi [Vail] and Kathi [Wilcox] from Bikini Kill too. We really bonded on the fact that we had just experienced such an amazing, life-changing thing. That show! Kat Bjellend played guitar better than Greg Sage from The Wipers! She was wearing a tiny dress with a huge bow in her hair and she looked so beautiful and so fucked up; she was doing the craziest shit with her voice. Lori Barbero hit the drums harder than anyone I had ever seen and Michelle Leon was just sexy as hell and could totally play the bass. I was like, wow! You really can have it all! You can make this amazing music which was about how beautiful anger can be to me. I’d never heard anything like it and haven’t heard anything since like it. It was just at somebody’s house in the middle of the woods.

Afterwards we went outside and there was this bonfire. I didn’t really know Tobi and Kathi very well but somehow we ended up standing together because everyone else at that show was talking about how much they hated it and how bad the band was. They were like, “They’re too pretty”. That was the big thing: they’re too pretty to be in a band. I didn’t even get it. They were totally stunning women but that wasn’t the main thing to us, it was definitely the music. It was also the fact that they were women and they looked how they wanted to look, they didn’t have to hide the fact that they were women to play this totally intense music; the combination of the femininity with the strength in the music in saying that femininity and strength weren’t the opposite of each other. It was really an intense experience. Me, Tobi and Kathi were like, that is the best thing we’ve ever seen! Everyone else thought it was the worst so it kind of became clear that we were going to be in a band together. No one else probably wanted to be in a band with us.

Posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at CollapseBoard.com

(Source: fuckyeahkathleenhanna)