by Selina Yang (@y_aniles)
I rang Marnie Stern from her home base in New York, right before she embarked on her springtime West Coast tour. The tour is not only “the first tour in ten years,” but also a celebration of her first album from a ten year hiatus, The Comeback Kid. When Marnie Stern took a hiatus, after being lauded as an upcoming guitar hero, the question on the tip of everyone’s tongues was “Where’s Marnie?” In this conversation, she walks me through the pillars of her performance – what has stuck throughout this past decade, and what makes her uniquely herself.
credit: Nick Johnson
“Sing with the dissonance”
Stern doesn’t care about how her sound is perceived. She landed in the zone of slashing experimentalism by coincidence, not forcing herself to be against the grain, but finding that that’s where her personality takes her. “I don’t care, I’ve never thought about it. It’s never ever popped into my head,” she says. There’s a fear of inevitably sounding commercial that Stern recognizes as a modern reality, and embraces rather than eschews.
“We’re all bombarded with consumer music all day long in department stores, in supermarkets, so that’s already in us. I don’t need to listen to that in order for it to be inside of me. I’m trying to explore other worlds.” With her starbursts of guitars, glittering feedback raining through her latest album, The Comeback Kid, Stern takes the limits of math rock experiments to soaring cosmic heights. It’s pop in sensibility – relatable assertions of self love, unwavering jubilance, but emerging from a decade’s worth of pent of confessionals.
“I know that the other side comes in, especially when I’ve got guitar lines that are so out yere, yet melodic. When I try to put a melody on it to make it bizarre, I come up with a very pop melody on top of it, which I don’t really love,” she says in a self reflective moment. Stern is self aware of what, in her mind, are her strengths and weaknesses, maintaining an aura of level headed reality despite her long music journey. “I would like to be able to sing with the dissonance more.”
“Go Home and Try It!”
“I wish I could be more of a performer on stage. You know, run around, kick the legs, do the punches, the real rock and roll. But I think I would have to really focus on trying to pretend in order to do that, and I just never have,” Stern says about her stage presence.
In live performances, Stern wields a Blonde Jazzmaster. Her eyes are pressed closed in concentration for her finger tapping guitar technique, flitting over the fingerboard like an aggressive piano solo. As layered instrumentals swell around her, weaving together to like a breathing organic, there is never a still moment as she can’t help but constantly grin into the mic. “It's just me up there.”
“Now that everything and everyone is grouped, it doesn’t feel like when I started,” she reminisces on the organization of local music scenes. In the world of her 2007 debut release of In Advance of the Broken Arm, “because there was no Internet, [to find] your community, you had to be around each other. You were going to shows and seeing each other. You'd see someone play something, and you know, no one was filming the show. So you would watch it and listen, and then you take an idea, and say, ‘I liked that!’ Then, you go home and try it.”
For example, Stern cites seeing the White Stripes play in 2006 as a moment of inspiration. “Because the drums were so minimal, it was all about the guitar,” a technique opposite to Stern’s electric collaboration with Zach Hill (Death Grips) or Jeremy Gara (Arcade Fire).
On teaming up with musical collaborators, “It’s rare that there are ever conflicts. Most of the time, the drummer knows what I want and what would sound good. I'm pretty laid back with others, but I'm only really hard on myself. With collaborators, I'm pretty into almost everything that they do.”
“Go Off On Tangents”
“I used to have a very strong work ethic when I didn't have a day job. So I would play in practice for at least five hours a day trying to work on music. Now I have these kids, so I play as much as I can fit in. When I worked on the television show, I played music all day,” she says, referring to her role in the Late Night Show with Seth Meyer’s house band, until parting ways in 2022.
“Mary Timony is a great guitarist who I played with before I was on the television show. Then she was on the television show with us at one point, and I traded music back and forth with her. She's amazing. She's terrific. I was a huge fan of hers before I was making music when she was doing the band Helium. She's as authentic as it gets. She's a great example of someone that I've always listened to, and then got to play with.”
“When I got home, I didn’t even want to think about working on my own stuff. I was just tired from the full workday. But now that I'm not working there, I'm back really more in the creative mode. And when I slip in, sitting down to practice these songs, I kind of go off on tangents a little bit working on new stuff. Right now, I’m practicing for the tour, so more every day. For at least one to two hours a day, I’m going over the material and strengthening my voice, because I haven't sung in so long.”
“Maximalism, Maximalism, Maximalism”
“I know no theory, I’ve never been interested in learning it. I know I’m incorrect, but there’s like a superstition that if I grab onto theory aspects, I’ll lose the organic parts. Which I know is not true, but I’ve always gone by feel. I know that mathy stuff is known as hoity toity, but it sometimes has more noise than the theory part.”
“I love listening to certain stuff that’s minimalist, but my personality is ‘more is more’, and I just keep on adding and adding and adding. I feel like if I didn't work the way I do on Pro Tools, where I can just add another voice and another voice, it would turn out far weird – which is still an idea I’ve had for a record.” While talking about her love for maximalism, Stern’s eyes brighten, and she repeats her mantra: “maximalism, maximalism, maximalism”.
“Yoko Ono’s artwork was an inspiration for a friend of mine a long time ago, and I used it in my work,” Stern says. Ono’s fame in Fluxus movement, where the process of making art was the art in itself, speaks to Stern’s collage-like flow when jamming, or even outside of music production, when finding sparks of inspiration. “Sometimes I'll write down things that people say, and then use it as a lyric. I go back and look at what my kids say. They say weird stuff all the time that I'll write down.”
Stern discussed the creative direction for her latest single, “Sixteen”. “I’m always trying to get this in my mind of an AC/DC rhyming song, with the Royal Trux album Accelerator. Those two are always in my head when I'm working, so that was going on when I was doing this song. The song is in triplets. It's like a waltz so that you can headbang to it.”