Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein rewrites the book on cool

Between co-writing and co-starring in the hit TV series Portlandia and co-fronting the legendary punk outfit Sleater-Kinney, Carrie Brownstein could not possibly get any cooler. Unless she were to, say, write a book or something. Oh, right — her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, comes out in October. All right, Carrie. We get it.

Sleater-Kinney — guitarist and singer Brownstein, guitarist and singer Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss — reunited last year, after almost a decade off. A new album, No Cities to Love, followed in February, and now the band is on the road. Ahead of its Sunday show at the Uptown, Brownstein talked to The Pitch about her various projects.

The Pitch: What motivated you to publish a memoir?

Brownstein: It just seemed like the right time to write a book, and I’ve wanted to for a while. And, you know, yes, I am a private person, but I wanted to have an agency of how I show myself to people, and writing a book is a much easier way of sharing rather than being misconstrued. I’m excited to have the book out there.

Speaking of timing: It’s been eight years since Sleater-Kinney was together as a band, 10 since you guys put an album out. What was the impetus for getting back together and putting out a new release?

I think the idea had been percolating for a while. Sleater-Kinney isn’t something we can really do unless we feel a sense of urgency, and after a while, it did feel like an inevitability, where it was almost something that was orbiting around us. And once it came into our view, we sort of decided that this was the time. And that sounds sort of mystical, but, at the same time, it was a lot of logistics and planning. The work of writing the record was very purposeful. So it was a combination of things — a sense of inevitability and then a lot of diligence.

The music-listening culture has changed so much in the time that Sleater-Kinney was away. Is relevancy something you considered when you reunited, when you were making this album?

I mean, yes, culture has changed, but culture is always changing. I don’t know. I guess Sleater-Kinney has never been a mainstream band, even though we’re sometimes acknowledged by the mainstream. It just seems like people find us. They’ve always managed to find us when they needed us and our music. I’m not really interested in the people that are obsessed with things that I find sort of asinine or sort of offensively benign. We have a really great crowd.

What was it like, getting back into the swing of writing and performing for Sleater-Kinney after so much time apart?

There’s a shorthand that we have, a chemistry that we have with the writing that is very undeniable. At the same time, I think that sometimes that ease, that’s not the place from which you want to create. It never really feels good to fall back on the first idea, but sometimes you can circle back to it. But I think sometimes you have to push past the initial ideas and see if there’s sort of a better iteration of something. I think Sleater-Kinney felt familiar, and that was really positive, but, at the same time, there was a challenge to push the narrative further. That was really the same commitment we had for all of our records, to make something new. So in that sense, it really hadn’t changed.

It seems like it would take such a different type of creativity for the work you do with Portlandia and the work you do with Sleater-Kinney. How do you feel those pieces of you are related, or not?

They definitely are related. I think that I’ve always been attracted to the way creativity can address humanity and dark subject matter in a way that sometimes is very illuminating. I’ve always been someone who is a keen observer of culture, and I like the lens that humor provides for some of those situations. I think that Sleater-Kinney does the same thing [as Portlandia] in a different way. It can take dark, stormy subject matter and bring almost a gracefulness to it or a meaning to it that feels very relevant and alive.

I think, for me, Portlandia is a slightly more intellectual exercise. Despite it being absurd and silly, it stems from a kind of cerebral viewpoint, whereas Sleater-Kinney has sort of a passion to it that’s different. But they both require the same sort of acumen, just expressed in different ways. They don’t feel divorced, necessarily, to me. They feel like different ways of trying to connect and express.