Seth Lorinczi, Sara Lund, Corin Tucker, Mike Clark

CORIN TUCKER BAND

The indie rocker chooses musical democracy for her new album  

After writing all the songs on her 2010 solo debut, 1,000 Years, Corin Tucker took a more collaborative approach on her latest. Kill My Blues was very much a team effort, as Tucker and her backing musicians jammed out the tunes in their rehearsal space. “We needed to open more doors for the band to evolve,” Tucker says. “That meant writing all the songs together and not having it be just my solo project.”

Tucker, 39, spent a dozen years writing with her bandmates in the punk trio Sleater-Kinney before the group broke up in 2006, and three years before that doing the same thing in the riot-grrrl band Heavens to Betsy—so working collectively is second nature. “It just makes sense,” says the Oregon native. “The whole idea of the indie-rock band is collaborative and democratic. That’s the musical community we all came out of.”

Despite the group effort, Kill My Blues is still defined by Tucker’s voice and her perspective. Backed by volatile riffs and hooky melodies, she sounds more assured than on her previous release. “Making a record after Sleater-Kinney was hard,” she says. “It was a real emotional challenge.” Having locked in a sense of confidence, Tucker drew inspiration from recent social and political developments with the women’s movement, and from stories from her own life and those around her. “I see this record as a statement of who I am today,” she says. “It’s got elements of the way I have written over the years, but I feel like it’s drawing on the strengths I have today as a writer and the experiences I’ve had as a grownup.”

One of those experiences is motherhood. Tucker and filmmaker husband Lance Bangs have two children, and like any working parent, she’s searching for balance between job and family. “That perspective comes through on certain songs,” she explains. “‘Constance’ is definitely a song about being a parent and watching your children grow up and move on. The whole record is really about moving on, and how good that is, and how hard that is.”

Not all the tunes are autobiographical. Tucker’s coy about which ones are about her, but whatever their origin the singer and guitarist strives to make them her own. “There are a lot of people’s stories on this record, but I put them into my own point of view because I think that makes them more gripping,” she says. “A good writer is a sponge, and a good writer is an observer who picks up not only the storyline of what is happening around you, but the  emotional weight of it.”

–Eric R. Danton