I definitely love performing live because there are moments of spontaneity. And as much as you're performing on stage, I feel like the audience is performing, too.
The Northwest, to make a generalization, is a fairly sensitive populace. Slightly self-conscious and very self-reflexive.
I grew up outside of Seattle and have lived here my whole life, and I think that there is a culture of questioning and guilt. Almost an 'anti-ambition.'
Shoes are a great invention. They keep us from stepping on nails. Your feet stay clean and warm and dry.
I think that there is something about the ritual of making things more difficult that people find meaning in.
Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.
I think that art, and making music or comedy, is a way of positing yourself on the map and then trying to find other people out there with you.
There is a certain comfort that comes from feeling intellectually apart from phenomena. That you have the luxury of time to reflect or apply scholarly thinking to art and culture.
I think there's a lot of wonderful comics that leave you hanging in a state of apprehension or anxiety before alleviating that tension with a joke.
I think music took hold of me and captured my imagination at such a formative age that I ascribe a mysteriousness to it, and I exalt it and take it seriously in a way that I think has just permeated my life ever since. And I'm less interested in music that is novelty or jokey or ironic.
Sometimes when you look at somebody else's career or choices or family, there's almost a comfort in knowing there's another option.
There's something about mean-spiritedness that has a way of distancing an audience.
Of course, 'Portlandia' is all about ways that people curate their physical space and their life.
I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because I think that's such a way of diminishing the present. And it's hard to live like that.
I always find that nostalgia is sort of like memory without the pain. And that's why it feels so good to kind of bask in that, and I think it can be deceptively comforting.
What I appreciate about Sleater-Kinney is that we did six records, and they all felt different. It was a band that was able to encapsulate different sensibilities because we were focusing on it as music and art and not as a statement.
I think a lot of people want stories or lives to have very distinct beginnings, middles, and endings. Generally, I think things are a little more fluid than that.
I think people would describe a lot of Sleater-Kinney as unsettling. And I don't think our best moments have sonic assonance to them. I think that we are best with a little bit of... a caustic attitude and tone.
I think I was so grateful, in the years after Sleater-Kinney broke up or went on hiatus or whatever you want to call it, to find 'Portlandia' and co-create 'Portlandia' with Fred Armisen, which allows for levity, allows for the same kind of kinetic energy, but channeled through absurdity and surrealism.
I think one of the scariest things about depression is that it exists along with the happiness and the joy, and it kind of plays with it and sucks the color from it.
