There are musicians who enter the studio with every song perfectly planned out, and then there is Kim Gordon.
“It just kind of happened that way, you know?” she says of the denser, noisier sound of “The Collective,” her second solo album that arrived this month.
And some variation of that answer – about lyrics, about deciding to work with producer and collaborator Justin Raisen, about the influence of her work as a visual artist – recurred throughout a recent call with Gordon to talk about the album and The Collective Tour that brings her to the Regent Theater in Los Angeles on March 27 and the Ventura Music Hall in Ventura on March 29.
(Gordon will also appear at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, which takes place April 4-7, in conversation with writer Rachel Kushner about the city and its cinema.)
At 70, the former bassist-singer for the New York City post-punk alt-rockers Sonic Youth is getting some of the best reviews of her career. Just check out the headlines:
“Kim Gordon is at the Peak of Her Powers,” the New Yorker declared. “Four Decades Into Her Career, Kim Gordon Is Still Exploding Our Expectations,” wrote Rolling Stone, while the Washington Post review announced, “Noise-rock star enters rap zone.”
Yes, the “rap zone,” and don’t worry, we’ll explain.
Making music in LA
Gordon, who was raised in Los Angeles, and graduated from the Otis College of Art and Design in 1977, moved to New York City to pursue an art career and soon fell into a life in music with Sonic Youth. After 16 studio albums, Sonic Youth split up in 2011 – her marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore ended that year as well – after which Gordon made several experimental guitar rock albums in Body/Head, a duo with guitarist Bill Nace.
Eight years ago, Gordon moved back to Los Angeles, where fate brought her together with Raisen, writer-producer for rap and pop artists such as Drake, Charli XCX, Lil Yachty, Yves Tumor, and Angel Olsen.
“I met Justin through his brother, and he kind of bugged me to make a record,” Gordon says of her eventual collaborator on “The Collective” and its predecessor, “No Home Record,” her 2019 solo debut.
“I didn’t really have that intention,” she says of working with Raisen. “I already had this experimental duo with Bill Nace, and I was kind of focusing more on art-making.”
Add to that, her leeriness about the L.A. music world; to Gordon, it seemed like the flipside of the downtown New York City scene, which still felt like her musical home. She thought of Los Angeles as a place where it can take “10 people to make a song,” she says.
“It’s kind of the opposite of how I fell into music post-punk. You know, it’s just a much more organic sort of music-making in New York, that scene. It’s more kind of art-oriented and less commercial, basically.
“But I thought, ‘Well, I should be open,’” Gordon says, and laughs. “Why do I have this prejudice, blah, blah.”
Raisen sent her tracks built around loud and heavy electronic beats. Eventually one of them spoke to her.
“I felt like I could do something with it, so I went in and did some vocals,” Gordon says. “He took these bits of it and put it to kind of a really trashy drumbeat and sent it to me.
“And that became ‘Murdered Out,’” she says of the 2016 single that later appeared on “No Home Record.” “I was like, ‘Oh, he really knows my sensibility.’ So that’s kind of how I got working.”
Lyrical notes
“The Collective” is a more claustrophobic set of songs than its predecessor. On Gordon’s first solo release, there was enough sonic expanse to include an oboe, or an electronic facsimile thereof. There is no oboe here.
Instead, the beats built by Raisen clamor and clang with industrial intensity. Gordon’s distorted guitar rises from the mix at times, and over it all her deadpan almost-spoken singing tells a story that shifts from anger to humor to romance and more.
“Psychedelic Orgasm,” despite the title, is a travelogue of the hipster haunts of L.A. “Picking out potatoes/$20 each,” she sings. “L.A. is an art scene / L.A. is an art scene.” “Shelf Warmer,” by contrast, is one of the sexier songs on the album despite apparently being about the gift of a restaurant appliance that keeps your food warm. “You must love me / But you don’t know me,” she sighs. “You don’t know me.”
The album’s name was inspired by Jennifer Egan’s 2022 novel “The Candy House,” the title of which is also used for one of its songs.
“I was a fan of her book, and I was like, ‘Oh, I like this sense it has,’” Gordon says. “It feels like it could be the immediate future, and there’s something dystopian about it.
“During the pandemic, I read this book by Octavia Butler, ‘Parable of the Sower,’” she continues. “I actually just realized this, because I’ve been doing these interviews. But it takes place in 2024 in Los Angeles and it partially inspired the song ‘It’s Dark Inside.’
“Things like that just filter in,” Gordon says. “But getting back to ‘The Candy House,’ I thought (the book) was a really interesting idea, and I kind of wanted it to go a little further. So (the song) ‘The Candy House,’ it’s kind of a relationship song. Like, there’s often these elusive men, or somebody who for whatever reason they’re not accessible.
“I kind of just played that feeling into the idea of someone being in The Collective” – a sort of shareable network of people’s memories in Egan’s story – “and you want to know them, or get to know them, but you don’t want to be part of this thing that seems like it kind of steals your soul.”
“I’m a Man,” meanwhile, emerged from her contemplation of American masculinity in the popular imagination and the reality of 2024.
“It was kind of inspired by shows like ‘Mad Men,’ which in the beginning shows a man in a suit falling down the side of his skyscraper,” Gordon says. “And about how after the era of Reagan and this kind of cowboy ‘I’m gonna ride up on my horse and save you,’ that’s kind of changed.
“So men became lost and they didn’t know what to do, so they became consumers like women,” she says. “People like (Missouri U.S. senator) Josh Hawley are saying feminism destroyed me, but my take on it is that it’s actually consumerism and corporate branding that’s destroyed men.”
Home now
For “The Collective,” Gordon says she wanted to make an album for which every track was built on the kind of beats producers create for modern pop and hip-hop.
“I’ve always liked hip-hop,” she says. “Because I’m not a sort of naturally melodic singer, I kind of have always used rhythm as a starting point, and done things that are not exactly rap. But, you know, in Sonic Youth, like, ‘Making the Nature Scene,’ it was a song we made that we did a (hip-hop-influenced) remix on.
“Just kind of felt like, why not?” she says, laughing. “It’s fun working with beats.”
Raisen sent her tracks, and as they’d done before, Gordon added guitars and vocals, the lyrics flexible enough to improvise new lines depending on the needs of each song’s rhythms.
“Sometimes you don’t know how (a lyric’s) going to place in the music,” Gordon says of her need to be flexible with the words she initially wrote. “You can kind of get a sense of how it would work, but it’s not like sitting down with a guitar (to write), which is something I’ve never really done.”
Eight years into her return to Los Angeles, and two albums into her collaboration with Raisen, Gordon says she feels increasingly at home in her music.
“It’s nice to work with someone who’s a collaborator who’s actually not in a band with you,” Gordon says of Raisen’s role in the creation of the songs and albums. “I mean, I like working with Bill (Nace in Body/Head). It’s just one person and we really get along.
“But this was a completely different experience for me,” she says. “And I wouldn’t have – it wouldn’t have happened in New York.”
