Kazu Makino will at all times look stylish. By way of the hazy lens of Zoom on her telephone, the Blonde Redhead singer-guitarist waves from inside her mint inexperienced house in New York Metropolis. Just a few crops dangle within the window the place pure gentle floods in, illuminating a paper lantern, a spotless desk, and her trusty Gibson. She’s pulled a chair as much as her kitchen countertop the place the digital camera seems to be positioned, and sometimes slumps her elbow on the highest of the old-school range as she talks, typically trying to the ceiling to search out the precise phrases as she conjures decades-old recollections. Her hair, amber blonde fading into darkish brown, spills over a knit sweater with maroon stars.
Whenever you’ve lived a life as cool as Makino’s, curiosity in her tales comes naturally. Born in Kyoto, Japan in 1969, she obsessed over data from France and England as a child regardless of her strict upbringing on conventional Japanese values and classical music. By the early ’90s, she relocated to New York Metropolis as a twenty-something in the hunt for change. She discovered it when she stumbled into twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Tempo, her future bandmates in Blonde Redhead, together with the music of Lush, Dionne Warwick, and Marvin Gaye within the metropolis’s legendary venues.
This yr marks the thirtieth anniversary of Makino forming Blonde Redhead with the Tempo brothers. What began as a noise-rock band turned an experimental mission tapped into and influencing the spheres of dream pop, shoegaze, and indie rock. Her deep friendship with Unwound and Fugazi—spawned from their 1995 tour collectively—left a mark on Blonde Redhead’s most well-known run of albums, the previous’s Vern Rumsey taking part in bass on their 1997 LP Faux Can Be Simply as Good and the latter’s Man Picciotto producing 1998’s In an Expression of the Inexpressible, 2000’s Melody of Sure Broken Lemons, and 2004’s Distress Is a Butterfly. The band’s seventh album, 2007’s 23, was a mysterious slice of chamber pop, and the closest they’ve ever come to mainstream success.
Blonde Redhead simply launched Sit Down for Dinner, their first new album in 9 years, and a revitalized comeback at that. Makino lights up with eagerness whereas discussing the songwriting course of and their upcoming tour. “I’ve been fairly aggressively chasing some type of independence. I might see the twins have been a bit intimidated, so I took benefit of that,” she laughs. “My strategy is a bizarre mixture of naiveness and expertise.”
A wistful sort of gratitude paints her face as she recounts Blonde Redhead’s adventures, just like the time Steve Albini gifted her a gold Beyer ribbon microphone on tour, or watching fireworks in upstate New York with Sufjan Stevens. Even whereas exploring a solo profession with 2019’s Grownup Child, Makino discovered herself sharing secrets and techniques with a few of her lifelong idols. “I’m nonetheless shocked,” she says, struggling to search out the phrases.
