Guitar Heroine

Sexism lives, even in the supposedly enlightened realm of
21st-century indie rock. Just ask Marnie Stern, the brilliant insomniac
guitar phenom from New York City who’s released two excellent albums on Kill Rock Stars—she’s
received plenty of shit-talk from Anonymous Internet
Commenters™.

“‘I wish I was a girl; then I could be considered a great guitar
player,'” Stern quotes a typical detractor in a phone interview.
“There’s tons of shit on the internet where people say, ‘She fucking
sucks, her riffs are lame.’ ‘Three of my roommates play guitar
better than you do.’ People are really angry about it. I couldn’t care
less. I piss people off. That’s cool. I think it’s hilarious that
people get really pissed,” she says with obvious glee. “[It’s mostly]
dudes around the age of 19, 20.” On the other hand, some of these
young’uns propose marriage to Ms. Stern. She usually replies, “Okay, in
a few years.”

Despite vicious disses from faceless schmucks on the intratubes,
Stern’s accrued plenty of accolades from music critics and fellow
ax-slingers like Mary Timony (formerly of Helium) and ex–U.S.
Maple member Mark Shippy. (The former’s collaborating with Stern on a
project; the latter’s accompanying Stern onstage for this current
tour.) You can’t fault her work ethic. Stern’s notorious for spending
several hours a day on her music, sitting in her Manhattan pad with
guitar and Pro Tools, spurred by coffee, cigarettes, and an obsessive
compulsion to be original. How novel and charming….

“The only thing I love to do is to try and put different parts
together,” Stern says. “When I first heard [Television’s] Marquee
Moon, I thought it was the greatest. Everything was coming together
in such an interesting way. When I sit down to play, that’s the
excitement I get. It’s hard for me to find where vocals will fit in the
mix and trying to make that work. It’s frustrating, but when I finally
do it on the billionth try, it’s a big hallelujah.”

Stern may not be a virtuoso (yet), but her mercurial spray of
emergency-Klaxon tones are cohering into attractive, individualistic
shapes on her new album, This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and
So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is
That. Like that Alan Watts–inspired title implies, Stern
crams about 30 minutes of activity into her three-minute tracks. She’s
toned down the shrieky Yoko-isms of 2007’s In Advance of the Broken
Arm, too, crafting 12 songs that could follow in Deerhoof’s wake
without jarring the continuity.

Stern didn’t get serious about music until she was well into her
20s, after she—wisely, in retrospect—ditched her journalism
career. Her first musical crush was Bruce Springsteen, whose albums her
mother frequently played in the car when Stern was a child. “I liked
his songwriting, intensity, and honesty,” she says. “I was really a big
fan of his for a long time.” Not until her early 20s did Stern discover
more underground artists like Television, Captain Beefheart, and Hella,
whose Zach Hill became Stern’s drummer and producer.

Stern admits that making her music is cathartic and therapeutic.
Listen to her output; you can’t help noticing a tremendous pressure
release. Befuddling words and scalding, scabrous notes gush forth from
each song with volcanic blasts of energy. Marked by her manic
fret-tapping technique and amphetamined vocals, Stern’s trebly,
turbulent compositions present challenges for those not blessed with
high metabolisms and hypervigilant attention spans.

Oddly, Stern thought she’d lose fans with what she thought was the
commerciality of the new disc. But it’s actually not a huge departure
from Broken Arm. “I think it’s important to try to constantly
grow,” Stern states. “I thought that [This Is It] was so
straight-ahead that I was a little nervous, compared to the last one…
I thought it was like Coldplay or something.”

But Stern places utmost importance on being original, which will
always keep her music from sounding like Coldplay. “I think you gotta
go to the uncomfortable place,” she asserts. “If you don’t, it sounds
so regurgitated, so boring, like everything else. That’s why I love
David Byrne and Talking Heads so much [This Is It‘s “Steely”
pays tribute to Byrne]. I think he writes the best lyrics I’ve ever
heard in my life. They’re esoteric, but some of the phrases are so
great. So I was listening to that a ton, because I think he is a good
example of someone who showed his weird side and it worked out.”

“I want to grow more and take risks,” Stern continues. “It’s
interesting when you finally find your voice. It’s so hard to find it
and then you have it, but you want to grow at the same time. It’s a
fine line. I’d like to push myself as much as possible.”

And she will, haters; fret not.