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Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More
Hear her latest work and enduring classics from Sonic Youth and beyond.Molly Matalon for The New York TimesDear listeners,Recently, I had the honor of interviewing Kim Gordon, the legendary co-founder of the now-defunct alt-rock pioneers Sonic Youth, who has lately become a formidable and fearless solo artist. As I prepared to write this profile, I revisited her great 2015 memoir “Girl in a Band”* and listened repeatedly to a playlist featuring some of my favorite Gordon songs, which I’m going to share with you today.Gordon is at heart a California girl — “too young to be a hippie but brushed by whatever rebellion and amped-up freedom there was in the air,” as she put it in her book. Art school brought her east, and the allure of late-1970s New York eventually introduced her to a downtown scene in which anyone, even non-musicians, could pick up an instrument and start a band. Intoxicated by that D.I.Y. ethos, Sonic Youth formed in 1981 and, improbably, kept putting out great, challenging and singularly influential records for the next 30 years.The band broke up in 2011, shortly after Gordon announced that she and her bandmate Thurston Moore were divorcing after 27 years of marriage. Gordon has been admirably candid about her anger and sadness in the wake of that split, but the woman I encountered in our series of interviews was long past all of that now, deep in a new chapter of life and art.Today’s playlist highlights some of Gordon’s recent work — especially the brash, wild singles from her second solo album, “The Collective,” which comes out March 8 — and contrasts it with some of her enduring classics.I try to keep Amplifier playlists relatively short, but this one proved quite a challenge: Given Sonic Youth’s three-decade run and remarkably dense discography (not to mention Gordon’s work in other bands like the improvisational duo Body/Head) this mix easily could have been 50 or 60 songs long. So consider this not a completist collection of Gordon’s music, but merely a tantalizing and deliciously distorted sampler.Bettin’ on the bullllll in the heather,Lindsay*Though I read “Girl in a Band” when it first came out, this time around I listened to the audiobook — an experience I highly recommend since Gordon reads it herself, in her inimitable deadpan. As her friend Kathleen Hanna marveled when I interviewed her for the profile, “She has that voice when she talks to you, in normal.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The day she turned 60, the artist and musician Kim Gordon felt, by her own admission, “shipwrecked.” She had recently gone through a painfully high-profile divorce from her husband of 27 years, Thurston Moore, and in the wake of their split, their band Sonic Youth — the freewheeling and fearlessly experimental group that almost single-handedly defined the sound and ethos of American alternative rock — ended its 30-year-run. Plenty of people she loved attended her 60th birthday bash in New York, but she still felt unmoored.Gordon’s 70th birthday party last year, though, was another story entirely.For one thing, it was in Los Angeles, the city she’d grown up in and returned to in 2015. But also, as Gordon explained on a video call from her book-strewn home in late February, it doubled as a celebration of finishing her second solo album, “The Collective.”“It was kind of great to have done that on my 70th birthday,” she said and laughed from behind tinted sunglasses. “Because I’d actually worked that day and felt a finality to the project, it was really satisfying.”Not many artists welcome their 70s with a new album, and virtually none with a record as blistering and gloriously strange as “The Collective,” which has more in common with postmillennial SoundCloud rap than the dulcet tones of 21st-century indie-rock. (The title is partially inspired by Jennifer Egan’s novel “The Candy House.”) But left turns are business as usual for Gordon, a restlessly curious artistic polymath who has never settled for the conventional, expected or familiar.“She’s one of those people that was meant to be an artist,” said the musician Kathleen Hanna, who has known Gordon since the early 1990s. “Painting, writing, music — she’s one of those people who was born to be around any kind of art.”Justin Raisen, the 41-year-old L.A.-based producer who worked with Gordon on “The Collective,” noted that “Lots of careers go downhill with age, but there are also lots that go upward.” He cited as examples David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave — and Kim Gordon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
