Kim Gordon on the Unexpected Rewards of Her Solo Era

Kim Gordon’s candid, revelatory “Girl in a Band,” published just a few years after the dissolution of Sonic Youth, has been hailed as one of the greatest rock memoirs ever. Since the book’s release in 2015, Gordon has gone on to relaunch her career in music with a pair of excellent and surprising solo albums and tours, among other projects. On Sept. 9, she’s publishing a special 10th-anniversary edition of “Girl in a Band,” including a foreword by novelist Rachel Kushner and a new closing chapter titled “What Is the End” that covers the events of the past decade. Read that new chapter here, exclusively at Rolling Stone.

The tour is almost over. I’ve been on the road for eight months, on and off, through the U.S., Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the West Coast, the East Coast, back to Europe again. Each leg felt both too long and too short. I miss my bed, my dog, my friends. Tour can be lonely, even when you’re surrounded by people. That’s not to say that there’s no warmth, though — bonding with my band (the amazing Sarah Register, Camilla Charlesworth, and Madi Vogt) and seeing old friends. Or when I run into a musician I’ve known from playing together at festivals over the years, like a long-lost cousin, with our shared family history of playing and touring; the forging of one’s body through traveling in a van, endless waiting, getting up at brutal hours to go to the airport, jumping on trains with 17 guitars in tow. I don’t think of myself as a nostalgic person, or sentimental in any way, but lately I feel like I’ve crossed an age line where I can realize I’ve done some stuff.

I didn’t exactly mean to embark on a solo career. Before moving to L.A., I was staying in an Airbnb in Echo Park. This producer named Justin Raisen came over to meet me. I met him randomly, through his brother, and knew very little about him. My good friend Lizzi Bougatsos was visiting from New York. She was so devoted to the idea of getting California sun that it didn’t bother her to just throw a towel over the gravel in this Echo Park rental, an element used in almost every gentrified garden, and lie down. This was 2014 and Justin had been DMing me saying how I should do a solo record or at least sing one of the Lawrence Rothman tracks he was producing. Justin was using lots of guest singers on this album, and it seemed like a very L.A.-music-scene thing to do, very different from what I was used to. My music background is all organic, experimental, groping around in the dark as a group until there is a song, as we had always done in Sonic Youth. Or improv-based music that comes together from knowing each other’s moves so well, like Bill Nace and I do in Body/Head.

Justin showed up with bleach-blond hair, a whirlwind of energy bouncing off him, and told me he was getting married the next day. I was a little perplexed as to why he would take time out to come meet me when he must have been so busy with his upcoming wedding. I was skeptical of working with a “producer.” After he left, Lizzi and I giggled over the “L.A.” of it all.

As it turned out, Justin was an East Coast transplant with punk roots. After he left, he sent me various Lawrence Rothman songs to see if anything clicked. Eventually there was something I connected to, a song called “Designer Babies.” I came up with some lyrics and went over to check out Justin’s home studio. He chopped and edited and made hooks with what I did. He also took some leftover bits and put them to a trashy drum track. I was surprised how much he got my sensibility. I went back and recorded guitars and more vocals and those became the song “Murdered Out.” We kept experimenting together and eventually started working in earnest toward what would become No Home Record.

I put together a touring band, which was, at the time, a terrifying prospect. I reached out to Sarah Register, whom I knew from her great band Talk Normal. Yves Rothman helped music-direct and worked to translate the record tracks into something that could be reproduced live. He brought on drummer Sterling Laws and bassist Emily Retsas. Once again, my experience with the L.A. music scene did not match my preconceptions. We did three shows, and then the pandemic happened. During Covid, the world felt numb and dystopian. Bernie Sanders was smothered and locked out by the corporate Democrats and media. Biden was elected. I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which was written in 1993 and takes place in California in 2024. It’s a speculative fiction about a postapocalyptic California that felt almost prophetic — with complete anarchy, the wreckage of climate change ruling the landscape, and people taking weird drugs and setting themselves on fire. This novel felt like an appropriate inner dialogue during the pandemic. As soon as lockdown ended, I started working with Justin again.

When we finished a new record and mastered it, I listened. It was like I had forgotten to make music, and instead, what I had made felt almost visual. But that makes sense, I guess, since not knowing how to make music was kind of what got me here in the first place. When I started doing interviews for The Collective, I was asked about the tone of the lyrics and sound. What some called harsh I found normal. I realized that the Octavia Butler book had stuck with me, sunk into my subconscious.

I knew there was something special about this record. It was, however, a bit of a slog to make. Justin and I sometimes work really fast, but there were weeks when his ear was out, and I could tell in the mixing. He thanked me later for making him go back into songs. But once he gets going it is insane how everything comes together. Justin is sort of a mad genius. I’ve become addicted to this collaborative way of making music.

It’s been amazing to see how much The Collective has resonated with other people. Maybe it is the feel, that connection to the Butler novel. I was even invited to the Grammys, with a couple nominations. That’s something I never thought would happen. And I must admit, I felt like an interloper, though I do believe The Collective deserved the praise. I took Coco with me to the awards show and afterward she said, “Well that was an interesting experiment.” We post-punkers/indie rockers/experimenters have always lived in the shadow of the industry. Free jazz, the Velvet Underground, Iggy and the Stooges, punk rock, No Wave, and the early rock of the Sixties and Seventies were our influences. And for me, of course, everything goes back to playing around in the living room with my brother, Keller.

My brother was a poet, classics scholar, and charismatic leader of nerds who blossomed into a handsome surfer and then nosedived into schizophrenia and a life of unfiltered Camel cigarettes, caffeine, and antipsychotics. Back when we were kids, he had a recorder and would play it while dancing around as if he were a free jazz soloist. The high-pitched no-tune sound drove me crazy. But his joyfulness around it was undeniable. Neither of us ever took a music lesson.

In February 2023, the night after Bill Nace and I played a truly magical Body/Head show at Zebulon, I was awoken by a call from a policewoman telling me my brother was dead. He had been found unconscious on the floor in the assisted living facility where he had been staying. A couple months earlier, he had undergone a series of radiation treatments for two big squamous-cell growths on his head and melanoma on his cheek. For years, Keller would stubbornly sit outside in the sun smoking cigarettes, without a hat or sunblock. My longtime friend Margie and I had spent three weeks taking him to UCLA for treatment, five days a week. It was a lot of driving. Margie and I took turns picking him up from the Valley, going over the 405 into Westwood, and then going back again. It turned out to be a great way to spend time with him. Keller was always in a good mood. He would sing along with Neil Young songs, and occasionally he would recount dreams. One really hot day that fall when I picked him up and gave him a Coke, he leaned back in the passenger seat and said, “AC and a can of Coke, this is living the dream.”

Keller loved going to UCLA and would reminisce about the times he was taken to the neuropsychiatric institute there. Just the familiarity of being in Westwood and UCLA, where our dad had once taught, made him happy. At the hospital he would flirt with the female nurses and doctors, sometimes inappropriately. He could be very funny and charming, but sometimes, he was tired and cranky. He was wracked by a wicked cough, no doubt caused by his constant smoking. When he ate or drank, his cough was worse. My brother was quite frail, so his death was not a total surprise. But the fact that he’d died from falling out of bed was strange. He’d gone through all his cancer treatments with no side effects.

Keller’s death shocked me back to the vast differences in our lives. When I had to meet with the coroner to fill out the death certificate, he asked me what his occupation was, and I told him he was never employed, that he was schizophrenic. He kept insisting he had to have an occupation so finally I said, “Poet.”

When I’m home I disassociate from touring. I can’t even summon the names of my songs. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to do it again. But always, I feel it in my body, like a sleeping ghost. The adrenaline of it all, of the next show, of my nervous system never letting me entirely rest. My blood pressure is always a little high and sleep only comes in short stretches, never six hours or longer. When it starts up again, my body knows exactly what to do. And paradoxically, it’s onstage that I can sometimes feel calm, and a focus, like a ride takes me away. I’m definitely an introvert and yet, I chase this feeling, which can only be conjured up with the right sounds and lights and the mass of people there in the dark watching and listening. No sound check, just out onstage feeling the dark mass of the audience, guided by the sounds in my ears and the floor monitors and the vibrations of it all. On a good night we’re all one, lost in a river of nerves/adrenaline flowing and guiding us through every song until the end. I like when the venue is super dark, and you can’t see any faces to take you out of the moment. Then I can really feel my powers, I’m in no way self-conscious. My everyday self dims away. I become the person who has done some things.

By the time this book comes out, the 10th-anniversary edition of my memoir, I’ll have finished a new record. Another tour will have come and gone. We will have been to Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, where the last Sonic Youth gigs happened. That version of my life feels a million years away. I wonder if I’ll be sad when we play Santiago, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo, where Sonic Youth, my marriage, and my memoir ended. The stoic posture of those final dates feels like a distant memory, but every now and then I let my heart sink into all that happened. And the truth is, I mostly just feel lucky. This is not the future I could have predicted or envisioned. A solo career. My brother’s death. A trip to the Grammys. How fast and strange the world is. Music once again feels like a place I’ve never been, slightly familiar, but without a safety net. Sometimes the words don’t come until my mouth is open and my mind is just following along with the rhythm.

Excerpted from GIRL IN A BAND (10th Anniversary Edition) by Kim Gordon. Copyright © 2015 by Kim Gordon. “What Is The End’ copyright © 2025 by Kim Gordon. Reprinted by permission courtesy of Dey Street Books, an imprint of William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers