“The riff! The riff! The riff! The riff!”
At a nondescript Irish pub on Avenue A, Marnie Stern is delineating her sonic priorities. A couple hours before, we met up on the Lower East Side for a stroll past the former location of beloved indie basement-bar-bakery Cake Shop, where Stern played some of her earliest shows. Ludlow Street is so unrecognizable, though, that we have to laugh at our collective inability to even find the former Cake Shop. Among the artisan ice cream shops and vape-marts that now fill downtown, we get our bearings on the corner currently known as Beastie Boys Square, and I recall how Stern, a lifelong Manhattanite, has lived in the city long enough that Beastie Boys was the first band she ever saw, opening for Madonna at Madison Square Garden in 1985, when she was nine. We abandon Ludlow for the closest dive bar we can find.
It’s been a decade since The Chronicles of Marnia capped Stern’s initial six-year run as a god of high-caliber NYC shreddage. After that era of overcrowded DIY shows and abundant MP3 blogs—when Stern signed to punk-feminist institution Kill Rock Stars and The New York Times dubbed her 2007 debut “the year’s most exciting rock’n’roll album”—she never stopped playing, though her context shifted considerably. For eight years, Stern held down a nine-to-five job riffing for a million nightly viewers in the Late Night with Seth Meyers house band. She also got married and gave birth to two sons, in 2016 and 2018, which she calls “everything I could have hoped for.” She describes the experience of two pregnancies with morning sickness while performing on national television (a puke bucket always fixed behind an amplifier) as “hardcore.”
Now 47, Stern is, in many respects, still the buoyant noise-rocker who exploded into indie consciousness in the late 2000s with a confetti-bomb style of virtuoso guitar tapping and radiant positivity. She is disarmingly hilarious, droll and unfiltered, and will often break up a word’s syllables to let you know she means it (“Cah-ray-zee!”) or repeat a phrase three, four, five times for emphasis. Stern has a way of turning her underdog status as a notably abrasive musician into transcendent comic relief. In 2012, she became the namesake of the internet’s most famous American dog—“I started saying the names of some female rock icons I love and her ears perked up a bit when I said Marnie,” says Shirley Braha, who owned the late Marnie the Dog—but Stern says folks did not always believe her on that one. With spirited animation, she chronicles how she recently toted around a copy of Rolling Stone’s latest Greatest Guitarists of All Time list—where she placed at a respectable 188—to show it to her kid’s kindergarten teacher, a cab driver, her neighbor, and doorman. “‘Look at this! People of my building! This is what I do!’” she recounts. “No. Body. Gave. A. Fuck.”
Of course, plenty do, but Stern is nothing if not self-aware. On the second track from her new album, The Comeback Kid, she sings, as if her words wore boxing gloves, over little more than one trilling guitar note: “This sound is hard to hear right? You can’t take it!” Then, conceptual punches: “What if I add this? And this! And this!” as each line introduces another instrument. “I’m well aware of what a shrill sound is,” Stern says. “There’s something amazing but also alienating about it. I was trying to verbally create a story of music: ‘I can make this noise powerful for you, listener. I can do it right now!’” She knows her proudly uncomfortable music is at odds with the streaming status quo, too. “It’s not background music,” Stern adds.
From her genesis song, 2007’s “Vibrational Match,” through to her newest material, Stern has always honed in on the moment of creation in her lyrics and in the ecstatic spark of her sound. “That’s the high for me,” she says. She’s often catalyzed the process with a secret ritual. “I have a radio in my bathroom from 1999,” Stern explains, sipping her IPA. “I listen to the classic rock station 104.3 and I take a shower for like a half hour. I’ll hear a song and it will galvanize me–I’ll be like, ‘This is it. That’s the song. I can do it. I am doing it. That’s me, yes. I’m gonna do it right now!’ Even if it’s a Pink Floyd song. Every time, I get out and go to the music and sit down and I get lost. And it’s only in that goddamn bathroom where I’m like, ‘THE RIFFFFF!’”
Stern grew up as the only child of a single mom in a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she lives with her own family today. Though she played guitar briefly as a teen, it was only as a directionless Stern was on the brink of graduating from NYU with a journalism degree that she decided to become a guitar hero. “I had this boyfriend in college who asked me, ‘So what are you going to do with your life?’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘What kind of dick are you?’ But it got me thinking.”
That Stern studied journalism is no surprise to me; her enthusiastic curiosity seems ceaseless. “Let me ask you this,” she says to preface the many questions she levies my way during our interview: What did you study? Were your parents attentive? Do you do online dating? What are we going to do about the state of music? What happens with journalism? What happens with all of these fields where no one can make a living anymore? What kind of sick world are we in?
If the music Stern would go on to make feels mantra-like in its espousal of empowering PMA, that’s because she needed it. “I was talking to myself,” she says. Around the time Stern picked the guitar back up, she discovered Sleater-Kinney, who exploded her sense of what music could be. “At that point, I was listening to, like, ‘Free Bird,’” Stern recalls. “Sleater-Kinney’s singing wasn’t sugar-coated, and I liked that.”
She spent her 20s living on St. Marks for $500 a month, and became so enraptured with the guitar that people in her life grew concerned. “My mother and all my friends thought it was a way for me to avoid being around people, which I wasn’t big on, and to avoid life,” Stern says. It was peak Meet Me in the Bathroom era, a scene Stern admittedly resented, dismissing it as image-oriented. She preferred noise: the calculated chaos of bands like the Locust, Ex Models, Flying Luttenbachers, in whose maximalism she thought, “That’s me!” On one of her early songs, she sings: “This is my ‘Thunder Road’/This is my Marquee Moon/This is my Orthrelm in tune,” the latter referencing the skull-drilling avant-metal guitarist Mick Barr, a pivotal influence. “Watching him play, I was put to shame,” she said. “I was going to shows every night and seeing all this skill around me and feeling very envious and determined, like I can do this, too. I wanted to be a part of this movement so badly.”
During that period, it was Stern and her best friend Bella Foster against the world. A painter and riot grrrl whose band had opened for Bikini Kill back in her hometown of Portland, Bella encouraged Marnie’s music profoundly. “She was my everything for a decade,” Stern said. “We were like a team. We found each other at the right time.” Bella gave her prompts for songs, offered feedback, and eventually painted several of Stern’s vibrant album covers. When Stern was too nervous to bring her demo into venues, Bella told her: “Your eyes are shining diamonds and your body is a brick of gold! Walk into that fuckin’ place and give them that CD!” They read philosophy together and attended gallery shows that pushed Stern to study the entirety of Bella’s art-school textbook Art in Theory 1900-2000, which infused her music with ideas. Most crucially, Bella made Stern send her demo to Kill Rock Stars every single year, for five years—specifically to the then-new KRS noise imprint, 5RC—before founder Slim Moon called Stern up, in 2006, asking to meet.
Stern was 30 by then. Moon rung her again to ask, somewhat cryptically: If she made an album, who would be her dream drummer? She immediately named Zach Hill—now of Death Grips fame, then of math-rock antagonizers Hella, ever in pursuit of pummeling polyrhythmic anarchy. Often when Stern was working on songs, Bella would tell her, “make it more Hella drummer!” On the phone, Moon said, “‘Well, I have his information, why don’t you reach out to him and just say 5RC is putting out your record?” In sheer disbelief at it all, she chain-smoked and worked up the nerve to call. “That might have been the best moment of my life,” Stern says. A few weeks later, she and her dog, Fig, were bound for California to record what would become her debut, In Advance of the Broken Arm, with Hill drumming and co-producing. “I can’t tell you how ‘holy shit’ it was for me the whole time.”
As she pursued gleeful dissonance—“Keep on! Keep at it!” she cheered on “Grapefruit,” titled in homage to Yoko Ono—exhilaration became her key. “The future is yours so fill this part in!” she shouted on the 2008 anthem “Transformer,” summoning possibility in her lyrics as much as in the awed alchemy of her playing. And while Stern has dialed her sound in—her home-recorded new album is a compressed 28 minutes, bringing some punk brevity to her tricky time signatures and polytonal frenzy—she has neither stopped searching nor tempered her celebratory noise.
Stern began writing The Comeback Kid in earnest after quitting her Seth Meyers job in early 2022, a difficult choice but one that helped her return to herself. “I would have thought the job would have given me more confidence, but it was the opposite,” she said. “The thing that brought me back to feeling confident in myself was writing these songs.” The first words she sings on the record are “I can’t keep on moving backwards,” a directive to herself to resist musical regression, and also to remember “life is at this minute.”
Though she is heralded most for her ripping dexterity on guitar, Stern’s distilled lyrics often spike her songs with deep emotional resonance. Among The Comeback Kid’s most bittersweet tunes, and one of Stern’s most direct, is “Til It’s Over,” about committing to a dream; it references another of her Kill Rock Stars idols, Elliott Smith, in its first verse. “I always related to him, and got the most pure, beautiful, amazing feeling listening,” Stern says. “That’s the feeling I was trying to get with that song.”
The album’s second half digs into “all life’s messiness” that accrued as Stern was consumed by parenting and a high-pressure job. Fred Armisen helped get Stern the Late Night with Seth Meyers role—she calls him one of her closest friends—and when she hit a lyric-writing roadblock on The Comeback Kid, Armisen offered advice. “He said, ‘In the cab, turn the volume of the TV down and write down what you think they’re saying. You hear what you want to hear.’ It totally worked!”
Even as her artistry has endured, Stern knows the music industry has become even more inhospitable to artists than it was 10 years ago. Back when she was starting out, the practice of record collecting helped her envision her sound—“My iPod was chock full of crazy shit,” she notes—and she wonders how the endlessness of music streaming has impacted creativity. Stern is candid about the self-doubt, and even guilt, she contends with as a musician, given her responsibilities as a parent to small children. “I feel selfish—even though I know it’s not selfish—because it’s not contributing to the household,” she says. “But I feel as creative as ever.”
When she asks me how I feel seeing musicians in middle-age and older on stage, I quote one of her formative inspirations, Carrie Brownstein, who in 2019 emphasized a need for music narrating the experiences of women past the age of 40. “No shit,” Stern says, audibly heartened, “I agree with that!”
Stern’s constants are crucial: her ideas, her personality, her nerve and fire riffs. “It can be so embarrassing to just be yourself in the music world,” she reflects now. “I mean, as you get older, it gets easier. It was so wonderful to sit down and work on music and come right back to where I had been years before. I’m still here. It’s all still here. I am still me.”
