I went to a liberal arts college wherein grading was qualitative and we had to write our own evaluations.

One summer, when I was elementary-school age, my neighbors and I built guitars and keyboards out of scrap wood, painted them in bright colors, and formed the cover band Lil' 'D' Duran Duran. We didn't make our own noise or even pretend to play our fake instruments.

There's some horrible connotations in the word 'reunion.'

A lot of music for me was about - I mean, aside from the fun and challenge of writing and being really good friends with my bandmates - getting to perform.

I'd rather do spontaneous and silly work like ThunderAnt than have somebody's film on my shoulders.

I've realized that I have a lot of different loves, and I want to pursue writing, but I can never divorce myself from music.

With Sleater-Kinney, we have a lot of earnest fans, and we were an earnest band.

Sleater-Kinney is a band that we hold close to our hearts as well; it's not something that we're cynical or jaded about. We only feel gratefulness and appreciation for other people's enthusiasm about it. We would never be annoyed by that.

I'm a huge Quasi fan.

Kissing is kind of scary.

My father wasn't just taciturn - it was like he didn't want to be heard.

My father was a corporate lawyer. He went to work in a suit and tie. He had a secretary. He left the house before seven A.M. His professional life felt generic, like a backdrop, a signifier more than a life: office job.

Only in retrospect can I find clues to my father's gayness. Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present.

When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, 'You waited for your father to die; why couldn't you have waited for me to die?' I knew then that I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden.

My father was hard to know and gave little indication that there was much to know. He claimed he remembered almost nothing about his childhood.

My own relationship to food was healthy. I was lean and athletic with a high metabolism. I could eat half a pizza with a side of breadsticks and wash it down with soda. I never dieted or denied myself food.

My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that, on its own, sounds unfinished.

I've always felt unclaimed.

In Olympia, Washington, many of us were writing songs that were the equivalent of bloodletting: This is the sound a wound makes; this is the screech of a scar. But Mary Timony was always more kaleidoscope than microscope, creating magical worlds replete with weaponry or sorcery.

In the early and mid 1990s, every musician I knew was obsessed with Helium. The 'Pirate Prude' EP and 'Pat's Trick' played on repeat at nearly every gathering I attended. And we didn't just listen to these records - we discussed them, the worlds they opened, novelistic and strange.

The 'New York Times' is my homepage because it forces me to go right into the news.

'Beasts of the Southern Wild' was one of those films that I felt like I could dismiss because it received so many accolades, but then I watched it and was won over.

So many things can be filtered through fandom - joy, compassion, love.

There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.