Quasi – Featuring “Birds” Tour

Itʼs been a decade since we last heard from Marnie Stern, and in her absence, the indie music world has become overrun with an army of antiMarnies i.e. corporate clones making banal playlist rock lacking in the whimsy, creativity, and virtuosity that made Sternʼs take on rock music such a singular sound in the late 2000s. But when Sternʼs guitar bursts in like a shower of stardust on The Comeback Kid, her long-awaited follow-up to 2013ʼs The Chronicles of Marnia, itʼs like no time has passed. Marnie Stern is back—and not a moment too soon. Where has Stern been? She cops to having been lulled by the gentle rhythm of a nine-to-five job as the guitarist in the band on The Late Show with Seth Meyers; sheʼs also been raising two kids. But when it came time to start working on a new record, the ease with which she picked up right where she left off was surprising even to her. “I expected that all those years of playing other kinds of stuff would have influenced me—and it didn't at all! I was fully back where I was before,” Stern says. Even so, The Comeback Kid is no nostalgia trip: itʼs a statement of intent, as Stern makes clear on the anthemic opening track “Plain Speak”. “I canʼt keep on moving backwards,” she repeats, her fingers furiously tapping the fretboard as the song joyfully zips forward like a rocket hitting warp speed. She follows that up with “Believing is Seeing,” a song about overcoming alienation with nose-to-the-grindstone creative effort. “The sound is hard to hear right/ You canʼt take it,” she sings. “What if I add this! And this! And this!” punctuating each “this” with another layer of sound, gleefully rifling through her bag of musical tracks and trying each one on for size, building the song up as she goes along—itʼs fun and colorful and imaginative; itʼs also weird. But being unafraid to embrace her oddball impulses has always been part of Sternʼs musical DNA, and something she missed in her years of being a player for hire. “It was so great to be able to start being myself again, and when I would think, ʻOh, is that too weird?ʼ I'd remember I'm allowed to do whatever I want! This is mine. It's me,” says Stern of writing songs for The Comeback Kid. “I'm trying to go against the grain of this bullshit that when you get older, you lose your sense of taste. I want to empower people to not be so homogenous and go against the grain a little bit.” Taking joy in your individuality is the message of The Comeback Kid, as is the realization that making music which truly reflects who you are in all your brightness and your weirdness is quite possibly the key to happiness. “This record is about reassuring yourself that happiness is not about what kind of things you have or how many things you have or what you donʼt have—itʼs about all the good things you do,” says Stern.

Pacific Northwest rock legends Quasi play their beloved 1998 classic third album Featuring "Birds," start to finish in its entirety for the first time. Quasi was formed in 1993 by Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes, in Portland Oregon. Since then, the band has toured the world (more or less) however many times, and released a number of well-regarded albums on several of the most respected American indie labels, including Up, Touch and Go, Kill Rock Stars, and Sub Pop, and internationally with longtime comrades Domino Records. Concurrently, JW was a longtime member of Sleater-Kinney, as well as recording and/or touring with Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Bright Eyes, the Shins, Elliott Smith, the Go-Betweens, and others, and is currently also a member of Portland band Slang. SC has worked with Elliott Smith, Built to Spill, Jandek, the Go-Betweens, and others, and has toured and recorded as a solo artist. He is also currently a member of Jon Spencer and the HITmakers. Trivia!: Both Janet and Sam are two-time members of the Oregon Music Hall of Fame - JW for Quasi and Sleater-Kinney, and SC for Quasi and Heatmiser