Kazu Makino On How Blonde Redhead Made My Favorite Album Of The Year

Portraits by Charles Billot, Live Photos by Elena Saviano

Blonde Redhead are back after nine years, as cool and composed as ever, to wring out our hearts and teach us how to see the world with demystified eyes.

Their newest realization “Sit Down for Dinner,” released in late September of this year, is not exactly a reunion, nor is it anywhere near a reinterpretation of their multi-decade body of successes. It’s a magnificent metaphor: a spellbinding sigh of instinctive understanding. 

Kazu Makino and twins Simone and Amedeo Pace are time-tested masters of their craft, tending this time to a burgeoning garden of well-kept chaos and melancholy. They’ve refined and redefined their style over time, coiling together a history of kinesthetic experimentation with speculative indie-ish incantonations. But an achievement of this magnitude is not at all surprising for the trio. Decades of reflexive artistry have allowed for the unfurling of an exquisite sonic labyrinth, a record that is blisteringly sincere and quietly self-effacing. It’s romantic, it’s tender, it’s an expression of the burnished subtleties intrinsic to living and dying. 

I met Kazu at a Japanese tea house in NoHo with only four seats, all at the bar. It was an uncharacteristically warm day for November in New York, and I heartily believe this is somehow indicative of the effect she has on those around her. We spoke about finding clarity, sharing space, and the importance of her onstage drink rotation (hot tea, ginger shots, and champagne). It felt like sitting down with an old friend, hearing about where they’ve been and where they’re going. I wish there was a way to indicate laughter in a transcribed interview without typing “ha ha ha ha ha.” 

Blonde Redhead’s “Sit Down for Dinner” is my favorite record released this year. I’ve listened to it dozens of times, and it just keeps getting better and better and better and better. They say don’t meet your idols, but I am unequivocally glad that I did. 

Thank you so much for making time to do this. The show was great last week. 

Oh you were there!

Yep, taking photos.

Oh! That’s great. It was so funny, I forgot to wear my skirt. I forgot to put my outfit on. And right before the last song, before encore, I thought, what am I wearing? I thought I was comfortable, no wonder. 

I thought that maybe you had just done an outfit change specifically for encore. I thought that was kind of fun. The first skirt looked great.

Really? I was in a van all day long in that skirt, so I was like, shit. 

It’s okay. It looked great either way. And now we have this lovely day to talk. How did you first find yourself in New York? 

Oh boy. I met someone in Japan. He was from New York, and he was playing some shows in Japan. I was assigned actually to take photos of the concert. I was still in school, and he was like, You clearly don’t belong here. He was much older than me. I think he sent me a ticket to come here, to try it. Then, I started playing right away in New York. I didn’t like the city as a city, because coming from Kyoto, there was too much concrete and too much violence. It was too dirty. I thought I would just be here for a little bit. 

We briefly paused the interview because the barista, who minutes ago told Kazu she was new and not at all experienced at making the drinks on the menu, brought Kazu her hojicha latte with an irresistibly cute and structurally perfect teddy bear frothed into the oat milk. It was adorable, and we were both thrilled. Kazu stopped to take a picture of the drink. I couldn’t help but smile. 

Oh my god! She led me on thinking she was really new. And then she did this teddy bear! 

Oh my gosh. That is incredible. I’ve never come here, and I definitely have to come back now. 

I’m really, really choosy with my tea, my matcha, stuff like that. They cater all my teas. They’re really, really good quality tea. 

This is one of the best teas I have ever had. So, ok. Back on track. Has your feeling about New York changed? You’ve been here for a while now, and it’s certainly an overwhelming place. 

I still feel that it’s too much. I don’t spend that much time here, because we’re constantly on tour or I’m working on my solo stuff in different places. So yeah, I’m not having to really commit to the city as much as if you were really stuck here all the time. We’ll see. 

I understand. I moved here a couple years ago and even though I love the bustle, it feels suffocating at times to live in such a busy place. 

And then, of course, you don’t have to go to all those things. You don’t have to be with all those people. But then it turns into a very lonely place, to be alone. I mean, some people say, Oh it’s so nice, there’s constantly noise. I think there’s other ways of doing it. It’s hard to be in tune with nature. That’s definitely a big minus. 

Has that always been a big part of your life? 

Yeah, yeah. 

Oh, the bear’s face is falling apart. 

Oh no! He’s dying!

I hope not. Okay. You mentioned you were taking photos when you first came here. Was music a part of your life then? How did it become a part of your life before you did it professionally? 

I started playing piano really early on. My grandfather was a violinist, that was his livelihood. So I wasn’t aware, but it was always presented to me. It was there for me to consume. There’s always music in my house, classical music playing very soft, literally 24 hours. So yeah, I think it was subliminal, but I never, how do you say this, came off the track of doing music, you know?

Oh makes sense. You can absolutely hear the influence of classical music in what you write. 

Yeah? Yeah. Definitely. I also wasn’t allowed to listen to any other kinds of music, so I think that was a really heavy education at first. Basically, I was doing hearing training for the first 10 years of my life. Then, around then, I discovered other types of music but like, illegally in my household. It seems like every kind of music except classical music is rooted in black music: the blues. It took me a while to figure that one out, but once I figured it out, there was no going back. I just consumed things that classical music couldn’t offer that became my main influence. 

How did you manage to listen to other music? Were you sneaking records under your coat or what?

Oh, you know. Children. They think they’re hiding, but they’re not hiding at all. I’m sure my parents knew exactly where my secret records were. 

That is so funny. I definitely did a few things like that when I was a kid. 

You think you’re committing the perfect crime. 

I’ll choose to remember it that way. 

Oh yeah.

And now, “Sit Down for Dinner” is your first record as a group in nine years. Were you guys always compatible? 

Oh, we were never compatible. The work dynamic and stuff like that was just too difficult for me. The band dynamic, I suppose. But then, I walked away, and I recovered in more ways than one. Physically, mentally, musically. And when I was strong enough I said, I’m going to make my own music. Everyone always told me, from early stages on, you meet all these bands through touring and you make a lot of good friends through this community of musicians, and some of them were always bugging me saying, Be brave, make your own music. They would give me instruments, drum machines to do it. I always had support like that. It definitely made me feel like, if not now, never. So I started making. 

Right, and you have an extensive amount of solo work too. Do you feel like the work you do on your own plays off of the work you do in Blonde Redhead, or are they separate entities? 

No, I literally went through the trash bin of stuff that the band shut down. I went through all this material and was like, I’ll keep these for myself then. Nobody wanted it. That’s kind of how it started. I remember saying, Ame, you don’t like this one right? Can I have it? He said sure. And midway through my record, he listened and said, I actually like it, I think we should have it back for Blonde Redhead. And I said no, it’s mine now. 

Yeah, it’s yours! Paws off. That’s funny. So do you write as a group?

No, not really. It’s okay. Because it takes so long. Sometimes, when we rehearse all of our songs, something will turn into a new idea. That happens a lot. Even then, to make it into a song, you need quite a bit of time. You need to lock yourself up, so to speak. 

How do you do that? How do you be by yourself? 

That is a struggle actually. When I was making solo material, I had to actually work on it a lot when I was on tour with the band. I would be playing stuff, asking Simone to keep time in the dressing room. He heard initial ideas and stuff like that. But then again, I don’t even question what I do. It’s like a shelter for your mind. When you feel like reality is getting to be too hard, you use music to hide. It kind of works like that. The pandemic was just way too painful to navigate through, so I constantly worked on music. It’s an escape usually. 

I feel like I can hear that in this last record. It’s interesting because when I first saw the title I thought about the potential significance of literally sitting down for dinner, sharing a meal. Then I listened to it and realized that’s not at all what this record is about. So I’m wondering if any of those experiences played into the metaphors and imagery in this record? 

Yes, very much. I remember I was rushing to finish the songs, especially “Sit Down for Dinner,” because I was actually staying with Amedeo upstate with his girlfriend, the three of us. And we don’t get along at all. It was so painful. We were hearing every day from the city that people were dying by bundle, that they didn’t even have a place to put the dead bodies. So for Ame, it was not an option to go back to the city. For me, I’d rather go back to the city than go through this. I kind of had a lot of tension. After I finish this song, I’m going to go back. Then I’d launch into another and say, After this song, I’m going to go back. It was almost like a race. Of course, Ame rented a house with a piano and instruments to record, so I knew when I came home that I couldn’t do it, so I was almost like vomiting. All the fear. It was so complicated, living with your ex boyfriend and his current girlfriend. It was just rough. There was a lot to put down. 

Oh my god. Yeah. 

It was an insane journal. The music became like that.

Wow. Yeah. 

And it wasn’t just hard for me, it was hard for them also. 

Yeah, yeah. There’s so much intensity in that record, but it’s so digestible. You can hear the struggle and the mourning. You can hear the strife. It’s really not easy to make pain a pleasurable listen.

I came off what was maybe one of the happiest periods of my life. I was living on an island, I made the solo album, I was so proud of myself. I was by the Mediterranean Sea, which I love so much. I was surrounded by friends I really love. I had a lot of good energy stored in me. I was living off of it. It was night and day. To be taken away from that context and put in the pandemic was so surreal and so unjust. But still, I had a lot of good energy in every cell of my body. I think it’s the combination of that and the predicament I was going through. It was this crazy cocktail. 

That’s a weird mix. But it all makes sense. Clearly this work was very internal, so has the feeling you get when you perform for people changed? 

Oh hm. I definitely had a lot bigger obstacles: self-doubt, self-loathing. Maybe I was just not that happy. I slowly learned to only ask for good stuff, for happiness. I learned to ask for it even if I didn’t think I deserved it. That part was so magnified when making music. If the self-loathing is way stronger than self-respect or self-worth, of course every process is going to be so painful. But now, if not half-half, maybe my wanting to be happy is quite a bit stronger than wanting to punish myself. I mean, I still struggle. 

Especially in the world we live in, there are so many different pieces of life telling you to be one way, to think this about yourself, to want a specific thing. 

I start seeing these people whose main energy is hate. They actually use it to thrive and fester on hatred. There are a lot of people where that’s their engine. I don’t know if I can learn what that’s all about in my lifetime. It’s not hatred of themselves, it’s hatred of others. Or maybe they do hate themselves so much. I don’t know. I have no idea. 

Right, and we only have so much time to learn about other people and understand how all of that could possibly be…

Acceptable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And music is clearly a vessel for healing. We see that all over the world. 

It’s such an influential part for me. I find the music that Palestinian people are singing and playing so beautiful. I was literally imagining, what if the Israeli army had amazing songs to sing. What if they were always singing something authentic and beautiful. What would I feel about them? Is it even possible to feel something different? Art and culture is so important. And the fact that I relate to Palestinian people is because they have such a rich culture and history of art. And me as an artist, of course I’m going to lean towards that ideology. You hear them. It moves you. I wonder. If the Israeli government really wanted to appeal to the rest of the world, that would have to be the angle for me. You don’t see that. That being said, I have all my Jewish friends. They can make beautiful things and are in tune with nature. They just have such a deep understanding. I don’t need to say, there are so many great artists and literature that come from their culture. We are moved by Anne Frank because she can write beautifully. Her optimism is undeniable. 

Absolutely. And historically, art and religion have been practices that unify. I believe that complicates things. Sometimes I find myself wishing that I was doing something more beneficial given the times that we’re living in. I look at doctors and feel like I’m not doing enough. But art is such a thorough encapsulation of feeling. And to be able to create anything that allows people to feel is so important. That’s what all artists do. That’s what musicians do.

Exactly what you said. That’s how we relate to others that we haven’t even met. You can completely feel like we have blood relations, just based on the things that they make, the things that they sing, the things that they write. It’s a tool to reach out.