For Blonde Redhead, Intentionality is Everything

Glimmering in the light, Kazu Makino sits on a patio filled with cozy outdoor furniture. A soft breeze ruffles her long, copper-dyed hair as she cuddles a small dog. Her purple bikini absorbs the filtering sun. I’ve never seen someone actually emanate serenity through a Zoom screen before. Twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace flank her in their little virtual boxes, all three calling in from distinct locales and times zones. Linen-shirted Amedeo reclines in a small, overgrown garden, shrouded in late-afternoon sun. Simone sits half-obscured in a dark kitchen, eyes trailing thoughtfully across the screen. These are the three minds behind Blonde Redhead, the mid ‘90s and early aughts alt-rock trio who just released their first album in nine years (since 2014’s Barragán) last Friday. Even if you don’t think you know them, you probably do: “For the Damaged Coda,” the eerie finale of 2000’s Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, went viral as the theme song for Rick and Morty’s Evil Morty character and rose to meme-ified fame 20 years after its initial release. Blonde Redhead was reborn in the zeitgeist, though not as they deserved to be.

It’s funny how that always seems to happen to the bands whose songs are the most intentional and the best thought out. And really, that’s the only word to describe Blonde Redhead: intentional, and sometimes devastatingly so. Theirs is a sound whose every angle is examined, every dark corner scoured. Sit Down For Dinner, Amedeo explains, is the culmination of a decades-long effort to speed up their creative processes. Still, the LP is a five-year labor of persistence and resilience, a psychedelic rumination around the void of isolation the world fell into during the pandemic’s first months. Following a spurt of creativity nursed in the brooding melancholy of those sickly days, the band floated in labelless purgatory for another year before they felt comfortable signing their work into the hands of section1—a teensy, toddler-aged venture working out of L.A. “We wanted to not feel like we had put our destiny in somebody else’s hands,” Makino explains with composed sincerity. “So we waited.”

It’s a hard-earned patience that the three share, the kind that accompanies 30 years of music making amidst a constant ebb and flow of creative divergences and spatiotemporal rifts. The ‘90s underground indie scene is not, at a glance, conducive to the sort of generation-crossing, genre-spanning work Blonde Redhead has tirelessly churned out since 1995. The group’s continued existence is just as purposeful as their work itself, an active and ever-shifting effort to come together and create.

As the world fell silent in 2020, Makino made the decision to flee with Amedeo and his partner to upstate New York, where the two channeled a devastating lack of external stimuli into some of their richest sonic and lyrical work yet. Alone in the cold March suburbia, Makino perused Joan Didion’s magnum opus, The Year of Magical Thinking. The tome is itself a reflection on ending and continuation of life, the cycles of existence we all witness and undergo. When Didion’s husband and writing partner John Gregory Dunne died in 2003, her world crumpled into an enormous, hungry nothing. She wrote The Year of Magical Thinking to track her evolution through grief, coming to understand the absence which would now define her life. In a seminal moment in the memoir, Dunne sits down to dine with his wife. He never stands back up. “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,” Didion writes, a sentiment which Makino and the brothers worked to mold and soften into a sweetly profound meditation on isolation and togetherness.

And yet, “this is not a COVID record,” Simone enunciates, his voice clear and insistent. The group had been tooling at new music since 2018, trying to find an angle to swoop in on and a voice to hold on to. And then, Sit Down for Dinner came along. The album is, then, quietly philosophical at its core. It is a reflection on mortality and aging, on love and loss, on the way the self is stretched and corroded as you enter middle age. “It has the right space, the right amount of air; it moves. I think what it is is it’s really close to home,” Makino exhales gently. “So often you have a little distance [between] the self and the music. Once you find something like that, you feel honest about what you make. You don’t want to lose that.”

There is something deeply intimate about Makino’s dreamy falsetto, a truth reluctantly told in Amedeo’s moody lilt. It’s remarkable, really: a group that has constructed itself around the conceptual for so long steps forward for the first time in almost a decade, with its feet planted firmly on the ground. That deep sense of the mortal makes the album affecting, and adds an almost literary pathos to the project. In its raw honesty, the autobiographical sadnesses and angers and hopes which punctuate its every line, Sit Down for Dinner has achieved a triumph in subjectivity. It’s the very humanity Blonde Redhead once eschewed for a hyper-focus on being unexpected, one which led them dangerously close to dissonance.

Mellowing out in one’s late career is a cliche, and not one I hope to propagate here. Rather, there is something wise and elegiac in Sit Down for Dinner, an “it factor” that creates the mellow perfection I’m trying to describe. It isn’t attempting to prove itself to anyone, nor to hide behind alien production and otherworldly vocals. It’s full of devastating lyricism and softly insistent melodics, ripe with feeling and confidence. In “Sit Down for Dinner, Pt 2,” the second half of the epic, seven-minute saga for which the album is named, Makino whispers, “I can’t live for you / I know you’re tired of living / But dying is not so easy.” It is quiet and calm and achingly beautiful, a testament of loss and a triumph of subjectivity.

“I think our way of music is always to try and figure out a way of going into the unknown,” Amedeo smiles. “It’s kind of strange and great at the same time because it’s – it’s not necessarily what we were trying to do, but something that came out of some sort of unconscious decision.” He smirks: “or just the mixture of our personalities.” It’s not a seamless process: three decades of togetherness fosters the kinds of personality clashes that always make themselves known by the record’s end. “In the process, I forget about myself in order to find myself later on,” Simone notes. “For me, it was hard. But it’s the process.” It’s a process, though, that the trio have nearly perfected.

Take “If,” the record’s searing, penultimate cry: “Turn the light down moving star / with a long kiss just be yourself / I see you don’t want a mate for life / in the archives of your smile,” Amedeo croons. Melancholia and self-acceptance intertwine hungrily, upsettingly, in showers of shoegazey guitar and atmospheric percussion. It is both modern and essentially true to Blonde Redhead’s ethos, a gritted-teeth exercise in introspection rendered through the eyes of each member of the band.

And there are bits and pieces of each of the three on the LP: Simone insisted on light, persistent bossa nova throughlines; Makino rallied for literary connection; Amedeo set his sights on creating something inviting and easy to listen to. Makino, in fact, sees the record kaleidoscopically. “I have visual sensations,” she explains. Each song is a picture of the three’s lives, a vision they express in language. Makino speaks as though songs came out of her as they need to, and, and she bends to their exhortations.

Sit Down for Dinner is a labor of love, one long-suffered and painstakingly nurtured through each step of its creation. It was not an easy record to make, nor does it read as such. That’s the beauty of the thing: You can feel the effort that’s been injected into each track, the squabbles and upset and joy. “You really want a beautiful life / you really sang what you cried / I already care about two / I never wanted you to move,” Amedeo sighs on “Not for Me.” It feels like a love note to the practice of songwriting itself, and to the work the band has put into sustaining their working relationship. “I really care about you,” he nearly whispers as the song rolls gently forward. It’s impossible to doubt that he’s telling the truth.

Miranda Wollen lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.