One night, long ago, Kazu Makino was on a stage in Denver. Looking out, she saw only a handful of observers. After playing a song or two, she decided to stop the performance to invite everyone in the audience backstage for tea and cake.
“It was a lot more natural than to pretend like we have a crowd and we are playing a huge show,” Makino says. “It felt ridiculous.”
Makino, one third of the time-tested art rock institution Blonde Redhead, can’t remember the venue or even the year of that show-turned-greenroom chat. But she does know it was before the band toured by bus or traveled the world to perform. Along with the multi-instrumentalist Pace brothers — Simone on drums and keys; and Amedeo on lead guitar, keys and vocals — Makino has been singing and playing guitar with the avant-garde trio since forming as a no-wave punk band in 1993.
Looking back on her career, Makino says there were projects she felt particularly connected to. The band’s 2004 watershed Misery Is a Butterfly and its 2007 followup 23 showcased Blonde Redhead’s new sound, swapping their noisy, angular roots for something more lush and cinematic.
Listeners and critics responded, leading to the kind of success that comes with green lights everywhere you turn and a sense that no one can stop you. “We were riding quite high,” she says.
Other albums were less life-giving, leaving Makino with a sense of “instant humiliation” that cast her next moves into doubt.
“But then you forget, and then you accumulate energy, and then you start making another album,” she says.
It’s not so much that she’s evolved in the last three decades, the Kyoto-born artist says, but more that she has come into a deeper understanding of herself. Now Makino, 54, appreciates what sets her apart from other musicians, including her bandmates.
“I’m a lot more free-spirited than them,” she says of Simone and Amadeo. “But at the same time, I think that restriction somehow works to my benefit, because maybe I’m a lot more repressed and then kind of I explode — and so, that dynamic, it works in the end.”
Makino hesitates to continue, afraid she’s making the twin siblings sound more conservative in their musical approach than they actually are. This tension may be the secret to Blonde Redhead’s success.
“It can be quite magical,” she says. “It’s not like we get along really, really well, but I think we have musical chemistry, and nothing can take that away.”
‘It’s not really in your control’
In September 2023, the trio released their latest LP Sit Down for Dinner, a sweeping collection of visceral, melancholic songs about death, doubt and the power of togetherness. Makino didn’t realize it would be Blonde Redhead’s comeback album, returning the band to its critical-darling status after years in the wilderness.
“I had no idea,” she says. “You don’t know these things. It’s not really in your control.”
The band’s lauded new record comes nine years after their last, Barragán, which critics described as “lackluster” and “utterly barren.” At the time, it was presumed to be Blonde Redhead’s final album. But now there’s new wind in the band’s sails as they once again garner praise for their singular brand of moody, guitar-driven indie rock.
In the interim, Makino released her first solo album, Adult Baby, in 2019. The experience offered an “extremely gratifying” opportunity to collaborate with other musicians on a vision all her own.
“Watching younger artists expressing themselves in the highest scale through my music was one of the most rewarding things,” she says. “I made music that really had a lot of space, then I chose the right people who could do that. They just took off using my platform.”
Makino was able to channel the leftover “energy and enlightenment” into Sit Down for Dinner, an 11-track offering that finds Blonde Redhead trading the minimalism of its predecessor for more fleshed-out arrangements that recall the stratospheric run of their mid-00s glory days.
‘I’m not going to suffer’
Makino has always battled with the trope that artists have to go through hell to make something great — and after having so much fun with Adult Baby, she refused to fall into that trap with Blonde Redhead. She agreed to work with the Pace brothers again under one important condition.
“I’m not going to suffer. I’m not going to go through pain to make this album,” she remembers telling Amedeo. “I just wanted to really make a point that we are gonna have, I’m gonna have, fun. You do you, but I’m gonna have fun.”
Taking its title from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a 2005 memoir of grief following her husband John Dunne’s fatal heart attack at the dinner table, Sit Down for Dinner inspired an unusual sort of fan service: in-person meals with the band in select cities. Makino says these events felt forced, unlike the greenroom conversations in Denver all those years ago. A self-described “nerd” who likes to read and keep to herself on tour, she’s more introverted than her onstage posture might suggest.
“I’m quite fixated about music and working. And in those moments that I know what I’m supposed to do, I’m not shy. But everything else, I feel extremely awkward,” she says. “I don’t handle it well when a lot of people are paying attention to me.”
Makino intends to keep creating as a solo artist, but she doesn’t know if Sit Down for Dinner will be the last Blonde Redhead album. There are no plans to record anytime soon as the band continues to tour through the end of the year and into the next. Amadeo, for one, wants to keep the project alive.
“He keeps saying, ‘I think we should make a shockingly bad album, like a really terrible one. We can try to make an album so bad that it would become famous for it,’” she says. “I think the whole point is that he wants to reel me in into making another album but without putting ourselves under a lot of pressure.”
Makino seems unsure about the future of Blonde Redhead — but if this winds up being the band’s last chapter, that’s something she can live with.
“I feel like this would be a good record to end with,” she says. “A good note to end on.”
ON THE BILL: Blonde Redhead with Allison Lorenzen. 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 4. Levitt Pavilion Denver, 1380 West Florida Ave. Tickets here.
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