An ‘alien vibe’ and no fear of death: this singer is full of surprises

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,” Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking. Until she opened it, Kazu Makino had no idea it was a book about surviving grief. Much less that it would provide the title of a new album by Blonde Redhead, the band she’d left for dead.

“I was seeking for help. Simply [I thought], ‘Oh, I would like to have a magical way of thinking’,” she says, laughing. “I always heard about Joan Didion but I never read her books. It was so weird to me that accidentally, I picked up a book that’s just about death.”

Weird because when the pandemic began its grim march in Italy in early 2020, that’s where she was. “We were all surrounded by death everywhere, right? And then I lost someone who meant really a lot to me,” she recalls. Suddenly, the only question that mattered was, “Are you gonna be stuck in Italy, or stuck in America?”

The choice led to another twist in the Kyoto-born musician’s life of transience. Adult Baby, her first solo album, was only months old. She’d abandoned the fraught dynamic with twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace she’d battled since Blonde Redhead formed in New York in 1993, to work with Ryuichi Sakamoto and other fresh inspirations on her adopted Mediterranean island home of Elba.

“But when I came back to the States, I moved in with Amedeo and his girlfriend. We were sheltering in upstate New York in the countryside, away from the worst part of the pandemic situation. And so we started working as if we were recording for a new album, in the same house, like we used to do.

“It was unexpected. I never thought that this would happen.”

Sit Down For Dinner would be the name of the first Blonde Redhead album in nine years. Makino’s two-part title track, drawing on Didion’s invocation of sudden, unforeseen change in the most banal circumstances, would become its centrepiece.

“I was already working on new songs,” she says. “I was going through my demos and I found, ‘This is part two of Meo’, which is a song that I wrote for my solo album. But then I was listening to it and it’s actually Sit Down For Dinner.

“So I think, partially, I wasn’t sure who I was writing for. But I was strongly telling Amedeo, ‘I feel like I’ve changed, so can I stay on the track that I found myself on?’ And Amedeo really encouraged me. So we tried to do it my way, I suppose.”

I can’t believe how people always go to have hospital check-ups and stuff… ‘Oh, so you want to live? Like, wow’.

Mortality and other threads of impermanence seem to haunt the album’s floating currents of sound and fragmented lyrics which sometimes feel, maybe for good reason, like they’re translated from another language (the Pace brothers, for their part, were born in Milan).

“Amedeo wrote a few songs and I don’t think he’s that type of person to think about death so much,” she says with a laugh. “But, as for me? Yeah, it is sort of a theme. In general, that is something I think about quite a bit.

“Not that I’m afraid of dying. I’m more curious about ... How is it that so many people are so afraid to die? Sometimes I can’t believe how people always go to have hospital check-ups and stuff… ‘Oh, so you want to live? Like, wow’. That’s kind of a wonder to me.

“It’s not something that you look forward to it,” she adds, but “I mean, you can really have an intimate relationship with death, you know? It’s always still a difficult thing to imagine, but I see good examples all around.”

She describes, a little tearfully, the peaceful final days of her friend Ryuichi Sakamoto in March last year. “His spirit was really vibrant. He was still listening to music until half a day before he passed away, just being completely moved by music. And his mind was completely awake and absorbing music like always.

“So death is not the end. It’s not possible that he just ended like that, you know? It keeps kind of going. It’s not so black and white.”

His music, for one thing, will doubtless remain: as potent as ever within itself, and perhaps more influential as time passes. This is an idea Makino has taken for granted since she was a girl, growing up in a house permanently alive with dead Europeans, even as she slept.

“My father had a really intense attachment to Bach and Mozart. His father was a violinist. So there was classical music, constantly, on very low volume, in my house. So that was my first exposure to music. And then I started taking piano lessons. But he was also very strict: I was not allowed to listen to any other genre of music.”

Eventually, her craving for something else led her to blues, to the guitar, and to New York. “I think those are the two genres of music that are ... sort of like my foundation, I suppose,” she says, although the drifting dream-state rock-pop of Blonde Redhead tends to invoke impermanence, much more than any kind of home.

“You know, I felt just as much a stranger in Japan,” she says. “I think I left to find a place that I wouldn’t feel so [much a] stranger. But in the end, that’s just the role I’ve been given. There’s a sort of alien vibe I’m giving away, no matter where I go. I’m definitely still looking for home. I hope I find it.”

Blonde Redhead play the Forum, Melbourne, on June 14 for the RISING festival and City Recital Hall, Sydney, on June 15.