Carrie Brownstein

Carrie Rachel Brownstein is an American musician, actress, writer, director, and comedian. She first came to prominence as a member of the band Excuse 17 before forming the rock trio Sleater-Kinney. During a long hiatus from Sleater-Kinney, she formed the group Wild Flag. During this period, Brownstein wrote and appeared in a series of comedy sketches alongside Saturday Night Live alumnus Fred Armisen which were developed into the satirical comedy TV series Portlandia. 

The series went on to win Emmy and Peabody Awards. Sleater-Kinney eventually reunited; as of 2015, Brownstein was touring with the band as well in support of her new memoir. Brownstein was born in Seattle, Washington, and was raised in Redmond, Washington. Her mother was a housewife and a teacher, and her father was a corporate lawyer. They divorced when Carrie was 14, and her father raised her. Brownstein has a younger sister. Her family is Jewish.

She attended Lake Washington High School before transferring to Overlake School for her senior year. Brownstein began playing guitar at 15 and received lessons from Jeremy Enigk. She later said: "He lived in the neighborhood next to mine, so I would just walk my guitar over to his house. He showed me a couple of open chords, and I just took it from there. I'd gone through so many phases as a kid with my interests that my parents put their foot down with a guitar. So it ended up being the thing that I had to save up my own money for – and maybe that was the whole reason that I actually stuck with it."

After high school, Brownstein attended Western Washington University before transferring to Evergreen State College. In 1997, Brownstein graduated from Evergreen with an emphasis on sociolinguistics and stayed in Olympia, Washington, for three years before moving to Portland, Oregon. While attending Evergreen, Brownstein met fellow students Corin Tucker, Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, and Becca Albee. With Albee and CJ Phillips, she formed the band Excuse 17, one of the pioneering bands of the riot grrrl movement in the Olympia music scene that played an important role in third-wave feminism. 

Excuse 17 often toured with Tucker's band Heavens to Betsy. The two bands contributed to the Free to Fight compilation. With Tucker, she formed the band Sleater-Kinney as a side project and later released the split single Free to Fight with Cypher in the Snow. Brownstein began a career as a writer before Sleater-Kinney broke up. She interviewed Eddie Vedder, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Karen O, and Cheryl Hines for The Believer magazine. Brownstein has also written a couple of music-related video game reviews for Slate.

From November 2007 to May 2010, Brownstein wrote a blog for NPR Music called "Monitor Mix"; she returned for a final blog post in October, thanking her blog readers and declaring the blog "officially concluded. In March 2009, Brownstein was contracted to write a book to "describe the dramatically changing dynamic between music fan and performer, from the birth of the iPod and the death of the record store to the emergence of the 'you be the star' culture of American Idol and the ensuing dilution of rock mystique"; The book, called The Sound of Where You Are, was planned to be published by Ecco/HarperCollins. 

In an April 2012 interview on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, Brownstein said she was no longer working on the book. Brownstein's memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, was released on October 27, 2015. The book was published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Books USA. In 2020, Ann Wilson, lead singer of hard rock band Heart, announced in an interview that Brownstein was writing the script for a Heart biopic.