Tone Glow 175: Tsunami
An interview with Tsunami's Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson about meeting at the punk-activist Positive Force house, relearning old songs, and how the music industry made things boring in the 1990s
Tsunami
Tsunami is an American rock band that was founded in 1990 after Kristin Thomson and Jenny Toomey met at the legendary punk-activist Positive Force house. The two guitarists and vocalists were joined by drummer John Pamer and bassist Andrew Webster to complete their initial lineup. For the next seven years, Tsunami delivered numerous 7-inches and three studio albums—Deep End (1993), The Heart’s Tremolo (1994), and A Brilliant Mistake (1997)—that were defined by soaring vocals and biting lyrics. Thomson and Toomey also ran the Simple Machines record label, releasing work from bands like Ida, Scrawl, and Retsin (not to mention a 7-inch series that included music from Jawbox, Codeine, and Bratmobile). Tsunami’s music became more stylistically varied with each new album—a natural byproduct of seeing their friends perform live—and their unwavering DIY ethos led to a final album filled with scathing critiques of the music industry after Nirvana’s success rippled into a sea change in the underground. The band’s demise came shortly thereafter; running a label and being in a band became unsustainable and, as Toomey explains, boring.
Tsunami recently released a 5-LP box set on Numero Group titled Loud Is As, which collects their studio albums, singles, demos, and more. Tsunami reunited in 2023 for Numero Twenty, and is going on tour this March and April throughout the US with Ida. Dates and ticket information can be found at their website here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Toomey and Thomson on October 14th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss the women musicians who changed their life, playing chords between two guitars, and how selling out is real.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: How are you both doing today?
Jenny Toomey: It’s been great—I have the day off and I’m catching up on a lot of stuff that has been piling up. I just went into a deep wormhole of that (laughs).
Kristin Thomson: It’s a beautiful day out here in Pennsylvania. Is it beautiful there in Chicago?
Yeah, it’s actually a really lovely day today. I wanted to start off by asking about the respective households you grew up in. What were they like?
Kristin Thomson: We moved a lot, and something funny is that when my husband first started meeting my family, we’d go into the basement to grab something and it’d be completely empty. He’d say, “What’s up with your family…?” (laughter). We were very busy, everyone was very active and had a lot of freedom. As long as we were being responsible, me and my sister could do whatever we wanted without a lot of parental oversight.
Jenny Toomey: It’s funny—this is the second time we’re being asked about our childhood, and I guess people didn’t care to ask us about it when we were younger (laughter). I had a happy childhood. I lived in a suburb of D.C. and went to public schools. I had a lot of music in my life from a young age—I had a stereo that was always on, I was in a professional choir, sang a lot, and thought about music a lot. It was a really safe place where kids could go out and play all day long until it got dark. I was about two or three blocks from my elementary school and I would walk there on my own. I don’t know that kids are allowed to walk to school at that young of an age now, but I think it was pretty normalized then. I was pretty independent.
Jenny, was this professional choir your earliest exposure to being in a creative space? Or at least where you created music?
Jenny Toomey: I’ve always been super creative. As I got older, I realized that I’m kind of introverted and I like a lot of alone time. I taught myself to read at a really young age and read voraciously until college burned my brain (laughter). I didn’t read for like ten years after that. Music was always accessible to me. My dad had been in a glee club and always loved music. I was in church and there was singing there, and I think there was just more art in schools back then. We had a music teacher and we sang in elementary school, we did a lot of crafts and art—it was just a part of what you did.
Kristin Thomson: And you were in the school plays!
Jenny Toomey: Yup, a little later. I got really into them in junior high school, and then in high school I broke my ankle in sophomore year so I couldn’t be in the play, which is how I then became friends with all the punk rockers—some of them were in the stage crew. There was an orchestra pit and there were a lot of musicians who were part of the bigger productions, and so I met them that way too.
Kristin, what were your first dabblings with having a creative practice?
Kristin Thomson: I took piano lessons like many other children. We were in Canada so it was the Royal Conservatory program. You could go up in grades and take tests and reach certain levels. I was fine—I was no prodigy. I was definitely not sitting down at the piano as much as I should have to get ready for lessons, but it wasn’t until later that I realized that people wrote music. I thought that whatever was in the book was “official music” and that nobody else could really do anything. We had a fairly limited record collection, but we wore it out. Eventually, by 8th or 9th grade I was buying records I thought were interesting and played them incessantly. And that was when I started building my own interest in music.
What bands opened the floodgates for you?
Kristin Thomson: For me it was the B-52’s, the self-titled record. It never felt like a narrow path, though. I also liked the Who, XTC, the Fall, and Prince. There was a lot going on.
How about you Jenny?
Jenny Toomey: My mom was really into musicals so there was a lot of Cole Porter—all this very traditional songwriting. But they always had music on when they came home from work. My brother and I used to have a joke, like, “Don’t get in the car with daddy, he’ll make you listen to the book,” because he’d always be in the middle of some book he’d gotten at the library. But it was also, “Don’t get in the car with mommy, she’ll make you listen to the musicals.” (laughter). But I appreciated it because a lot of the music that I was exposed to as a kid was complex, so those weird harmonies and decisions, like in Rhapsody in Blue, offered a lot more crayons. It normalized complexity in music for me.
Kristin mentioned having this moment of realizing you can make your own songs, and that’s sort of the wonderful thing about punk rock. You realize that people your own age are putting out records. You can’t even imagine how this person came up with this song idea, much less recorded it, much less put it on this piece of vinyl. I was actually very musical, but sexism was constant—it was the water that we swam in. Maybe it wasn’t always overt, but with the generation we grew up in, in D.C., there were a bunch of women in the scene just earlier than me. And then there was a period when it was mostly guys. Not seeing women on stage made it impossible to understand how you’d be in a band. Even though I knew how to sing, it was just a block, that this could be a path for me. Even though I was organizing shows for [activist organization] Positive Force, there was this barrier. When I started writing songs, it was amazing and shocking to realize I’d written an earworm—that I could hear a song in my head and then it could exist. Those moments were profound. A real, “Where have you been all my life?” sort of feeling.
Who were the women you saw perform live when you were younger that made you realize that you could also make music?
Jenny Toomey: In D.C., every once in a while you’d see a band like Rude Buddha or Bloody Mannequin Orchestra, who I recommended to everyone in my high school. People in that band went off to be in Dag Nasty and other bands, but this was a mixture of punk and art rock, and Sharon Cheslow played bass in that band.
So you’d see women in bands every once in a while, but it only became clear that there was a path when two things happened. Fire Party started playing, and they were 100% a Dischord band. There were women in other bands before that but to see this all-women band that were seen as a peer to all these others was a big deal. Two people in that band, Kate Samworth and Amy Pickering, had been in that choir with me as well. It really did feel like there was a path. Also, when you’re only listening to boys at that age, all these emotions are coming out but they’re always about the girls, and the girls don’t have a voice at all. When Amy started singing, she didn’t just have a great voice, but it felt like there was more than one side of the story now.
The second thing that happened is that my friend Dave Grubbs, who I had a radio show with in Georgetown—he came from a small insular scene in Louisville, albeit one that was more embracing of women and had powerful figures like Tara Key and them. He just said, “Why aren’t you in a band? If you can sing, why aren’t you in one?” And then I said, “Shit!” I called my best friend Derek Denckla and said, “Okay, we’re gonna be in a band now!”
I love hearing all this. The Fire Party thing makes so much sense to me, they’re an incredible band. Kristin, is there anything you want to share?
Kristin Thomson: I was in Denver during high school and there weren’t a lot of women in bands, especially for the scene there. The anchor band was the Fluid, who signed to Sub Pop during that time. There were other punk rock bands but they’d be all guys, but then there would be some touring bands and there would sometimes be women in them. I wasn’t thinking about being in bands—I was just seeing shows. But then when I went to Colorado College, I was involved with the radio station and very active with the concert committee and booking. There’s going to be another synergy here because I was in some bands who sometimes played on campus. There was this loose collective that had three or four women, and there were like eight people who would come and go, but the one you may know is Betsy Biggs, the avant-garde composer. We were both in that band and cycling through it—it wasn’t well organized, but it was fun.
It wasn’t until I got to D.C. after college where I saw Kim Colletta from Jawbox on stage. I didn’t realize until two weeks ago that it was actually their first show—J. [Robbins] said that. And that’s where I first saw Jenny too! Suddenly you saw more women in prominent positions in D.C. This was post-Fire Party, and I saw them play once, but it was now the next iteration of things where there were more women showing up in bands.
What was that first encounter like between you two? Did you hit it off right away?
Kristin Thomson: It was a Positive Force benefit show, and the lineup was insane: Fugazi, Shudder to Think, and Jawbox. Jenny made some remarks from the stage about the beneficiaries. I went and signed up for Positive Force right then, and so I became part of the activist part of Positive Force. We met at a meeting, probably after that, but I did see her on stage that night.
Jenny Toomey: I actually had heard about Kristin from Mark Andersen before I’d ever met her. The first action that she participated in was cleaning up the garbage outside the Rolling Stones’ tour. You’d think there’d be another way to recycle things, but there wasn’t. Everything that was going to get recycled had to get picked up by volunteers and brought to a recycling center. Mark Andersen came back and he said, “Oh yeah, there’s this woman who showed up tonight, I think you’re really gonna like her.” Just sort of warned me that this really cool girl was coming to the Positive Force event next weekend (laughter).
Kristin Thomson: It’s true!
With the foundation of your band having roots in this Positive Force house, was there anything from the actions and collaborations that took place in this setting that informed how you communicated as bandmates? Your early songs were on these benefit compilations—you had the DsCene (1991) comp for the Zacchaeus Free Clinic and the You Can’t Eat Music (1991) comp for the Donald Bentley Food Pantry.
Kristin Thomson: I think that’s [Toomey’s band] Geek, probably.
Jenny Toomey: Is that Geek or is that Tsunami?
I’m pretty sure Tsunami is on both of those, let me see.
Jenny Toomey: Something I should say is that Tsunami the band does not remember what our first show was (laughter). We were just forward-moving fish, and we’re lucky that we also ended up keeping a lot of shit in suitcases. A lot of that was so in the moment that it’s lost to time, and we were always planning the next thing, not thinking about the thing that we just did.
That makes sense. I’m looking now and the one comp is a cassette that had Moss Icon, Freak Beans, The Fifth Column, and The Commonwealth on it.
Kristin Thomson: And Tsunami’s on it? What song?
“Answerman,” “World Tour,” and “Ski Trip.”
Kristin Thomson: Those came out on Cow Arcade (1991) as well, our own self-released cassette. You asked about conversations, and Jenny often came with things—a great idea with a lot of lyrics ready to go—and we would shape the songs based on the core idea. So the conversation was mostly “how does this sound?” using our limited guitar capabilities, especially at the beginning.
Jenny Toomey: There’s something unique about the early Tsunami songs because we didn’t know the chords we were playing. Kristin did a little bit because she had some piano background, but a lot of the chords we were making, we were making between our guitars.
Jenny Toomey: They’re unresolved, not-right formations of notes that come together to make chords between our two guitars. It’s been really interesting trying to relearn a bunch of those old songs because people listening would go, “Which one of you is playing… you’re both playing, that’s between the two of you!” I always give homage to Bricks—the band that Andrew [Webster] had been in with Mac McCaughan and Josh Phillips and Laura Cantrell—because a couple times they just tossed off an entire cassette in a weekend, and a lot of the songs would be kinda joke songs, but they were catchy and funny. We thought “let’s just do that,” and early Tsunami had a lot of that.
That picture of not knowing chords and forming them between the guitars is so beautiful. Do you feel like in retrospect that not knowing the chords was foundational to the way you approached songwriting? I’m assuming this was a different frame of mind than later on when you understood more about theory and chords.
Jenny Toomey: I don’t know how much more I learned about theory and chords (laughter). I had sophistication and melody because of my association to all that complex music for so long. I think it was freeing, maybe too freeing at times. We’re trying to relearn these songs with our friends who actually know music. Franklin [Bruno] was like, “Yeah, that sounds wrong—you’re playing that wrong” and I’m like, “I’m pretty sure this is right.” Then he says “move your finger up one” and “oh wow, that’s it.” So all of it’s just muscle memory for us, particularly for those early songs.
Kristin Thomson: Again, it was a lot of what sounds interesting and doable to play. Sometimes because we were relearning the songs to play them in 2025, I was like, there’s probably an easier or more correct way to play this part, but because I learned it the way I could do it—consistently, tolerably—I’m sticking with it because I’m not sure I can actually correct it. It’s a little bit handmade.
I want to talk about two specific songs from those early demos, ones that you both contributed lyrics for. Jenny, I like “Ski Trip” while knowing the context of the different actions and benefit compilations you took part in, as the first line is, “Mom’s got a nose job, father’s a reverend.” Kristin, I want to ask you about “Kickball Babe” and its schoolyard imagery. Could you talk respectively about both of these songs? You had the lyrics, how did you form the songs around these ideas that you had?
Kristin Thomson: With “Kickball Babe,” it was the first song I wrote that had both music and lyrics, so let’s keep that in mind. It was definitely, you know, “I’m a sporty kid, I’m actually good at those kinds of games.” It was a sassy kind of song. I think the chord structure is quite straight-ahead, with a little change in the middle. That was what we could do: kind of fast, and a combination of the things that we could piece together. The song had three verses that had some sassiness to it, and that was it. Looking back at it now, it’s kind of youthful, but that’s fine.
Jenny Toomey: If you had asked me about “Ski Trip” a year ago, I would have had a totally different thing to say about it. But because I hung out with Dan Littleton [of Ida], he reminded me something about it. Dan and I were in this band called Choke together at the same time, and I was in this band called Geek, so we’ve been friends since I first started playing music. He reminded me that there was a different iteration of “Ski Trip” where it was a really broken-hearted love song. I’d had the big breakup of somebody I’d dated for four years, and I had this very sad lyric on it, something like, “When you think about me, will you be kind?” Now it’s just like, “It’s never cold,” or whatever the lyric is. He was really mad at me. “That was this heartbroken song, it was so beautiful, and you changed it.” But that thing, “Mom’s got a nose job, father’s a reverend” was 100% a Bricks homage. I wrote it in 10 minutes with Andrew, and it was just about funny rhymes. “Ski mask on her head she looks like a fucker.” (laughter).
You both ran Simple Machines, which was a label that released a lot of works, including your own. Most artists aren’t also running a record label on top of making their own music. Was there anything you felt was significant about that whole process?
Kristin Thomson: Meeting our heroes before we worked with them, like Scrawl or Superchunk. They were on a few singles, but we were friends and we would tour together, especially Superchunk. They were the masters of writing catchy but clever songs. And Scrawl—incredible. We’re glad we were able to work with them and play shows with them. Hearing them every night, I’d think, “Oh look, that chord’s just quite open” or I’d think about the way they structured songs. Being in D.C. there were tons of bands to see, a lot of stuff was going on.
Jenny Toomey: Also I think there was tons of permission. If you want to start a weird band with your friend Mark Robinson and put out records, you can. If you want to make these records sound completely different, just write and record them, and you’ll be able to put them out. It felt like, at the beginning particularly—before it became more cumbersome and more like these plates we had to keep spinning in the air—we had been granted 100% permission to make it as weird or complicated or silly or serious as we wanted it to be.
When experimenting with different ways of making music, was this something you figured out live or something that you decided upon while sitting and writing songs?
Kristin Thomson: Things were pretty much organized and practiced. We weren’t a jammy band, and we definitely weren’t improvising playing live. Very rarely, right Jenny?
Jenny Toomey: I mean, strings would break and jokes would have to be made, or somebody would miss a part and you would have to find your way back together with it, but it was very much a serious work ethic. It was, “We have to get the record out by this time, we gotta get it written and recorded.” We got better at practicing a little bit and with setting up a big tour, you really learn the songs—you know them like the back of your hand. Then you record them, tour them to promote them, and then start again. So we would have these constant cycles where we knew where we’d be going six months from now, eight months from now. Everything now is so complicated. There’s so many negotiations about setting up shows, whereas beforehand you could just ask. Someone would sneak you on as an extra opener. I think we played four songs for our first show. And who cares? It’s punk rock, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to be seven songs, ten songs.
Jenny Toomey: When we learned new tricks, they became part of what we could do. And this happened after being exposed to more people. After seeing bands like Rodan, we could write songs like “Slaw.” Our first tour was with Beat Happening. For a bunch of the songs on Cow Arcade and Deep End (1993), I won’t say they were like Beat Happening songs, but they have that same easy-permission and humor, that mixture of childishness and sexuality. That weird Beat Happening stew. On The Heart’s Tremolo (1994) we’re trying to do more complicated things. And then A Brilliant Mistake (1997) was a total critique of the entire music system that we were working within. So the music went from jokes to these more internal critiques of the scene and sexism, and then this larger systemic critique of the machinery.
Kristin Thomson: Another thing about the difference between Cow Arcade and Deep End is that for Cow Arcade, we did a 4-track with Dan Kozak and got it out. There was that plus a couple of 7-inches—early stuff like the Headringer (1991) single—and we were getting some response. So then here comes the chance to record an album, but because we were putting it out ourselves, it was our money on the line. We were relying on friends. “Where should we record this?” We ended up going to Catbox Studios in Lancaster, and we were right after The Lilys’ In The Presence of Nothing (1992). There was more of an investment in the idea.
Jenny, you mentioned that as you progressed through the albums, the songs got a lot more serious. You have songs like “The Workers Are Punished.” You have songs like “Enter Misguided,” which is about the music business, and “The Match,” which has the line about men getting to be weak. What inspired the both of you to have songs that addressed these things? Were there conversations about this?
Kristin Thomson: I don’t think there was a conversation, but Jenny, I remember the first time you played “Old Grey Mare” for me in the basement at our house in Simple Machines. It was just the two of us working out the guitar parts. I remember thinking, “I see why she’s written these lyrics.” It was 1996 and the music industry had changed. It was post-Nirvana, and there was this commercialization of many parts of the music industry that were very close to us. We needed to operate in that space, either as a band or for the label, so there was a lot of stuff that was in the stew on a daily basis.
Jenny Toomey: The scene was changing. At first, no one had aspirations to become major label artists—there wasn’t a path. On our early tours, there was a good set of clubs we could play at, mostly between the East Coast and the West Coast and back, but some subset of that would be in someone’s parents’ house, on a skate ramp, or in a laser tag facility. The idea that there was this systemic place, this commercial set of pathways across the country, of career musicians doing all these things: it wasn’t true at all. It was much more that we got a list because we would ask Mark Robinson. Ian [MacKaye] gave us a lot of dates, places, and names for booking those first tours, which meant that it was dependent on your willingness to be helpful and kind to one another.
Then suddenly, you’ve got bands that have never done a tour, and they’ve got a manager before they’ve even put out a 7-inch. There’s all this professional infrastructure that is glomming on to what we used to be doing ourselves, and all that infrastructure comes with sharp elbows. Suddenly it doesn’t feel like what you were trying to do, it doesn’t feel like the scene that you were part of anymore. It feels like you’re angling for a gold ring that the major labels are going to give you. It felt bad. We were just writing about what we were feeling—it was like somebody had shrunk all our clothes and nothing fit anymore.
Kristin Thomson: It’s funny to get back to “The Workers Are Punished” because this was written in the infancy of the internet, and it wasn’t about the internet at the time. It was about co-option. Remember there was a famous Baffler article about the commodification of dissent? It was like “How many more spaces can be taken over by commercial interests and sold back to people?” It was about that, but it applies to today! About the continued surveillance capitalism. It’s interesting that it still fits.
Did you feel disenchanted with wanting to be in this music scene? Did you feel that you just had to keep pressing forward, and make do with the current circumstances?
Jenny Toomey: It didn’t feel good anymore. There was a combination of things that happened. If the internet had been around, or some things had been different, maybe there would have been a pathway to maintaining the label. What happened was Tsunami tended to be the band that raised the most money for the label, so when we were putting out a record or touring, we could make enough money to pay for all the other stuff. But we were putting out our friends’ bands, they were rising in power, audience, whatever. And we were responsible for maintaining that with our team at Simple Machines, which was at first volunteers and then employees. It was people like Pat Graham and Mickey Menard, people who helped us do the mail order and keep the trains running while we were traveling.
But largely, we had to stay home more to support that work, which meant we weren’t making the money, which meant the margins were tighter, which meant we had to get part-time jobs. So Kristin would be slinging bagels and I’d be doing the overnight shift at Kinko’s in order to have the privilege of working 20-hour days to fill out the mail orders or solve the problems of running a record label. So it did get to a place of diminishing returns. Also, people were aspiring to success in this way that seemed kind of anemic, not full of blood, not full of the community. It just felt more boring, frankly. It’s not like, “I’m really mad, I hate you for selling out,” but hang out with an A&R person and tell me how much fun you have.
Jenny Toomey: Or promo people. It’s necessary to get the stories out, and I’m not trying to be mean to human beings, but people whose whole idea is to determine whether a piece of artwork is “over” or is “gonna happen” just has little to do with the importance of art.
I actually think about this sort of thing a lot because I interact with a lot of other music critics and I often feel very disconnected from them. I feel like we have different priorities.
Jenny Thomson: No, I think that’s really clear. I was really excited that you said that you wanted to do this interview because when I looked at your stuff it was so all over the place, and then I just got obsessed. We’ll have to talk about this after the interview, about your matching music with perfume?
Oh yes, I’m a huge perfume nerd. I will proselytize perfume to every single person.
Jenny Toomey: Yeah, so when we’re in Chicago I want to sit down and smell all your perfumes.
Kristin Thomson: Let’s go on a perfume trip! (laughter).
What’s it been like to return and play shows? I saw y’all at Numero Twenty and wrote a review of it for The Wire, too. I felt very conflicted about the entire festival though, partly because I kept thinking about the corporatization of everything. I remember going downstairs there was this corporation-sponsored space with the walls all lined with old tour flyers. I kept thinking about how it’s maybe okay if things remain in the past. But even then, the shows were great, and one of my other big takeaways was, “Holy shit, Tsunami are so good live.”
Jenny Toomey: Get ready for us to actually know how to play our songs… (laughter).
What was it like to play that entire festival and come back and relearn these songs? How did that compare to concerts of decades past?
Jenny Toomey: Tsunami as a friend group has been hanging out once a year for most of the past 8 or 10 years. A lot of those folks were part of my wedding band, so at the ten-year anniversary of my wedding, my husband suggested we all get back together again. We’ve had this thing where in December, we all rent a house—or now they just stay at the house next door—and do karaoke, eat food, hang out, make masks and go to this weird festival that they have in Rhinebeck. And it’s been really fun to do that. If we hadn’t been doing this, I’m not sure we would have had any of the muscle memory sufficient to figure out how to do anything. The year before the festival—the December before that—we tried our first practice. We just pulled some amps out into the living room and tried to play some songs. It wasn’t great, but it felt like it was doable. And then we practiced a couple more times.
I’m glad you thought we sounded good, but for me, when Tsunami was really playing, it was effortless. I said we weren’t improvising, but I was singing a lot—I was improvising how I would sing a lot—and we could move all crazy over the stage. It was very free… and the Numero show wasn’t like that. I felt like if I moved an inch in the wrong direction, the whole thing could fall apart. And some of those last songs from A Brilliant Mistake are very exposed; if you make a mistake, you’re right out there ’cause you’re alone doing that. So all of that was really hard, and I got COVID the week before the Numero show. Those things made it feel more stressful than joyful, but it was really fun to be included, and it was good to see all our old friends. So I think we’re gonna have a lot more fun on this tour than we did at that show.
Kristin Thomson: It was fun to revisit that summer camp-vibe to how we approach touring, of using touring to bond with other bands. We were seeing people we hadn’t seen in a while, like Codeine and Karate. We were friends with Ida, but hadn’t seen them play in a long time. It was so fun to stand on the side of the stage and watch everybody play again. But I agree with Jenny, it was a bit like, “I’m ready. I can play these fifteen songs that we practiced so hard. And that’s probably it for now.” But now that we have a longer runway and more time, and have had a little more time to revisit everything, we have lots of things we can do when we go out in 2025.
Jenny Toomey: I want it to be that loose. There’s only a little bit of live footage of us playing out there. There’s one great CBGB’s show we played and there’s some new stuff that just came out recently. When I see that level—of how we were a unit and loose and having fun—I want that back. I think we can get there. It’s funny—I lost my voice and Kristin found this amazing guy named Michael Kiley who wrote this wonderful book called Personal Resonance. He totally helped me. I had a break between my head voice and my chest voice, and now all those Tsunami songs I sang in this insanely high register that I didn’t think I was going to be able to get to, I think I can get there now. “Poodle” is five notes higher than he ever warms anybody up to—like the high notes at the very end. I was like, “Should we just practice that?” and he’s like, “I’ve never done it before, let’s try it.” It’s been really really fun to get back into all that, you know?
Kristin Thomson: Another thing that Jenny and I are notorious for is winding each other up with ideas, like, “What if we did this? And then we added that?” So we have the Numero box set [Loud Is As (2024)] coming out and chances to reintroduce people to the recorded stuff, but when we go on tour, there’s literally so many things that we’ve thought of—interesting merchandise or funny participation prizes, and we might do a coin toss every night to figure out who’s gonna play first. So within the container of a show, there’s so many things that can happen inside of it. As long as Ida and our bandmates are willing to try, we have a lot of ideas.
Super excited for both of you. Is there anything that we didn’t talk about today that we should talk about?
Jenny Toomey: If Tsunami were a perfume, what perfume would we be?
I’ll think about it and add it to the interview. [Editor’s Note: The perfume I have been pairing with Tsunami’s music is Papillon’s Spell 125.] There is a question I end all my interviews with, and I wanted to ask both of you. Do you mind sharing one thing that you love about the other person?
Jenny Toomey: Only one?
Only one.
Kristin Thomson: I love that Jenny is eager to organize people around ideas, and be the person that is, not like the cheerleader, but you’re like, “Yes, we can do it!” As soon as you get people motivated around an idea, it’s possible, right? Not just as the band and the label, but your whole career at Ford Foundation is a representation of that. You build around it, you get momentum, you get people moving in the same direction as you, and it takes a lot of… not charisma, but it’s that you’ve thought it through and have great arguments to advocate for it.
Jenny Toomey: That’s nice, thank you Kristin. I like that Kristin does what she says she’s gonna do. There’s a thousand million people that say, “Oh, it’d be fun to do that” or “Yeah, I can help with that” and then they don’t do it. Kristin is the most hardworking person, and it’s never about her. It’s never about “...and I’m doing this to get the shine back on myself.” It’s not an accident that she put a workhorse on our hats, you know? (laughter). We both have some workaholism, but I don’t see her as being the kind of person who ever sees a cool idea and decides it’s too hard to try to do it. She really just does it. She starts thinking and she gets the spreadsheet out (laughter).
Kristin Thomson: That’s why we’re such good chocolate-and-peanut-butter partners.
Jenny Toomey: It’s kind of a perfect closing because that thing about our chords, I think is true. If we played the chord in the accurate way with one guitar, it wouldn’t be as interesting as bringing the different pieces together and making the chord happen. I used to think it was a problem that Kristin and I had such different lanes we liked to be in when we ran the record label, but I talked to my dad about it once and he said, “If you were doing the same thing, why would you need the other one?”
Earlier you mentioned Fire Party and their importance to you and subsequent generations. What’s it been like over the decades to sing these Tsunami songs, to use your voice in this way? What would be different if these lyrics had just been written down as ideas and kept private? I’m interested in both thinking about their public-facing nature and the idea of singing them.
Kristin Thomson: Let me go first, as I know Jenny has lots more to say about this. There’s some songs that Jenny sings in Tsunami that still make me a little verklempt when I hear them. The hair stands up on my arm when we play “Genius of Crack” together—it actually affects me emotionally when we play it. It’s about being able to have the permission, if you will, to build this band, to be out there doing ambitious things and creating something out of nothing. That’s what songs are: you start with an idea and then it becomes something that exists in the world. You just keep building on the successes, and it’s because we were supporting each other and had bandmates who were in it with us too. It was a demonstration that this was possible, and fun, and hopefully a good example.
Jenny Toomey: When we started playing again, a lot of people asked, “What do you think of the lyrics?” My sort of pithy joke was that I was the perfect audience for them (laughter). I 100% agree with these lyrics. But I’m also in the process of listening to some of my early bands to figure out if there are some of those that we want to make available. However, those make me a little itchier. I do feel like Tsunami was part of finding my true confidence and my voice. It is really fun to sing them. I think Kristin’s songs—like “The Workers Were Punished” and “Lucky”—are better now than they were then. They were prescient songs in some ways. I don’t want to say they were a caricature of a critique of the dominating structures, but when we see where the world is at this moment, it was like prescience. Particularly A Brilliant Mistake. Over and over people tell me, “You can’t sell out anymore” and the joke of it is, “Because no one’s buying.”
I’m not criticizing bands that get support at this point, and I’m not getting in an ideological “we’re pure and they’re not”-type conversation, but I do think you can sell out. I don’t think we ever get better systems if we just accept the systems that we’re living within, so it worries me—this normalizing of the language around that. I totally get what people are saying about fragile bands who have no margins, who are trying to figure out ways to have resources to make their art. But there is something to me about this moment where we feel like we’ve been made to feel so precarious, and so much of the supports and systems that privileged people in my generation had access to are going away. It’s creating a race to the bottom and normalizing it, which I wish we didn’t have. Having some people who are a little older than me saying, “Hey, it’s fucked up that young kids can’t go to shows, so we’re only going to play shows that everybody can go see. We’re gonna completely change how the D.C. clubs allow kids to come into shows by creating straight edge and putting Xs on our hands.” There was this creativity, and we need to dip into people who are doing that kind of thing.
That’s what made me excited about the internet initially—this incredible ability to sidestep all these gatekeepers. And yet we allowed so much more gatekeeping than we ever even had back then (laughter). That’s a lot of pontification that’s not very clear. I do love singing the songs that criticize what was happening to the scene. It was the beginning of what made it really transactional and more commercial, and less of this exchange between the audience and the performers. Fugazi would always invite people onstage—they didn’t like that there was this divide between the performers and the audience. Eventually they had to stop doing that because the audiences were so huge, but there’s something about that, and it needs to get reincorporated into how we do this music thing.
Tsunami’s Loud Is As is out now via Numero Group. The 5-LP box set features their three studio albums—Deep End (1993), The Heart’s Tremolo (1994), and A Brilliant Mistake (1997)—along with eleven 7-inches, various 4-track demos, and compilation tracks. Tsunami is also going on tour throughout the US this March and April with Ida. Dates and ticket information can be found at their website here.
Thank you for reading the 175th issue of Tone Glow. Some things are just too precious to sell off or give away.
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