I’m not a rock critic. I’m a comedian, which is how Kim and I met: She sent me a DM on Instagram once and told me that she was coming to one of my comedy shows. We met face to face after the show. Yes, I’m bragging.

I don’t have the language to analyze music, but No Home Record, Kim’s first-ever solo album, is an experience. I listen to it as an entire album, something I rarely do anymore. To put it in comedy terms, it reminds me of the first time I watched Curb Your Enthusiasm and realized, Oh, Larry David was the heart and soul of Seinfeld. Kim Gordon, although she told me “I don’t really see myself as a musician,” was the heart and soul of Sonic Youth in my opinion. Her new album is an explosion of her freedom to be the artist that she’s always been, mixing poetry, music and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny lyrics.

I don’t know why she wanted me to interview her, but my guess is that it’s because interviews are no fun and she wanted to feel comfortable. I’m always so worried about annoying someone I admire, but I gladly took on the discomfort. Kim was just chilling at her house in central Los Angeles, on her back deck, with her dog and her cup of tea while I asked questions. We got to talking about making an album, dating, feeling invisible, sexuality on stage and how she has no urge to fuck the audience when she’s making powerful electric noise with her guitar.

Kirkman: What I love about this album is that you carried your unique sound all the way through, from Sonic Youth to right now, and it doesn’t sound like, “Oh, I’m staying relevant: Here’s some young DJ with his beats.”

Gordon: I mean, it’s definitely an eccentric record, but I think maybe people are starved for that. Everything has gotten so conservative, in a way, except for hip-hop. I feel like anything can happen there, and that’s where I got most inspiration from, actually. Listening to Cardi B, that first song of hers, I was like, “Wow, she sounds really punky.”

Kirkman: I looked up your album title. Was it based on No Home Movie? I don’t know of the filmmaker, but I looked her up. Chantal——

Gordon: Akerman, yeah. I’ve actually never seen the movie, but I liked the title. She was really influential in early feminist critique and stuff.

Kirkman: I saw a trailer for a documentary about her called I Don’t Belong Anywhere. She says the word “career” is not what she’s thinking about when she’s creating—she just does things that interest her—and it reminded me of you in the best of ways. Do you feel like you don’t belong anywhere?

Gordon: Yeah, kind of. I had no idea what this record was going to ultimately sound like, or where it would fit into the contemporary landscape, but I don’t really see myself as a musician anyway. I’m first a visual artist, and that’s the way I think. A lot of the lyrics are things like “Air BnB” because, as a visual artist, I’m fascinated by these interior landscapes, in a way, when you look at them online. Maybe I’m more of a sociologist than anything.

Kirkman: I was also laughing out loud listening to that song. Do you want people to laugh, or you’re not really thinking about that?

Gordon: Yeah. I do want them to laugh.

Kirkman: I don’t know if people know how to respond to things, really. I don’t think it’s an angry-sounding song, but it has these extreme guitar noises. I don’t think people would know that [laughing] is appropriate.

Gordon: I mean, I’m not exactly passing judgment, you know what I mean? I’m just laying it out.

Kirkman: If you put songs out there and people interpret it differently than you meant it, does that make you crazy or do you really, truly believe “It’s yours”?

Gordon: I mean, sometimes I don’t even know what I mean. Or it’s like I intuit it, but people project all kinds of stuff or mishear lyrics. I grew up mishearing lyrics.

Kirkman: Did you have anything secretly in there about Trump?

Gordon: Well, there is in that song “Don’t Play It”: “You can pee in the ocean / Golden vanity / You can pee in the ocean / It’s free.”

Kirkman: And that has to do with Trump?

Gordon: Yeah, it just has to do with him being such a flag-waving capitalist, and how the idea that we’re free because we have so many choices is an illusion.

Kirkman: What do you think is going to happen?

Gordon: We’re going to vote for Bernie Sanders, and he’s going to get elected.

Kirkman: But what’s going to happen with impeachment before we even get there?

Gordon: I think that the House will impeach him and the Senate won’t, possibly. But hopefully it will keep in the forefront the corruption of Trump.

Kirkman: I wanted to ask you something about Madonna, too. I feel like she’s going for this visual artist thing right now, and she’s always purported that as part of her story. I’ve been less interested in her as she’s gone on, because it’s too much changing it up. I’m always like, You’re just using the hot new producer of the day.

Gordon: Yeah, she’s trying to keep up. She’s no David Bowie; let’s just say that.

Kirkman: Exactly. I admire her for having the balls to say ridiculous things about herself. She would say she is David Bowie. Do you have any opinions on her new show?

Gordon: Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. She’s still mostly in the entertainment business. I mean, I would never consider her a visual artist. She’s a very visual person.

Kirkman: So it’s not like someone actually encroaching into your world. She’s this other thing.

Gordon: No. I don’t know. I mean, she can be whatever she wants to call herself, but no one’s going to take her seriously in the art world. James Franco, I think, had that problem too. You can’t just jump in and out of the art world.

Kirkman: So here’s the sexuality part of this interview. What’s the song that’s about sexual harassment?

Gordon: Oh, “Hungry Baby.”

Kirkman: “Hungry Baby,” yeah. I thought back to [the Sonic Youth song] “Swimsuit Issue.” I remember listening to those lyrics and thinking, Oh, it’s a song about the ’50s! There was no internet then, really. It didn’t dawn on me it was still happening because I wasn’t in the world yet at that point. And now I go, Oh my god, it never got better.

Gordon: Yeah, it never got better.

Kirkman: In terms of sexuality on stage, do you think about this at all?

Gordon: Only that I feel like if the sound is going well or something and I’m in a zone, I don’t feel self-conscious about my body. I feel like I have a certain grace through power or something. I just feel good in my body, so I don’t know. I feel like sexy is a word that we attribute to things that superficially look sexy, but it’s almost like it’s more about activating the space around you.

Kirkman: If someone called you sexy, how would you feel about them? Would that bother you?

Gordon: Depends on who it was. If it was my boyfriend, I would be into that.

Kirkman: Yeah, but just a rock critic or someone that’s——

Gordon: Oh. Yeah, I don’t mind that. Doesn’t bother me.

Kirkman: Is there anything about getting older where you’re like, “Oh my god, I feel more in my body than ever before,” even though our bodies are changing constantly?

Gordon: In some ways, I suppose, but then as you get older you also feel more invisible on the street. I’ve heard guys talking about that.

Kirkman: Really?

Gordon: Friends, yeah. In their 50s. I didn’t realize that was a thing. I’m actually always very curious about male sexuality. I asked my ex-boyfriend, “What’s it like to have a penis?” There’s not a lot of places to read about it.

Kirkman: Right, their feelings about it.

Gordon: It’s just such a mystery.

Kirkman: Are you in a relationship right now?

Gordon: Not really. I mean, there’s someone I think I’m seeing. It’s very new.

Kirkman: How do you meet people? Have you ever done a dating app or anything?

Gordon: Oh, god, no. I can’t do that. Yeah, I don’t really meet people.

Kirkman: Do you sit around and think, “I want a relationship”?

Gordon: I’m a little intimidated about relationships, or leery. But I don’t want to casually date either, so I’m stuck.

Kirkman: I wanted to ask you about this: Do you know who your fans are? Have they been there from the beginning? Do you have new people coming in?

Gordon: I have no idea. I think that definitely I have a base of Sonic Youth people. Actually, you know who came up to me? I was in Culver City doing a radio interview, and I was waiting in the lobby, and Jeff Gardner… is that his name? From Curb Your Enthusiasm?

Kirkman: Oh, Garlin?

Gordon: Garlin, Jeff Garlin. He saw me and he came over. He goes something like, “You’re a fun bowl of cherries. I’m a huge fan.”

Kirkman: I’ve never heard of two more different-seeming people.

Gordon: That really made my day.

Kirkman: One more thing about physicality: Do you move around on stage a lot? Are you different now that you’re not in a band with other people taking attention away?

Gordon: I move around more, yeah.

Kirkman: Is that a metaphor for anything?

Gordon: I don’t know. I just have more space. But one thing about the electric guitar is that it’s so visceral. It’s electricity, and it’s affected by movement, so I like to play with that. And I also like to play off of the classic male guitar gestures and stuff sometimes. But I don’t do it like Carrie Brownstein does. I think she’s really awesome in that way.

Kirkman: I never thought about that until you said it—that it’s electric and it’s really going through you, and through us, and it does sound different if you’re moving.

Gordon: Yeah. You can get feedback by taking it to the amp, or turning it different ways. You can get sound. So I play around a lot with that. I actually do this performance piece: I wrote a text describing a male playing guitar, doing the heroic gestures and then falling on the ground and rolling around. So I read that, and then I enact it.

Kirkman: I think it can be embarrassing when guys do that. You can see the little boy in them. Axl Rose—just to look at him, it’s like, “Oh my god!” because it’s vulnerable.

Gordon: It’s cringey.

Kirkman: There is a weird vulnerability to it. It’s someone trying to act cool, at the end of the day. Yeah, but I like when women do it.

Gordon: It’s so heroic. And you’re a hero.

The above conversation was condensed from the transcript of an hour-plus conversation.