Those dark times seem far behind now—her last lengthy stays in the bath were when she home-birthed her daughters back in Portland. “I was getting in and out of the tub watching Larry David,” Hutchins recalls of Lottie’s birth, in 2005. “I made Steve get me macaroni and cheese, and he came back with some kind of soy version. I wanted to kill him.” Currently, the only people she wants to “party with” are her children. “We have a very rock ’n’ roll house,” she says, referring to the playful chaos of their domestic life.
It’s also quite a creative place, with husband and wife working in similar bare-bones styles—he with his abstract loner lyrics and she with her emotionally raw sculptures. Yet Hutchins says that she and Malkmus don’t hash it out artistically at the end of the day. “He’s never going to give me a dissertation on my work. He might say, ‘I like that red.’ ” In fact, it’s her daughters who are more involved: “Lottie used to tease me and pretend that she was going to knock something over.”
No matter—you can imagine Hutchins picking up the pieces and creating something new, with all the cracks, nicks, and stains lovingly exposed.
