By Laura Studarus
On the strength of a career well into its fourth decade, it would be easy to cast Yo La Tengo as the superheroes of the indie rock scene. Their signature sound, laid-back rock jamming obfuscated by jazz-style improvisation, seems breathtakingly effortless (a graceful feat not unlike leaping tall buildings in a single bound). They’ve come to epitomize their hometown of Hoboken, N.J.—performing annual Hanukkah shows, regularly participating in fundraisers for local radio stations and contributing to the recent Hurricane Sandy relief efforts (surely a Bat Signal isn’t far behind). Wikipedia claims that frontman Ira Kaplan possesses the comic book-worthy quirk of carrying a bug trapped in amber in his pocket as a personal talisman (a trait that Kaplan laughingly denies). Heck, the trio even has a not-so-secret identity (see: garage noise-rock side project Condo Fucks). But as Kaplan describes, he—along with bandmates Georgia Hubley and James McNew—never set out to be music’s savior. Longevity, as it turns out, just kinda happened.
“All I can say is that it’s just the three of us working on music that sounds good to us,” says Kaplan, humoring his interviewer’s question about the nuts and bolts of his band’s enduring legacy. “There’s certainly no strategy beyond that.”
And why would they want to develop one? Bassist McNew notes that the attempt would signal a sea change in the philosophy that has served the trio well from the beginning—the consistent element to their ever-changing musical tides, which over the years have included elements of garage rock, pop, krautrock and a bevy of cover material stretching from Sun Ra to Beat Happening.
“My whole experience in the group is that we’ve done whatever the hell we wanted to,” he says. “It seems like over time, slowly more people came to us and what we do, rather than us trying to recruit people. It’s really satisfying. It’s a really great feeling.”
Starting out as the musical project of Kaplan and his wife Hubley, Yo La Tengo featured a rotating series of bassists until the introduction of McNew, who was added to the lineup shortly before recording May I Sing with Me in 1992. McNew recounts his transition from temporary touring musician to full-fledged member of the band as a somewhat forgone conclusion.
“I wound up moving to New York, so I kept showing up for practice, basically,” he says blithely. “Until they gave me a key. I think I psyched them out!”
While his seemingly gutsy move paid off, McNew admits that, at first, he was left with a feeling of trepidation as he entered a musical conversation that had already been in progress for nearly a decade before his arrival.
“It was a group that was established,” he continues. “And a group that I was a huge fan of. I didn’t want to show up and start writing songs and sticking my nose in. I didn’t want to mess it up. I loved the songs! I was a fan. I didn’t want to mess up what I was a fan of. Basically I learned all the songs. Once I learned all the songs we had to make up new ones. So that’s kind of what we did. The record, May I Sing with Me, those songs were pretty much all written before I got there. By the time we were preparing for Painful, we sort of started writing together a little bit, we were practicing every day, and then preparing for the next record, Electr-O-Pura. I think we wrote that record completely as a group. Every song came out of jams and group efforts."
McNew chuckles now, knowing in hindsight that Yo La Tengo isn’t the closed society they often appear to be. Constantly in search of genre-bending experiences, over the years the band has joined up with a series of collaborators (see: their playful partnership with cult singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston on “Speeding Motorcycle”). McNew recounts one such partnership, where during the recording of their 2003 album, Summer Sun, the band joined forces with jazz musicians Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen and Roy Campbell Jr.
“We were just fans of theirs,” he says. “We didn’t know them personally, but we invited them to collaborate with us on a few things. That was a huge experience. That was a hugely important thing for us to do that, and learn from these guys who were lifer master musicians. I’m not fit to carry their cases up a flight of stairs. They couldn’t care less. They didn’t care that we weren’t jazz guys, or that we didn’t have chops. They were interested in us as people and interested in a way that we could talk to each other, basically. More interested in communicating than anything else. That was a real revelation. I think we were off to the races after that, once we saw the possibility of talking to people other than ourselves. That was a real world-expanding moment.”
While McNew may joke that they’re “nothing but comfort zones,” Yo La Tengo’s adventurous spirit belies the claim. Their low-stakes approach to their craft—making music because, hey, it’s what they do—has allowed Yo La Tengo to cover an extensive amount of ground, without staking their identity on any one facet. Possessing a chameleon-like talent for shape-shifting, over the years the trio has tried their hand at everything from improvised cover albums, to performing sitcoms on stage as part of their “Spinning Wheel” concert series where each night’s set list is decided by spinning a wheel onstage, to scoring science documentaries and independent films.
“It’s fun to have done stuff that challenges the way you look at writing music and making records,” says McNew. “We’ve done these movie soundtracks over the years, where we try to be ourselves as much as we can, but at the same time, ultimately we’re working for somebody else. We’re working for the vision of the director. The director has the final say. So we have to learn how to express ourselves in this whole new way. And then if the director doesn’t like it, we have to start again—which also took some learning. But we learned.”
“When the band started, I don’t think anyone really thought too hard about if anyone was actually listening to us, let alone caring about us,” adds Kaplan, noting that they’ve never felt that they’ve had something to lose. “So we had complete freedom…When we were on tour for I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, the group got increasingly successful. It’s not like that was the first time people started coming to our shows. But more people started coming quickly. We never had a real meteoric rise or fall. But in our little way, we started making bigger jumps at that point. I remember the three of us actually talking about it. It felt like there was more pressure on us. It felt like people were paying more attention. Which is obviously a good thing. If we didn’t want people to pay attention, we wouldn’t make records or do interviews. But it still came with its own pressure.”
It’s that spirit of acknowledging and dismissing the risks of being an established band in equal parts that Yo La Tengo brought into the recording of their 13th studio album, Fade. After working with producer Roger Moutenot for a string of albums (a relationship that dates back to 1993 album,Painful), Yo La Tengo opted to shake up the status quo and invited producer/Tortoise drummer John McEntire to man the recording boards at Soma Studios in Chicago.
“It really was mostly, ‘Hey, why don’t we try something different for the first time in 20 or so years?’” says McNew of their break from the habitual. “We were slow to make a decision like that. I think we wanted to change the way we work and we really did.”
While the decision wasn’t one made lightly, the band went into the process with history on their side, previous experiences assuring that their partnership with McEntire would be fruitful.
“We had known John since he was the drummer in the band Seam,” says McNew. “We did a tour with Seam in Europe in 1992 where it was the three of them and the three of us, crammed into a very small van for five weeks in the summer time. We got to know each other pretty well a long time ago. It’s that feeling of having been in a war together. We’re bonded for life in a way. He’s an awesome guy. We really found a connection really fast when we were working.”
Along with a change in scenery and personnel, the band flirted with the idea of brevity, banishing the extended 10 minute-plus jams which they often use to close or open their albums. It was a first attempt, says McNew.
“The songs are shorter and the album length is shorter,” he chuckles. “It feels pretty natural to do any of it. None of it felt forced. At the same time I didn’t feel like I was missing any song over seven minutes. I love those. If records didn’t have to end, I would be cool with that, and let a song trail off into infinity. I love stuff like that. But I love short songs too.”
Kaplan is quick to note that in light of several cuts—including six-minute album closer “Before We Run”—the band’s mission of brevity was only partially fulfilled. Not that it really matters.
“We had the same notion about Popular Songs, and we had the same notion about I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass,” he muses, offering a verbal shrug of his shoulders. “Those ended up as sprawling, 70-minute things. So even that idea wasn’t one that we were going to hold ourselves to if it went elsewhere…Maybe discipline is overrated. We really try not to be bound by too many feelings of what we have to do. We try to react whenever we can with what we want to do. The people who say this, and the songs that they’re saying it about, I have a lot of sympathy and agreement with. ‘No song should be over three minutes long!’ On the other hand, I don’t really like the idea of setting out laws that we have to conform to.”
Fade airs Yo La Tengo’s mellow side—signature krautrock-style freak-outs replaced with murmured recollections, acoustic guitars, horns and the occasional string section. However, there’s an undertow of discontent, the band taking themselves to task with songs such as “Is that Enough,” where—against a lush orchestral accompaniment—Kaplan slurs, “It’s unimportant as far as far as I can tell/what’s important is that I can’t see so well.” Have Yo La Tengo, as the elder statesmen of indie rock, taken to musing on mortality? Or their own shortcomings? It’s an observation that Kaplan doesn’t dismiss out of hand.
“It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable reaction,” he says, not unkindly. “It’s really nothing that I’m going to talk very much about. But, probably. I really am going to let the songs speak for themselves and the lyrics speak for themselves… For the most part, when we’re talking about this stuff we’d rather leave the personal things enigmatic or all-together private. If we didn’t hope and think that it is evocative—especially without knowing—the private meanings behind it, we wouldn’t have chosen it.”
On relating to his audience, many of whom are whipped into an almost-Pavlovian frenzy by the mere tweet or status update from their favorite band, Kaplan acknowledges that his style of minimalist communication can be frustrating—even though he’s not prepared to apologize. “I know the pressure to speak in soundbites and think in soundbites,” he continues. “But it’s nothing that comes that naturally to any of us.”
It’s an enigmatic party line that McNew echoes. “If there are ways that we can trick journalists into talking about sports or other people’s records, and then all of a sudden they realize they’re out of time and we have to go, that’s awesome!” he laughs.“Our website has no personal information about us at all. I’m cool with that. I think we prefer to let people find out more about us by the music we make and the things that we say that aren’t about music. You find out quite a bit about our personalities and interests. Maybe the origins of certain things. I hate to sound like an old crank. But I am! I own it. Growing up without computers, we were forced to use our imaginations, and we were frequently wrong. But the wrong answers were always great too. If you’re trying to fill in a blank, your imagination can go into overdrive. That’s great. That being said, if I had a computer in central Virginia in the early ’80s, I would have used the hell out of it.”
Equally as protective of his private life, Kaplan too refuses to be pressured into offering any form of Cliff Notes to the Yo La Tengo experience. Part of his hesitance stems not from the fact that he uses music as a veiled form of self-expression, but rather that he still finds himself surprised to discover that people are not only listening, but caring.
“When the band started, I don’t think anyone really thought too hard about if anyone was actually listening to us,” he says. “Let alone caring about us. So we had complete freedom. When And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Outcame out, there was so much attention focused on the words,” he recalls. “I remember being really dumbfounded. It never occurred to me that anyone would be listening to the lyrics. The ones that I had written, I had shown them to Georgia and James before we sang them. I really thought that was the last that anyone would ever think about the words. That was kind of a surprising moment, realizing that people were paying a little more attention than I had expected.”
Despite Kaplan’s detachment when it comes to the promotional elements of his job, the musician exudes a quiet enjoyment of his job that could never be mistaken for apathy. He is, after all, in a privileged position—a place where even the silliest Yo La Tengo project can sit side-by-side with their “serious” albums without judgment.
“I like working things out so that we can continue to work and do what we want,” he says. “I’m very appreciative that we put ourselves in a position where we can make a living reading a Judge Judy script. The opportunity of doing that is never lost on me. That’s something that we do that’s so intensely personal, that it’s of interest to anybody other than the three of us is not lost on me.”
McNew agrees with his bandmate, noting that the creative freedom they’ve experienced almost since day one is rarely achieved. The fact that he gets to commune with notable musicians or perform a Seinfeld script on stage (“The most exhilarating, punk-rock moment of my life!” he says) in the name of “work” isn’t lost of him.
“I feel like we really achieved something,” he says. “A lot of people know if they come see us more than once, chances are those two shows won’t be very similar. We play a different setlist every night. Every night for 20-some years. It’s awesome that people are interested in us and interested in what we’ll do next, or how will tonight be different from the last show that I saw. Just to get that kind of appreciation is a huge achievement. I’m really proud of that.”
So where does a band go from here? Winners in the numbers game, Yo La Tengo have not only survived, but thrived long past a point when most of their contemporaries have called it a day. Their longevity as a band has put them in a unique club. But for every band that makes past their first decade (R.E.M., Sonic Youth and Echo & the Bunnymen among them), the anniversary usually carries with it a decline in the quality and frequency in output. With Fade poised to become another high point in the band’s catalog, is Yo La Tengo the rare exception? The band without the downward arc?
“We don’t question it,” McNew says, confirming that the band doesn’t foresee an end to their partnership. “There’s a lot of things that we don’t think about…We didn’t really think in terms of ‘Well we can’t do that.’ We adopted the belief that if it’s us playing it, it’s Yo La Tengo. Even if we’re playing acoustically, or loud, or freaky instrumental music to films about undersea life, or anything, it’s us. We set our boundaries of no boundaries.”
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario