This month has seen Yeasayer finally release their fourth studio album in Amen & Goodbye, four years after Fragrant World and numerous tours that had the New York musicians making their stamp as one of the experimental indie bands in that crop emerging from 2006/2007 onward.
As Chris Keating says, the time in between album releases was necessary for the band in the end. Ditching the noisy distractions of New York City for the remote farm settings of the Catskills, Yeasayer locked themselves away to write and record Amen & Goodbye in an isolated environment.
“Recording records in the city can be a little stifling, creatively,” he admits. “You’re just stuck in a room and you know, there’s stuff going on outside just down the street or in your neighbourhood. You want to meet someone for a drink or you want to have dinner and go on a date, whatever.”
“When you isolate yourself up in nature, there’s nothing to do. Literally, there’s nothing to do. We were playing with animals and starting bonfires, recording in the middle of the night – it was good. It was a nice creative time. It was inspiring for me; I actually moved up there, to a different part of the Catskills, about two hours away. I bought a house up there after we did all that.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rQxrZn8-A0
“I remember, I used to be really mad when bands would take a long time.” he adds, noting the time in between Fragrant World and Amen & Goodybe. “I was really mad when the Beastie Boys took a long time between Ill Communication and Hello Nasty, it was like four years. I remember being like, ‘What are they doing?!’. Now I’m on the other side of it, I’m like, ‘You need to reset and think about new things, write about new things’. We don’t want to just churn out the same album over and over again. Ever.”
Now existing and creating music in a climate dominated by social media and new platforms for leaking and releasing new sounds, Keating opens up about how Yeasayer has changed and developed over the last few years in their approach to creating music that not only interests them, but hopefully strikes a chord with the fan base who has been following them since the early days.
“I think it constantly changes, hopefully!” he laughs, thinking about the band’s dynamic and creative drive. “We started the band ten years ago. I don’t know, maybe we’re like those old dudes who are irrelevant now and we’re still trying to make it cool, I don’t know! It doesn’t feel that way to me, but then again, I guess it never does.”
“We were trying to make an album that’s very collaged, sounded layered and it sounded like it could stand multiple decades and maybe generations and then pushed into the future. The process and the collaboration was similar to that; we were working on our own and we’d share recordings, we’d go back and forth, we’d lost some recordings and so we’d rebuild them and sample them. I really like collaged music like Portishead and DJ Shadow, music from France. The second side of Abbey Road, music like that, where it’s collaged together. That was the idea, it worked out well; we were living in different places and bouncing around, recording in different places.”
What has remained, regardless of any other changes or developments to the band, has been Yeasayer’s ethic of sticking to their roots. Chasing those musical eccentricities in studio and following threads of music that probably buck against whatever is declared ‘cool’ or accepted by the indie mainstream. The experimentation still shines on Amen & Goodbye and as Keating describes, being in the studio working on this type of music is still exciting and invigorating to embrace.
“We’re not a Top 40 band and we were never that cute to begin with,” he says. “I’m okay if we get a little older, get a little wiser…we’re not trying to chase the dollar. I really like being in the studio, I really love it. It’s super fun and creative.”
“It’s funny,” he adds. “I think a lot of so-called ‘indie’ bands these days really try to push a pop sound or a pop aesthetic and I think we’re conscious of maybe not trying to compete with that world. We just felt like we needed to stay true to what we wanted to make. Over the last few years I’ve definitely been listening to a lot of electronic music, but that tapered off as we were making this album and we were revisiting some classic 60’s and 70’s rock and roll records and jazz. I felt like being inspired by those things was really helpful for this album, it was exciting.”
This isn’t to say ‘pop’ is a dirty word for Yeasayer at all, though. As Keating muses, the importance of album as its own entity and environment is just held higher than a need to debut at #1 on a commercial chart.
“I think that trying to creative a little world, trying to create your own little movie soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist, being conscious of the album and the aesthetic surrounding it and every facet of it, is important.” he says. “We have flirtations of pop moments; I do like some pop music, so there’s always that element, but generally I think the stuff that we’re interested in is the slightly more experimental and slightly more underground music. I think that’s where we come from, that’s our heart.”
—
Amen & Goodbye is out now!
———-
