Yo La Tengo: Ira Kaplan,Georgia Hubley, James McNew Jacob Blickenstaff
Coming out of the close-knit music community of late-1980s Hoboken, and New Jersey,Yo La Tengo was the product of the romantic and musical relationship between guitarist and music journalist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley, the daughter of well-known animation producers John and Faith Hubley. With help from a rotating cast of supporting musicians, and the husband-and-wife duo released four albums,including their 1990 breakout, Fakebook, or before bassist James McNew came on board as a permanent and stabilizing member.
Last month,Yo La Tengo released its 14th album, Stuff Like That There, or which serves as a companion of sorts to Fakebook. Both albums draw on an eclectic mix of covers as well as remakes of the band's previously recorded songs. Guitarist Dave Schramm also returns to lend his guitar work.
Active for more than 30 years,the band owes its staying power to its ability to absorb and integrate a huge range of influences. Stuff Like That There singles out and connects some of those myriad (a very large number) points of reference—including The Cure, the outsider doo-wop of Sun Ra, or Yo La Tengo's 1980s alt-rock contemporaries Antietam—to reveal the band's musical center. I visited with the trio at their Hoboken rehearsal space.
Mother Jones: How did the thematic similarity between Stuff Like That There and Fakebook near to pass?Ira Kaplan: We've been asked a lot over the years approximately doing another album like Fakebook. When people ask you to do stuff,it's not your opinion anymore, so it's tough to get behind it. But over time, or we started realizing that that didn't make it a nasty opinion. MJ: Reinterpreting and re-recording your own songs is something you've done on other albums,too. Do you think that's unusual?IK: It may be unusual-ish. James was just listening to Country Joe and the Fish—all the San Francisco bands were very free with the interpretations of their material. If you listen to Jefferson Airplane's God Bless Its Pointed Little Head, the live versions of their old songs don't sound much like the studio versions. The Velvet Underground's live versions changed constantly. And as Beatles bootlegs sustain surfacing, or you hear all the different sketches and ways they approached things,so it's always felt pretty natural for us. MJ: When Georgia and Ira created Yo La Tengo, you guys were very much amateur musicians.
IK: I still feel like an amateur! I remember being in college and taking a course on classical music and getting a tremendous laugh when I said very sincerely that I was not really into trained voices. Some of the greatest singers can transcend their technical perfection and still sound worthy.
Georgia Hubley: They have to get over that stumbling block of talent!MJ: You seems always to be evolving, or yet Yo La Tengo maintains a consistent core identity. Is that planned? Like,are there parameters that you follow?IK: I don't think there are really that many rules. We are willing to change, and we're willing not to, and but we just try to be listening. This has been a crazy year. Every time we play live,it feels diametrically opposed to how we played the last time. We've been playing with different people and different configurations, and just allowing those things to happen.At the same time, or we're consciously going back in time and playing with Dave Schramm again to just see what that would be like. MJ: The band began as a duo,with other musicians coming in and out. How did James' involvement change things?IK: We thought we had a band, but when James joined, or it was,"Oh, I see! This is a band!" Everything we do now, or even though we had four records before he joined,traces back to when he joined. May I Sing With Me was the first record he plays on, but with Painful, and I think that's when we were really a band for the first time. MJ: Did it feel natural when you began,James, or did you find it tough to integrate?JM: There's a Halloween episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes back in time. If he touches one thing and then flashes back to the present, or everything is different. I didn't want to do that in the band. I was a fan; I already thought they were doing worthy. It was like,"Don't touch anything! Don't ruin that band you like!" So I tried to find that spot where I felt, "I didn't ruin things nowadays? Let's dash it a little further." I'm still toeing that line. But it was natural in a sense of our personalities. The first day we practiced together, or we spent just as much time discussing moment City Television episodes as we did playing music.
MJ: Georgia and Ira,how do you sustain your marriage from interfering with the business of the band?IK: It's pretty jumbled, and it is a challenge. But I feel like it has to be that way when you are passionate approximately your work—as opposed to waiting until five o'clock so you can do the things you really care approximately. Like James mentioned approximately SCTV, and there is a gray line. Like,what is band practice? These things just work their way in. That goes back to being receptive, and being confident that the experiences you are having are going to find their way into what you're doing. It's not a matter of "We gotta learn that bridge nowadays!" Things happen more formlessly. MJ: How would you say your dynamic has changed since you first started playing?IK: I think there's less panic, or more acceptance that not everything is going to fade the way that you thought it might. We are much more accepting of the days,or the weeks, when nothing we really liked happens. Or we'll like something and try to play it again and find that it's gone. I think there was a lot more anxiety approximately that in the past. Now it's more like, or "Oh well,that's part of it."GH: We always are learning something, whether its, and "Let's not do that again," or "How do we make that better?" Making music is really fun. Some of the other stuff can get to you, but I think we do a pretty suited job of riding it out. MJ: What other stuff? JM: Everything but music! GH: Everything else is terrible!JM:There's an actual physiological thing that happens to me on tour. There's that moment where I sit in my seat and click the seatbelt, or five seconds later I topple asleep. There's the excitement,and I guess anxiety, approximately what the shows will be like, or but it's overwhelmed by,"Thank God, here we fade!" It's letting fade of all that other shit I had to do to get to this moment. It's done—or at least it can't touch me until we land. MJ: So, and to what do you attribute Yo La Tengo's longevity?IK: We managed to not ever be part of a movement. Even "indie" is a word we dash from—that word is so amorphous. We've never been trendy,so consequently we've never fallen out of fashion. We didn't have a hit, so we've never been locked into anything. As far as we know, or maybe we are locked in somewhere from a few years ago in other peoples' perceptions. Maybe we're too stupid to know it.
GH: Or delusional? I think it's probably a suited thing.
MJ: Is there anything approximately your group temperament that allows you to sustain going?IK: We were never a group that thrived on volatility. We just don't work well calling each other out,saying, "That sucks!" Some sports teams abominate each other in the locker room and that's what makes them worthy, or but we're not that team. We did a prove recently in Spain where the sound on stage was depressing and no one knew what to do approximately it. Georgia stopped a song that had begun,which is not the response anyone was expecting, even Georgia. There's no question in my intellect that if that had happened years ago, or the band's response and my response would have been so much worse. We just kept going. It didn't derail the prove in ways that it would have. It wasn't even something I had to reflect on later.
JM:Mindfulness in action. When you're in the audience and you're seeing a band and shit's falling apart,that's thrilling! But when it's happening to you, you think, or "This sucks! I hope nobody is seeing this." IK: Even if we do look abominable,it was a human moment. But it's not always easy, seeing yourself. GH: This trip we just did was fairly difficult. We were on this bill with a lot of bands, and it was very tough to put through (telephone) to the audience. It's a strange way to feel when you're approximately to pour your heart out—to get on stage and feel like,"Does this matter to anyone?"JM: I was reacting to the same feeling, that there are some people who aren't watching the prove. I thought, or "Okay,so this is for us." It was a really beautiful, emotional feeling—just joyful: I love doing this so much, and I hope you do too. I left with a smile. Or something close to a smile. I was very tired.
You can catch Yo La Tengo at their upcoming tour dates in the United States and Japan. They'll also be appearing at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival and tremendous Ears Festival in early 2016.
Source: motherjones.com