WYE OAK, EDGE,
Indie rockers Wye Oak blend projects in new tour
Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack produce a lot of their best stuff when they work closely together. Just not too closely. Wasner and Stack, who make up the indie rock duo Wye Oak, recently found themselves both settled in North Carolina after a few years of living hundreds of miles apart. Being blocks, not plane trips, away has already resulted in two of Wye Oak’s coolest singles — the dream pop, electro-touched “Fear of Heights” and “Fortune.” But the pair still like to maintain a little distance from one another.
“We need to give each other the space to create something on our own and then bring it back to the other person as a more fully fleshed out idea,” Stack said ahead of Wye Oak’s Tuesday show at the Sinclair. “We’ve never really been the type of band that’s like, ‘Hey, let’s get together and jam.’ Whenever we have tried to do that it results in a lot of wincing.”
“That said, we do tend to work a lot faster and more effectively when we’re living in the same spot,” he added.
Wye Oak began in Baltimore in 2006. The pair quickly landed a deal with vanguard indie label Merge, which is based in Durham, N.C. While Wasner and Stack have released six albums and a dozen singles with Merge, they have increasingly made time for independent work. Wasner has put out solo music as Flock of Dimes and started touring with Bon Iver on its 20192020 arena trek. Stack launched his first solo outing as Joyero in 2019 and has logged time on the road with EL VY and Lambchop.
For the 2020 Wye Oak tour, the band will do a few new things. The duo will expand to a five-piece and mix songs from across the Wye
Oak catalog with tunes from its side projects.
“In the last five years, especially with the live show, we got into a lot of programming and synthetic textures that tied us into machines,” Stack said. “It was a fun thing for us to play with and it maximized our ability to play as a duo. But part of the appeal of touring as a five-piece band is that we can get back to this feeling of being a real, naturalistic group. There will be no click tracks, there are no computers on stage, and everything is happening in real time.”
Stack says their experience touring with other acts rekindled their joy of playing with people. Now the expanded line up will let them pull from anywhere in their catalog and give songs a fresh, robust feel.
“We don’t get to do that much touring because of all these other projects, so we felt if we were going to go through the effort of getting on the road, we wanted it to feel really vital,” he said. “We wanted to be able to dig back and find a song from 15 years ago and bring it back into the set list. … There are textures on records that we can’t play (as a duo) and it will be nice to find those textures and give them a human feel.”