wye oak

WYE OAK FOUND STAYING POWER IN DOING WHAT FEELS GOOD.

The meet-cute sounds like a scene from a winsome indie movie: slightly nerdy teens gathering in a basement for their first-ever band practice, sizing each other up by the names of the artists on their t-shirts. Jenn Wasner was 15 when she met her future band partner-for-life, Andy Stack, who enlisted her to join his high-school rock group. “I was really nervous, and I thought Andy was really cool,” Jenn says. “He was wearing a Weezer shirt, and I was like, ‘Note to self: gotta check out that band’.” Jenn must have impressed Andy, too, because 18 years and six albums later, they’re still making music together as American indie-rock duo Wye Oak.

“Andy is the only person who’s put up with me for my entire life without being like, ‘I need space’,” Jenn says. The pair are about to begin their latest US tour after spending a few years on other projects (Jenn’s Flock of Dimes and Andy’s Joyero), but it was working with other folks that made them realise how special their long-term musical partnership is. “In a way, we’re like our own little family,” Jenn says. “And the longer we work together, the more valuable our connection becomes. That kind of history isn’t something you can just conjure overnight.”

Jenn and Andy came up in Baltimore in the mid-2000s. Named for a famously old tree outside the city, Wye Oak was inspired in the early years by rock group Weezer (yes, the one from the t-shirt), as well as the hardcore punk scene in nearby Washington, DC. “We grew up together musically,” Andy says of their songwriting process. “There’s this intuition there. We’ll be talking about how we want a recording to feel or sound, but we don’t really have to say much to each other, because we’ll just know.”

The Wye Oak of today makes earnest, sweeping pop songs about restlessness and uncertainty. “You say it’s worth it for the view,” Jenn sings on one of their latest standalone releases, “Fear of Heights” – a lovely, dreamy tune about how nerve-wracking relationships can be, like climbing to the top of a tall building. Wye Oak isn’t about specifics, though; they just love songs about big emotions, underpinned by experimental sounds and textures. Jenn suggests it could be the soundtrack to a “dramatic orphan coming-of-age film”.

Jenn and Andy have grown up plenty since they were teen bandmates in Baltimore. Though Andy moved around for a while

– to Marfa, Texas, then Portland, Oregon – Jenn relocated to the small southern city of Durham, North Carolina in 2015, in search of a more affordable, relaxed lifestyle for a full-time muso. They kept Wye Oak going by sending music back and forth digitally, until Andy moved to Durham a few years later. Living in the same city for the first time since 2012 has been “transformative”, Jenn says. “All of a sudden, we were in the same room again, improvising and writing together. We came up with the backbone of the songs we’ve released in the past few months.”

The pair are more relaxed now they’ve moved down south, and they’re enjoying some of the relief that comes with getting older. Andy says they’ve left behind their 20-something anxieties about what they’re supposed to be doing – now, they’re just chuffed to be members of what he calls the “musical middle class”: working musicians who’ve got heaps going on. Last year, Jenn became the first woman to join Bon Iver’s band, and will tour Australia in June with frontman Justin Vernon and his crew. Andy, meanwhile, works as a producer and composes music for film and TV.

“I feel like Wye Oak in 2020 doesn’t give a fuck,” Andy says.“we’re not trying to be cool. We’re not trying to get our big break. We’re just doing what we feel good about. There’s security in that.”