Ira Kaplan on making a very different Yo La Tengo album
FIRST of all, can you explain the album title? It occurred to us during the making of the record, I guess about a year ago. We had worked on it for a while, and then we came up with this title. We felt it reflected what we had done so far, and I’m sure it helped us focus on what we did next. Once we had the title, we started thinking about the record differently. I don’t think it occurred to me until recently that Sly’s title is a quote in itself as well. Given his background as a DJ, it seems almost impossible to me that it’s not a self-aware quote of Leiber and Stoller’s “Riot In Cell Block #9”. What was it like working in digital instead of analogue? All of us have really tried to avoid absolutes and rules. The process of making the record included not even planning to make a record. We were well into that process before we realised we were doing it. We thought we were just doing sketches in our rehearsal space for some eventual record, and then we realised it was working. We could push ourselves a little more and actually make a record that way. We didn’t set out to make a digital record. It’s not like we were tired of analogue. But we don’t have the facility to record any way other than digitally in our rehearsal space. There were downsides of course, but that’s always a challenge to locate what’s good in a situation and make the most of it. It’s pretty hard to find something good that doesn’t come with a pitfall – or something bad that doesn’t have some kind of silver lining.
It sounds like the upsides and the downsides of the technology both inform the final product.
I think so. I mean, I think when the three of us do everything, we’re working with our limitations – hopefully within them, but definitely with them. We switch instruments a lot. Different people play them differently. I am far and away the worst drummer in the band, but every once in a while there’s something in my inability to do it any better that expresses something that we’re enjoying in that moment. The limitations can be strengths, hopefully.
Did you have an idea of how you wanted it to sound, or was it more about exploring the technology?
It’s very rare that we have a plan going into something to make it sound like anything. There are times when we hear songs that remind us of other songs, but it’s not like we set out to [make those references]. It just that that’s what we came up with. Sometimes we’ll hear where a song is going, and we’ll say, “What can we do to enhance that effect?” Or, “What can we do to get away from it?” Either one. It’s not like we have absolutely no thoughts beforehand, but we don’t have many.
Did that recording process change how you write lyrics and melodies?
I don’t think the process changed that much, because it’s always the end of the process anyway. Sometimes the lyrics just emerge from us practising, but usually they come when we’re not quite done with the songs but well on our way. Then it becomes, “All right, now we need some words.” In one case, on the song “Ashes”, when Georgia wrote the words for that, she completely changed the melody and structure of what we already had. There was kind of a “la la la” placeholder melody for that song, and she didn’t really rip it up, but she definitely balled it into a clump and discarded it.
The album has a strong narrative quality in the sequencing. Is that something you’re thinking about while you’re recording or sequencing the record?
That’s really the last thing we do. We discussed the songs that would be at the beginning and the end of the record [“You Are Here”
and “Here You Are”, respectively], but I don’t think any of us felt locked into it. Neither song was titled at the time, so that wasn’t really a concept until it happened. It was just something that occurred to us and we did it. I think, much more often than not, we just let these things emerge as they occur to us, without trying to steer them.
Did working that way present challenges for figuring out how to play this stuff live?
Yes, it did. Those challenges always exist, because we’ve always drawn a pretty clear distinction between the live shows and the recordings. We’ve never made a record thinking, “How are we going to play this live?” But in the past, every song has been played in some form before we recorded it. In this case, there was very little of that. Most of the songs were recorded one track at a time, one person at a time. Also, we made the record over such a long period of time, without a studio bill going up and up and up. That means a lot of the songs have even more parts, which is the nature of digital recording versus analogue recording. You really can just keep going, putting more and more parts on. But we are still pretty hard at work. When I hang up the phone with you, I’ll be going to practice and trying to tackle just how to present these songs live.
“We thought we were just doing sketches in our rehearsal space for some eventual record”