PUSH CREATIVE
Wye Oak ‘can’t move fast enough’ in putting out music
Jenn Wasner is in Salt Lake City for the first show of tour — and she can’t wait.
Not to mention that Wasner and Andy Stack, who make up the indie rock outfit Wye Oak, are out with new music.
“It’s super,” she says. “The album is now out in the world, and we’re playing our songs for everybody.”
Wye Oak released the album “The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs” on April 6, on Merge Records.
Wasner and Stack took their time in making the album.
They had to, because they live in different cities — Waser in Durham, N.C. and Stack in Marfa, Texas.
The two would travel to each other’s home studios and sort through and combine their separate songs.
The shorter stints together produced less second-guessing and hesitation in their process, Wasner says.
“We discarded past rules about how to write a record, instead funneling all those experiences and experiments into perfectly unified statements,” she says. “This time we put ourselves to the test. From the first stop to the final mastering, it was all done in less than a year. It was unusual, and it was also fun. It was scary, because there wasn’t time to reflect, and in retrospect, I’ve been happy with all of our decisions.”
Before the release of the new album, Wye Oak stopped by Moog Music factory in Asheville, N.C., to perform a unique version of “It Was Not Natural,” from the album.
“We had the absolute best time re-imagining our song at the Moog Sound Lab,” she says. “We had just filmed our video for ‘It Was Not Natural’ — shot in slow motion, so I had spent hours listening to a sped-up version of the track. That version had wormed itself into my brain enough that I felt like I wanted it to exist, and the Sound Lab was the perfect chance to make it a reality.”
On the current tour, Wasner says, the majority of the new album will be performed.
“We prefer to play new songs over anything else,” she says. “Once in a while, we’ll throw something older in. I tend to tire of the old stuff, and I want to have as much of the new album as I can. As far as I’m concerned, we can’t move fast enough with putting out albums. If I had my way, we’d put out songs all the time.”