Yo La Tengo – Bandwidth

Yo La Tengo: Morning Edition’s In-House Band For A Day

Lars Gotrich — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 06:00:00 +0000

When listeners aren’t writing to NPR to comment on a story, they mostly just want to know what music was played between segments. We call those buttons or breaks or deadrolls, and they give a breath after reporting a tragedy, lighten the mood after you most definitely cried during StoryCorps, or seize a moment to be ridiculously cheeky. How could you not play Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold” following a story about why women shiver in the office?

Lindsay Totty, who directs Morning Edition, listens to the stories on the show and chooses the music.

“I look for what the emotional tone of each story is, but I’m also looking for a certain kind of cultural context,” he says.

Totty says that in the course of a 30-year career, Yo La Tengo‘s music has covered a lot of cultural contexts, making the band a go-to for music buttons between stories. It also doesn’t hurt that “they sound like six bands at once,” he adds, using everything from the country twang of “Pablo and Andrea” to the heavy hard rock of “Big Day Coming.”

That’s why the long-running group took a train from Hoboken, N.J., to NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., to be the in-house band for Morning Edition on Tuesday, Aug. 25, playing all those music buttons live between stories.

When NPR’s David Greene asked guitarist/vocalist Ira Kaplan if Morning Edition has ever used a Yo La Tengo song the wrong way, he replied, “I’m mostly angry that you’re on so early. This morning thing’s not really working for me.”

Yo La Tengo: ‘When We Let The World In, It Can Be So Profound’

NPR Staff — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 02:03:00 +0000

It can take years for a musician to discover his or her voice. But in the meantime, they find themselves by discovering the music of other artists. With a wide-ranging catalog spanning 30 years, Yo La Tengo is its own band, but the trio has become just as noted for its huge repertoire of cover songs.

Yo La Tengo’s new album, Stuff Like That There, features covers from the well-known (Hank Williams, Cat Stevens, The Cure) to the obscure (Antietam, The Special Pillow). Before serving as Morning Edition‘s in-house band, they sat down with NPR’s David Greene to talk about adapting to other artists.

Did you all have a goal in mind when you took “Friday I’m in Love” by The Cure into the studio?

Ira Kaplan: I’m not sure we were going for anything specifically. I think the sound of Georgia singing that song — we all respond to that and wanted to play in a way that was supportive of her. In fact, when we were recording it, it actually took us a little bit of trial and error. At first, Dave Schramm was playing electric guitar, as he does on every other song on the record, but it was just too big, so we just pulled it back and pulled it back until we felt we were in sync.

So is it often that Georgia sings it [with] you guys figuring out what mood and personality’s coming through and beginning to build the song that way?

Kaplan: I think, certainly in the case of this record, probably more than most records. Because most of our songs, the ones we write, begin with us just jamming, so the singing may not even occur in the initial jam. Invariably, the song will have a mood before anybody starts singing. But this time, because we were working off specific songs that we were trying, we were very quick to adapt to the sound of the singing. That was part of our performance much earlier than the original songs.

Yo La Tengo is known for covers. Why is that?

James McNew: I think before we even knew what the term “playing covers” meant is how we all came to play our instruments in the first place, when we were kids and playing along to records. We’ll learn cover songs for specific cities; we’ll learn them for specific people who might be in the audience. Any occasion we can do it — taking someone else’s song and performing it yourself instantly changes the perspective and instantly changes the emotional resonance of the song.

Georgia, how did you find this song by Antietam, “Naples,” and why did you all decide to cover it?

Georgia Hubley: Well, we are friends with Antietam, who are actually a band very close to us because we literally formed at the same time 30 years ago. We actually played our very first concert together at Maxwell’s. It’s no longer, but it’s in Hoboken, N.J., where we rehearse and have been for a long time. That record that that song is on by them — Ira and I actually produced that record … sort of. [Laughs.]

You have some songs on this album that you wrote and recorded a while ago and decided to re-record. What made you want to take those songs back into the studio and do them again?

Kaplan: When we record a record, we don’t think about how we’re going to play the songs live. We just record the song the way we want it to sound. And then when we’re done, we try to figure out how we can possibly play it live. In doing that, the songs take on a life of their own. When we toured on our last album, Fade, we divided the show into two sets: a quiet set and a loud set. We started taking songs from the loud set and reworking them so they’d be in the quiet set and vice versa. We’re always tinkering with the songs and love the idea of approaching them from a different angle.

It’s almost like a song is an unfinished piece of art that you keep working on.

Yeah.

It’s such a rare opportunity for NPR listeners to hear from a band whose music they hear often on Morning Edition. I just wonder, is there a particular song that you would love to hear with a particular kind of story that might be on our show?

Kaplan: Obviously, that’s a hard question to answer, because none of us are answering it. I think one of the ways we have continued is by not projecting things like that. We got an email just this week from somebody that got married and one of our songs — maybe they walked down the aisle, but it was the wedding song. That has happened on a number of occasions, and it’s great. But he also picked a song that nobody has ever told us they used.

What song was that?

Kaplan: Oh, it was “Return to Hot Chicken.” We spend a lot of time, the three of us, interacting just as three people oblivious to the world around us. But when we let the world in, it can be so profound.

First Listen: Yo La Tengo, ‘Stuff Like That There’

Jason Heller — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 23:03:00 +0000

“We would write our songs soft / Then we would try to make them tough.” That’s a line from “Before We Stopped To Think,” a song by the obscure, now-defunct indie-rock band Great Plains, covered by Yo La Tengo on its new album, Stuff Like That There. The choice of song is telling. Like Great Plains, Yo La Tengo was formed in the ’80s, when indie rock had yet to become a genre, let alone a mainstream phenomenon — and when playing jangly, noisy pop was as radical as playing hardcore punk. Writing songs soft, then trying to make them tough: That’s what bands like Great Plains and Yo La Tengo did 30 years ago, fueled by nerves and desperation instead of geek-chic ambition.

Yo La Tengo, though, has always had something else up its sleeve: an encyclopedic love of music that transcends genre. The group’s 1990 album Fakebook was a patchwork of cover songs (along with a handful of originals and remakes of its own catalog) that reverentially stitched together everything from Cat Stevens‘ rarefied folk to Rex Garvin & The Mighty Cravers’ juke-joint R&B. Stuff Like That There is cut from the same quilt. Amid two invigorating new songs and three fresh renditions of YLT classics, nine wide-ranging covers are performed with varying degrees of sweetness, sadness, silliness and joy — and never a lick of irony.

As with Fakebook, Stuff Like That There reunites former YLT guitarist Dave Schramm with founding members Ira Kaplan (guitar) and Georgia Hubley (drums), along with longtime bassist James McNew. A quarter-century hasn’t diluted their chemistry an ounce. In “Friday I’m In Love,” The Cure‘s bubblegum-popping mope is converted into a country-rock shuffle; The Lovin’ Spoonful‘s “Butchie’s Tune,” a gem recently resurrected by Mad Men, celebrates that same vintage twang more directly. Hank Williams‘ iconic “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is filtered through a luscious funk arrangement in the spirit of Al Green, then filtered once more through Kaplan and Hubley’s sparse, heart-heavy harmony. The bubbly romanticism of “Somebody’s In Love” by The Cosmic Rays (a ’50s doo-wop combo aided by jazz legend Sun Ra) winds up hushed and sultry, like a late-summer comedown.

YLT reaches far and wide for songs to cover on Stuff Like That There, but it also keeps things close to home. Twenty-five years ago, Kaplan and Hubley produced Antietam’s under-appreciated album Burgoo, and “Naples,” a standout from that record, is rendered here with even dreamier melancholy. Meanwhile, YLT’s Hoboken neighbors in psychedelic outfit The Special Pillow are honored with a warm, wistful interpretation of their song “Automatic Doom.”

When YLT covers itself, as it does in “All Your Secrets,” “The Ballad Of Red Buckets” and “Deeper Into Movies,” Stuff Like That There operates strictly on the level of fan service — but it does so with a wise understanding of just how malleable the band’s songs have always been (a point proven by its erratically brilliant live shows). Of the album’s two new original songs, “Awhileaway” and “Rickety,” the latter is more immediately gripping; both are mellow, but “Rickety” sports a singsong, effortlessly catchy refrain that captures nostalgia in a Mason jar. As playfully backward-glancing as it is, Stuff Like That There is by no means a comprehensive overview of YLT’s repertoire. (For a more staggering example, see 2006’s collection of radio sessions, Yo La Tengo Is Murdering The Classics.) But the album does show, yet again, just how euphorically Yo La Tengo scrawls outside the lines — not to mention how soft and tough it can be at the same time.

First Watch: Yo La Tengo, ‘Friday I’m In Love’

Otis Hart — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 12:00:00 +0000

The members of Yo La Tengo flexed their record collector muscles on their revered collective of covers, Fakebook. The 1990 album featured interpretations of songs by The Flamin’ Groovies, Daniel Johnston, NRBQ, and some bands too obscure to even mention on this website. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley clearly weren’t aping past hits during a prolonged battle with writers’ block — they were sharing great songs that you likely hadn’t heard.

That isn’t exactly the case with Yo La Tengo’s upcoming sequel to Fakebook. Stuff Like That There, due out August 28, has its share of the willfully obscure, but it also features one of the most notorious earworms of the 1990s: The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love.”

A band as respected as Yo La Tengo covering one of the silliest chart-topping songs in recent memory would seem like the end of the world as we know it for fans of the original Fakebook — and that wasn’t lost on Kaplan, Hubley and bassist James McNew. The video, directed by Jason Woliner, features Hubley inciting the apocalypse as she strolls around the Silver Lake neighborhood of L.A., singing the song.