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 Two and a half decades into their career and New Jersey indie legends YO LA TENGO love music just as much as ever. Guitarist IRA KAPLAN – who shares vocals in the versatile trio with his drumming wife Georgia Hubley and bassist James McNew – tells NARELLE WALKER about writing soundtracks and the album behind their latest Australian tour, the aptly named Popular Songs.
After a dozen albums and over 25 years playing music together, Yo La Tengo, the quiet achievers of alternative rock & roll, recently had their highest Billboard chart entry (#58) with their 2009 album Popular Songs. A little ironic, considering Yo La Tengo are often cited by jaded rock critics as ‘indie darlings’. Ira Kaplan, guitarist with the Hoboken, New Jersey threesome, is slightly bemused by this fact. “Somehow it must relate to the fact that less people are buying records,” he says with a smile.
Popular Song’ contains a new batch of tunes running the gamut of popular reference points, from the psychedelic drone of opener Here To Fall to the bouncing garage pop of Nothing To Hide and the upbeat duet If It’s True, with strings arranged by Grammy award-winning arranger and composer Richard Evans. Demonstrating just how far they are willing to go for their love of popular music, they worked with Evans to achieve the ‘soulful strings’ sound he pioneered in the ‘60s.
The relentless touring schedule which brings them to Brisbane in February also leads to a range of other projects, such as community radio benefits and the hometown Hanukkah shows they put together every couple of years. Speaking to Kaplan in late November, I asked whether the Hanukkah shows would be happening in December. “No, not this year. There is almost nothing we do that is as rewarding, and there is almost nothing we do that is as overwhelmingly taxing to undertake that while touring it just seems foolhardy,” he says gravely.
“The shows are sprawling evenings of unpredictable entertainment,” he continues, and that’s a pretty accurate description of any Yo La Tengo show. “We have got incredible people to take part either as opening acts or with us or both. One show that was really special to us was in 2007 we got Howard Kaylan – who is the lead singer of The Turtles, and sang with Marc Bolan and Frank Zappa – to come perform with us and he was extremely generous, and would sing anything we wanted him to sing.”
“The owner of Maxwell’s, who is a very good friend of ours and a big record collector, brought up this song One Potato Two Potato. Basically the pre-Turtles band was called The Crossfires, just teenagers, and that was a song by The Crossfires, and we asked him to do it. So we learned it, he sang it. A song he probably hadn’t sung in 40 years! An experience like that! And nobody knows, they come to the shows and they don’t know that is going to happen.”
Similarly unpredictable, the Freewheelin’ shows are question and answer shows where the band draw from audience requests and their vast repertoire of cover versions. They were rumoured to be performing this type of show in the eastern Australian capitals, a notion that Kaplan is forced to reject.
“I gotta find out who is writing these press releases!” he says, a little exasperated
“It‘s not a request show. I’ve been devoting a lot of time in these interviews to dispelling that.” He goes on to indicate that the upcoming Australian shows will contain a lot from Popular Songs and a mixture from the older records.
With a growing repertoire of soundtrack work, I wonder whether Australian audiences could hope to hear some of these pieces in the live show. “Probably nothing from the soundtracks. We have done them on rare, rare occasions, generally at a Hanukkah show.”
“When we are writing something and we time it, on the rare occasion that it comes in under three minutes we go out for a celebratory meal!”
“Most of the music on soundtracks is written to order. When we write songs we just get together and start jamming, and sometimes they become songs, sometimes they don’t and we do have hours and hours of music from our rehearsals. We have drawn on that on occasion for our soundtrack stuff but not that much, mostly it is stuff we have written for the movies.”
With such a natural, freeform approach to making songs, ‘writing to order’ sounds like quite a different process. “It is such an obvious question that I hadn’t really thought about the fact that we really do segregate between the two,” ponders Kaplan. “I think some of the techniques we use in playing for soundtracks end up in our songwriting, but the actual material doesn’t seem to. How ‘bout that!” he exclaims.
“You are perhaps collaborating with another person when doing this,” he says of trying to work with a film director to create a soundtrack. “Not merely another person – the boss! The approach we use is completely different. Instead of James, Georgia and I creating a piece of music we like, now if the three of us like it and the director doesn’t, by a three to one vote we lose!”
Soundtrack material recorded by Yo La Tengo in 2005 and 2006 as the album They Shoot, We Score, gives a glimpse into the workings of the band for films such as Junebug and Old Joy. In their frequent quiet moments, the band create mood, The Fireside from Popular Songs being a good example. One would think that such an approach lends itself quite naturally to scoring films, but as Kaplan explains, “you still want music that is working with the movie.”
“We had a situation a few years ago where we wrote a piece of music for a movie and we were about to go on tour, and we handed it in and the director said great, love it. And then he put it to the picture and it wasn’t working with the picture. So that is a big part of it, not just liking the music, but how it is interacting with the movie.”
Working across a number of genres and musical briefs, Yo La Tengo play with genre and pop conventions but don’t let them get in the way of a good groove, resulting in album tracks that sometimes run to ten or fifteen minutes.
“We always think ‘oh we’re not going to wait three years to make a record, we are just going to bang out a 35-minute record’, but it just doesn’t seem to work out that way. We try not to be very conceptual, we try to just follow our instincts, and so we will have this notion that ‘hey wouldn’t it be great to do that’, and then you start playing this thing that just doesn’t really want to stop! So you don’t stop it.”
“When we are writing something and we time it, on the rare occasion that it comes in under three minutes we go out for a celebratory meal!” Kaplan says, laughing. “As much as we love records like John Coltrane’s sixty minute version of My Favourite Things, we also love two minute pop songs.”
YO LA TENGO play The Hi-Fi on Tuesday Feb 16. Tickets via www.feelpresents.oztix.com.au and the usual outlets. POPULAR SONGS is out now through Matador/Remote Control. www.yolatengo.com
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