Interview: Yo La Tengo

How do you open an interview with a band who have outlasted their contemporaries to such an extent that once retired piers are now on the reunion money-grabbing trail. A band who have, perhaps uniquely, never put a foot wrong in their 25 years. A band who, among 14 remarkably consistent records, have peaked with at least one pretty special effort a decade. Yo La Tengo are undoubtedly among the very best bands of the last quarter decade, though don’t - and more on this later – start erecting any statues to them just yet.

 

So, well, how do they do it?

 

“I don’t know,” bassist James McNew tells Ragged Words with a chuckle. “I don’t know. I don’t think we think about it. We’re not very good as a focus group, we don’t sit around and think ‘what haven’t we done yet? What kind of records should we make?’ We don’t do any of that stuff; we just do what feels right to us and what’s fun to do… I know it’s a disappointing answer!”

 

It’s a more understandable answer the longer we talk. Continuity, for one, certainly hasn’t hindered the threesome’s relaxed approach. Two of the three – founding members Ira Kaplan (guitars, vocals) and Georgia Hubley (drums vocals) – are, after all, married. Similarly, long-time producer Roger Moutenot has worked on much of the group's work while most, if not all, of their records have been recorded in the New Jersey city of Hoboken, a base James assures us is “significantly less romantic” than we think.   

 

“We rarely think further ahead that is absolutely necessary,” James offers as another possible secret to their enduring success. “Right now we have this tour over to your part of the world which is a rare situation, to know what we’re going to be doing with our lives for the next couple of months. And that’s about it.”

 

James is in fact perhaps one of the newest elements to the band, having joined eight years after their inception. He moved to Brooklyn in 1991 and followed a rotating cast on bass before quickly becoming a permanent member. “I just kept showing up and just wore them down,” he modestly says. His arrival coincided with the band signing to Matador and releasing their then best album yet, 1993’s Painful, before topping all that went before four years later on I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. A firm fan favourite and real tour de force of a record, it heralded a turning point both critically and popularly. Did the band see it that way back then too?

 

“I think that was. I definitely remember when we went to tour in support of that record more people were showing up. It was really exciting. I thought even in the way we put together the album, that was a turning point as well. It just encapsulated the direction in which we were going. At that point we’d been playing together for five or six years, and that record in a lot of ways was a lot more personal. It was more like what our rehearsals are like. It was showing a lot more range as far as the moods of music that we like and what we like to play and I think that was the first time we showed those sides to people.”

 

They’ve kept showing those sides since, most notably perhaps on 2000’s And Then Nothig Turned Itself Inside-Out (watch this space for our albums of the decade…) and haven’t let up, right up until this year’s Popular Songs. Continuing the trend as being “a band you can rely on”, the album nevertheless plays a new and neat trick where the first nine tracks make up a pop record, and the final three songs – clocking in at virtually the same amount of time - comprise an almost entirely different reverb-tastic album. Was this an intentional plan from the start?

 

“Yeah, we came up with that sequence and it sort of seemed unusual. I think we all thought that it was a very strangely direct way of presenting the songs to people. It wasn’t lost on us that except for the final three songs on the record, we had a large amount of pretty concise songs – relatively speaking to us, we’re not known for songs in the three minutes or under department – and I think arranging the songs in the sequence that we used highlights it. But at the same time if you listen to the whole record, you forget that, so I think it makes for a nice story overall.”

 

Despite being albums 11, 12, 13 and 14, each Yo La Tengo record since the turn of the decade has entered the Billboard charts at a slightly higher position with Popular Songs coming close to troubling the top 50 (not band at all for a band of their ilk). I wonder how much this has to do with the fact that people, even vinyl or cd-loving YLT fans, are downloading music illegally pushing sales way down. Looking at the bigger picture, what do a band as experienced as Yo La Tengo make of the current state of the music industry? And are they happy not being a new band setting out among the wreckage of that industry in 2009?

 

“It's kind of all relative. In a way media is more interested in covering things that are new. Newer groups would get more coverage than a band that have been around for a while now so there’s ups and downs for both.

 

”But it’s tough,” he says of the current state of things. “It’s affecting all bands and it’s difficult not to take something like that personally (illegal downloading). It’s a strange time for all of us, speaking for all bands as I often do…”

 

You probably wouldn’t find many more qualified spokespeople among the indie music community though. Yo La Tengo have, unsurprisingly, been long regarded as indie royalty but as a band still very much in their prime, what do they make of such titles?

 

“I forget where I heard it but there’s some kind of rule that there should never be a statue made for someone who is currently alive and I think that’s a pretty good rule,” James concludes, with a hearty laugh.