Bechtolt begins by giving a little insight into where their unbridle creative focus has been directed of late. “Our main focus right now is our TV show. The four of us in the touring band wrote a comedy pilot together, we’ve sold it, and now we’re going to be producing a comedy show over the next three months. We’re actually putting music on the backburner to focus on this new area that we know nothing about.” Evans chimes in with more detail. “It’s the weirdest story of moving to L.A. and happening to meet a person that might be interested in a project that we’ve always been joking and talking about,” she laughs. “It’s based on our experiences but it’s in no way a documentary – everyone seems to assume that. We’re not going to be in it we’re just writing it.”
Evans and Bechtolt are a delight to talk to and as excited and energetic as their résumé would suggest. It becomes apparent that although we’re chatting about their upcoming tour to Australia, their new show (currently titled Support) will take them away from the stage, at least for a while.
“This is the last booked big tour for the foreseeable future,” Evans says. “After this we’ll do single shows but we won’t be doing consecutive tours for at least this year if not longer,” Bechtolt says. “There’s never been any pressure for us to make anything consistently. We won’t be able to stop making music, we’ll do that in some way forever, but we won’t be focusing on making records. But we do have a new song that is coming out soon and we like the idea of just putting songs out as soon as they’re done.”
YACHT began as Bechtolt’s solo project, Evans joined a while after, and now they’ve moved on to a four-piece touring band. These changes have come in increments with those involved able to develop personal relationships built on mutual trust and creative respect. How then, are YACHT – a concept so steeped in a DIY ethos – going to handle a large scale TV production of scores of fingers prodding the creative pie?
“It will be an exercise in ego sacrifice,” Evans says. “We’ve always been in control of everything we do and that’s the operating principal of this project but by becoming involved in this and selling our story and point of view, it’s going to be interesting to see how we handle that. I think we’re lucky because the team that we’re stepping into understand that we’re bringing to the table experience in a realm that not a lot of people are able to articulate. We have the upper hand of truth I guess.”
“We’ll also be pushing to do as much as possible, well, as much as they let us,” Bechtolt says with a chuckle. “It’s a project that we all have 20 years’ experience in from playing in crazy bands. It’s a dark comedy about being a supporting band and it grew from jokes that we shared to actually writing a show about it.”
They’re looking forward to heading out to Australia and doing this last big tour for a while; their need to be forever in a state of flux doesn’t come from any musical frustration. “Jona and I are both in the same state of mind,” Evans says. “We lie in the present and we only focus on what will be rewarding for us in the moment because you never know when that moment will end. Whether that’s in a pragmatic way, we could die in a car accident tomorrow, and also as artists we don’t know when the offers will stop. We have a tendency to call everything we do creatively YACHT and that allows us a lot of freedom and we can continue to diversify what we do. It keeps us from becoming complacent I think if we were just a rock band, we would be bored to tears by now.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
