“I think we’ve been irrelevant to some people for 30 years,” laughs bassist James McNew. “I try not to take it personally. There are lots of bands that have been irrelevant to me ever since they formed. That’s just show business.”
Yo La Tengo’s approach to their 13th studio album was business as usual, McNew says – to do whatever made them happy. It just happened that what made them happy this time around was to try something new. For the first time since their 1993 LP Painful, the band decided not to work with producer Roger Moutenot. Instead, their latest record, Fade, was recorded with John McEntire of Tortoise and The Sea and Cake. “It took us a very long to make the decision, or to have it really even occur to us,” McNew explains. “There was never really dissent or dissatisfaction with Roger, far from it; it was really just that it occurred to us when it occurred to us. I don’t know, we’re weird people in a lot of ways. We seem very normal, but we’re not normal at all.”
McNew and bandmates Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley had known McEntire for over 20 years, as friends and fans. Yo La Tengo moved in the same circles as McEntire’s bands and they admired his work as a producer for artists including Broken Social Scene, Smog and Trans Am. When they decided to make a change, he was the first person that came to mind.
The band enjoyed recording in McEntire’s Chicago studio, but the new arrangement took some getting used to. “We’ve worked with the same producer for 20 years,” McNew shrugs. “Roger understood our language, which isn’t the most technical in the world. When we were in the studio with him, he had a very good idea of what we liked and what we didn’t like and he knew what all of our equipment sounded like, so he had a very good idea of how to go about things. John knew nothing, so it was like we were starting from the very beginning. We really had to work hard to be clear and to communicate what sounded good to us and what we liked. But I thought it was really positive and really strong, in the end. It turned out to be a very strong connection between us.”
Released just a few weeks ago, Fade is a fairly concise record from a band prone to releasing double albums featuring epic seven- to ten-minute tracks. With just two meandering tracks book-ending the 45-minute work, Fade prompted one reviewer to suggest that McEntire’s influence has made the band more user-friendly. “Did we aim to make a more user-friendly record?” McNew laughs. “Not really. Once we started writing songs and they started to be short, it felt natural to us to have them at that length. I think the idea of making something a little more concise really appealed to us, and I think we kept that in mind. But I don’t think we ever announced that mission to John. We just wanted to be happy with the sound. Like most things that we’ve done, it was really just to please ourselves. The idea of making a single album as opposed to a double album was… I’m not sure if ‘perversely’ is the right word, but it was perversely appealing to us. We hadn’t made a single record in such a long time, but it felt right. It felt right to change a lot of things. To grow a little bit.”
At the same time, McNew says he can hear traces of early Yo La Tengo on Fade, the sound of the group before he even signed on as bass player. (His first record with the band was Painful – there were five Yo La Tengo albums prior to that.) To McNew, Fade has a very organic, very natural history, while representing a real push forward for the band. What it means to people, and whether that historical Yo La Tengo sound is still ‘relevant’ is not something he really thinks about. “I try not to,” he laughs. “Certainly not this close to bed time. The fact that no one really has an answer is the part that I find somewhere between darkly funny and deeply depressing. It’s a fine line between those things on any given day. Who knows? It’s all subjective.”
Meanwhile, Yo La Tengo keep making the music they love, and they keep making new fans. “We have met lots of people [on the Fade tour] who are hearing us for the first time, and that makes me really happy: in somebody’s life, we’re brand new. Like, ‘Oh wow, there’s this new band with 30 years of music I can catch up on,’” McNew says. “I love it when that happens to me.”
BY SIMONE UBALDI
