Shazam Meets… Yeasayer
Earlier this year Brooklyn based indie trio Yeasayer released their second album, ‘Odd Blood’. A staggering work of outlandish originality, the album smashed all expectations after their debut ‘All Hours Cymbals’. While their first album certainly exposed Yeasayer as ones to keep an eye on, ‘Odd Blood’ was the sound of a band hitting their stride that also saw them exploring a wider range of influences. Rather than stick to the psych tinged folk sound of their debut, Yeasayer also incorporated poppier dance elements into their music. As a result they’ve begun to move from the shadows of indie obscurity to the mainstream in a similar way to Animal Collective after last year’s ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’.
We spoke to band member Anand Wilder about their appearance at Reading & Leeds, their plans for the next album and how they managed to convince Gossip Girl star Kristen Bell to star in the bizarre video for their latest single ‘Madder Red’.
You recently played at the Reading & Leeds. Do you guys enjoy playing festivals?
I like the challenge of a festival, doing a quick changeover. Having to convince an audience who may or may not be totally familiar with your repertoire. You really have to convince them that you’re worthy of their attention otherwise they could move on to see something that’s competing with you. I like the challenge; I prefer some festivals over others. I live in New York so I prefer festivals that are in the middle of the woods, I really liked Latitude. Lovebox was really cool.
You guys have a pretty solid tour schedule up until the end of the year, have you set aside next year to start work in the studio?
We’re actually going to head into the studio next month, just to lay down some B-sides – hopefully to put out an EP or single before the New Year. We haven’t had much time to be at home to create much and I kind of need that. The last cycle we just toured and toured then stopped and worked on the album for six months. The new way we’d like to do it is to maybe tour more moderately and record while we’re doing it, before we stop touring take a month out to record. Maybe that won’t work but you’ve got to try it. Hopefully then we’ll accumulate more work, when you’re constantly touring you start to feel a bit like a robot.
And I guess there are ideas that you have on the road that need to be captured, before they vanish into the ether?
Oh yeah, totally.
On ‘Odd Blood’ we saw you guys embrace a dance influence that wasn’t present on your debut ‘All Hours Cymbals’, have you any idea where the next album will take you?
I think we’ll just see as it comes, we learned a lot from recording the last album. It’s a constant learning process of what sounds good, what direction you want to go. That’s the good thing about going to a lot of festivals, you see bands and you think ‘I don’t like the sounds they’re playing, but I like the way they’re going about linear composition’. The way that people write songs is different to us. The challenge is to say now that we’ve done a dance song, let’s try to do this type of song and have it be just as good. I don’t know; the touring and recording are two sides of the same coin. You need to tour to be able to purge all that music you’ve recorded and you need to record in order to put out all that stuff you’ve built up.
‘Madder Red’ is your latest single. The video – staring Gossip Girl’s Kristen Bell – has attracted a lot of attention. It was directed by Andreas Nilsson who’s worked with the likes of The Knife and MGMT, did you work on the concept together?
No that was something that he pretty much came up with himself. He’d worked with Radical Friend on their first two videos and we were looking for someone new to work with. He was at the top of the list Mute gave us and we were really excited to work with him as we were familiar with his work with The Knife, Fever Ray and MGMT. We were interested in his unique Swedish wit and we were enamored with his visual aesthetic. It was kind of like, “Wow, he wants to work with us? Great!” We had a few conversations with him, he had this wacky idea for this monster, but he’s not really a monster – he’s cuddlier! Then the whole Kristen Bell thing was really fortunate that she was happy to chat to this little independent band, such as us. Plus it was really good for the video to have this really famous actress to play someone who is still struggling in auditions, who has this pet at home who needs taking care of. The other cool thing is that she’s a really big animal rights activist; she’s been a vegetarian since she was eleven. I like that the video doubles up as a PETA advert!
For many ‘Odd Blood’ is one of the albums of the year, personally what have you enjoyed listening to this year?
I’ve been listening to a lot of new bands, a lot of new bands that have been opening up for us. That’s what happens, if a band opens up for you, you’ll fall in love with them. Bands like Sleigh Bells, Javelin, and Light Asylum. I really liked the Suckers’ album. There’s this English guy called Jay Paul that I’m really into, he doesn’t have an album out yet but there’s a couple of tracks on his MySpace that are really great. I just saw Health live and they blew me away.
When you were making the album did you think that it would resonate so well with people?
For us, it was more about doing something different and not taking the easy road of just repeating our first album. Even when maybe our natural instinct would be to do something like our first album, it would be a challenge to really twist our brains around and think “how can we make this completely different”. That was our main concern for the album and to make whatever genre we played with as effective as possible. Plus whether people were going to be into it or not, working on an album you might have only played to your girlfriend or a friend, - they might roll their eyes or say I like this song, it’s nice to get some feedback on it. One friend, who’s in the band Fang Island, was really into ‘Madder Red’ when we had a very early demo of it and that was a good feeling to have someone whose musical opinion you respect to be like “I’m obsessed with this song!” That feels good. But you don’t know until the album comes out. As many good reviews you get, you only remember the bad ones! That’s why we stop reading all reviews, because if you’re going to take the good ones seriously then you have to take the bad ones as well!
You guys gave away a free download of ‘O.N.E’ before the album came out, for many it’s one of the standout tracks of the album. What made you decide to give it away before the album came out?
I think we like to walk a line of doing what the label want and what the fans want, you know? That was kind of a gift to our fans to say thanks for coming out to the shows. We see that emotional support and this is a good way to give something back to the fans and you hope that if they like it they may pass it on to a friend who may buy the album. It’s a shrewd business move on our behalf (laughs). I’m not thrilled with the fact that people can download all of our music for free, but at the same time you have to engage with temporary technology. We’re trying to be a contemporary band; trying to be contemporary today. We don’t think that the internet is dead or anything, like Prince. I think the internet is the future it’s just about figuring out better ways to get artists better compensation for all these free downloads.
It’s good to see you guys are willing to work with it, whereas some bands seem to refuse its existence.
Yeah, I never understood that. I don’t think keeping things from your audience is going to help your career in the long run. I can see the difference in-between the fans that were coming to our first tour, who probably all downloaded the album three months before it leaked. Now, when we play places like Munich or in Holland, it’s an older crowd who maybe just discovered us through a legal, legit purchase.
Yeasayer’s latest single ‘Madder Red’ is out September 13th.
