Yo La Tengo

Interviewed december 1999 at Konkurrent in Amsterdam.

Ira Kaplan, singer, guitarist and one of the two founder members of Yo La Tengo must have done this so many times. The obligatory promotional interview tour. There he is again, after a small tour in Sweden he has to stay awake and be polite for seven days, while every day he has to talk to nine stuttering pimple ridden journalists who most of the time only talk just a little English and have forgotten to listen to the new album And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out'. Still, Ira is wide awake and with unbridled enthousiasm he starts answering my crossfire of questions.

Ira: 'I'm surprised myself. I feel just fine, even though I've had hardly any sleep the past week and after the concerts I went straight into these interviews for the next seven days. But the same goes for James and Georgia. I only have one day extra.'

SILENCE

It has taken a while before Yo La Tengo followed up their last "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One". Ira: 'It has been three years since the last album, but it doesn't feel as long. We haven't been working on it continously, some of the songs existed a lot longer. If you listen to it in one go you might think of it as one consistent whole that must have been created following some masterplan. But that ain't so. Some of the songs are actually quite old. When we were preparing the album James spotted that one of the songs we played sounded so much like a song we used to play live years and years ago. I had forgotten all about it, but we tried it again and now it is the openingtrack on the album "Everyday".'

MEANING

Listening to "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out" is absolute bliss. Yo La Tengo has become even better by being more silent, more introvert, and that without losing any of their strength and depth. The interviewer is so enthousiastic about it that he tries to describe the essence of the album in a single sentence: "A detailed and introspective description of the many facets within relationships and love, through the eyes of two people who know each other inside out." Ira: 'Well it's wonderful that you think that, and I'm glad that hear that in our album, but I'm still not going to tell you what the true meaning is of this album. Everybody should find out for themselves. Any similarities with reality is purely coincidental.' Ira doesn't want to explain this product of their creativity any further. Not even the cryptic title. Ira: 'The last two records were named after famous quotes. But I'm not going to tell who they were by and what they are about. A title should work like it does with a song. In the long run it should give you a certain emotion. If we would explain it, that could get lost. We've made that mistake once before by explaining the name "Yo La Tengo" and we won't be doing that ever again. It just isn't important, the title is not connected to the meaning of the album, it should only remind people of the music and the feeling that provokes.'

STABLE

Yo La Tengo has changed a lot since they started back in the middle of th eighties. But the last eight years they have been a trio. And that seems to work quite okay. Ira: 'James has been with us for the past nine years and that feels really comfortable. It isn't that we couldn't make music without each other, but the three of us working together works out just great. Yo La Tengo the way it is now started around the time James joined the group. Just after "May I Sing With Me". On that record he did play too, but back then he still had to learn the basslines we had written for him. Now he is as much a part of the band as we are. "Painful" was for us the big leap forwards musically. Since that time we have found our sound an form.' Not that Yo La Tengo since finding this form has stopped experimenting. On the contrary in fact. For instance on the new record Georgia even plays together with a rhythmbox. Ira: 'Georgia has cultivated quite an interest in that machine and she has become very good in programming it, even though it is very hard to play with. In combination with live drumming it can create exciting sounds and situations. But that's only one of the ways to keep it interesting for us. We also switch around in the rolls we play within the band, by playing each others instruments, by bringing in new instruments or by working on totally different songs for a while. That keeps us on edge and creative. For the most part our music is made during the rehearsals, that's where we try to peak creatively.'

CINEMA

The new album is so direct and clear and creates such vivit images that it could have almost been a movie or at least the soundtrack to a movie. Ira: 'Thank you. I could have worked. We have worked on soundtracks before (mostly on films done by Hal Hartley - JV). I think that the nineties have been the most poor age if you consider soundtracks. All those filmstudios trying to earn some extra buck by cramming a cd full of the new and hip, which have absolutely nothing to do with the movie. That makes for very bloodless soundtracks that don't add any depth to the movie.' If I would compare the new record to cinema, then it would probably be with the films by John Sayles. The music breathes the same honesty and emotional maturity as the works of Salyes. Ira: 'Ha ha, I wouldn't know about that. But it's funny you should say that. Georgia has once worked with John Sayles on a clip for Bruce Springsteen. Well, she was just standing in the audience. A friend of hers looked at the clip frame by frame and picked her out of the crowd. She made a picture of it. When we were working on "The heart...", one night our technician asked if he could leave early, because he was going to meet Bruce Springsteen, with whom he is good friends. We said he could, but only if he would let the Boss sign the picture. And he did. It's now in my small collectin of autographs. Every once in a while I ask for one. Recently the Shaggs played in the neighbourhood so I asked them. And at home I got one by Sammy Davis Junior!'

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Back to the record. It is going to be released on february 22nd in the year 2000. That's a lot of two's, did you do that on purpose? Ira: 'Oh no, that's purely coincidental. It's because we missed a deadline, so the recordcompany moved it to that date.' So it's also purely coincidental that the record uses the absolute maximum space available on a CD, seventyseven minutes and thirtyeight seconds? Ira: 'It wasn't our intention to do that, but when we finished the album in the studio we ended up with this much. So we asked Matador what they wanted us to do, if we really needed to cut it, because to us it was exactly perfect. I don't know what the listener will think of it, but to us the album contains a natural progression, from which we couldn't just remove something.' Well, let me assure you, this listener is perfectly happy with the way it is. Never before have Yo La Tengo sounded so rich and well though through. It's hard to imagine that they created this just by experimentation during their rehearsals. Ira: 'Maybe you're right. Maybe we have been working on it for three whole years. The creative process isn't linked to any certain point in time.' interview 1997