Yo La Tengo: Genre Overload (James McNew Interview)

The party line on the twelfth Yo La Tengo album, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is eclecticism, in the White Album sense.

Twenty-two years in, however, it seems only natural that the beloved New Jersey trio would arrive at a place like this: a 77-minute cascade of hairstanding guitar jams (“Pass the Hatchet”), countryish numbers (“Sometimes I Don’t Get You”), falsettos-and-brass-lines triumphs (“Mr.Tough”), orchestral ambience, complete with strings and horns (“Black Flowers”), and cheery pop (“Beanbag Chair”). Indie rock’s least pigeonhole-able band continues its genre-spanning sprawl.

Half the fun of keeping up with Yo La Tengo is just how much there is to grab onto. The studio albums are a starting point, and only hint at the further reams of obscure songs, the superb live shows and the numerous collaborations. Of course, there is the band’s name itself, which comes from New York Mets baseball anecdotage and the encyclopedically musicological tendencies of guitarist Ira Kaplan, his wife, drummer Georgia Hubley, and bassist James McNew.

There are also the performances on Jersey freeform station WFMU’s Annual fundraising marathon, and, of course, the famous Hannukah shows, where the band takes up residency at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ, each night, with guests galore and mix CDs on the table. A band that once played the Velvet Underground on film (1996’s [I Shot Andy Warhol) and is the snap in one of The Onion’s most infamous headlines (“37 Record Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster”) probably isn’t just a great cult, but a mini-universe. And that “probably” becomes a “likely” when you factor in the film score work—2005’s Junebug, 2006’s Old Joy (with Will “Spooner” Oldham) and the new, super-risque Shortbus, by John Cameron Mitchell, among it.

Scratch one corner of the Yo La Tengo universe, and you find how deep the roots go—this is the ultimate band for esoterica fiends. Glide chatted with McNew as the band prepared for its fall upcoming fall tour.

Good afternoon, James. I imagine you guys are deep into a lengthy interview schedule.

We are, but I can always just say, “Gotta go!”

I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is album number twelve for Yo La Tengo. I know you get asked about the title a lot, and I was told it was you who came up with it.

Umm, I gotta go!

Yes. It is fun to say. It’s a sentence you probably don’t get to say much in your everyday life, at least not in my case. In general, anything with “ass” in the title is going to be good.

Say a complete Yo La Tengo dilettante picks up this album, wanting to know which song best captures the band as a whole at this point. Which song would you direct him to?

Well, first, if you’ve only got time for one song, there’s something wrong with how you’re living your life. It’s never been our responsibility to sum up our mission statement in one song, although you can certainly hear bits in of other songs. I encourage people to spend more time on themselves. Listen to whole albums.

Alright then, well, which song on the album was the first to really come together? To really materialize or emerge?

“Pass the Hatchet” is one that’s really not that different from when we came up the initial idea. We just kind of let it rip. I’m really bad at describing the things we do. It happens naturally and for me to start describing it, I’m “dooming” it somehow.

We’re not a band that’s overwhelmed when we arrive at a recording studio. We leave a lot open until we commit to tape, and that’s a very good way to work.

Has it always been that way?

“May I Sing With Me” [from 1992, the first studio album to feature McNew] was made in about a week or less, and doing that just seems impossible now. It’s certainly a luxury to have all that time. And then, even at the end of four week sessions, the last two weeks are always pandemonium anyway. It’s not really more relaxed.

There’s a battle between us and technology, I think. The four-track cassette machine—you could get so much done on them because you had so few options. Now, with ProTools, digital editing, and everything, the options are infinite. You could work on one song til you died of old age.

The studio stuff can easily lead to studio neurosis, where you stop being sure of anything. Then you need to go outside and walk around, have a coffee.

[Former Bob Dylan collaborator] David Mansfield’s strings work is prominent on the album. How did you guys link up with David in the first place?

We were fans of his work and we knew who he was. Interestingly, he lives in the same town in New Jersey—Maplewood —where lots of our friends and relatives live. I’m not really sure, I think David had worked with someone else we know. He also sat in with us at one of our Hanukkah concerts [in 2005]. He was a real joy to play with, and we said we’d keep him in mind when we made a new record. His studio is in his garage, and we brought session files out to him and he got to work.

You’ve done music for several films now. What’s fundamentally different about writing for film?

It’s definitely different, and we didn’t really know that, we sort of found out it was different. The huge difference is that you’re working with a director—working for his or her vision while trying to maintain your own identity. It’s strange, I’ll grant you that. It’s a real challenge, and pretty enjoyable. For a band that’s been writing music for 20 years, it’s a new way to write.

We worked with John Cameron Mitchell on a a movie called Shortbus and it’s playing at film festivals now. It’s pretty exciting. Two of the films we worked on before, Junebug and Old Joy, with Will Oldham, were both very quiet, sensitive movies. John’s movies are neither quiet nor sensitive, and definitely not dull. Which is not to say the other two were, it’s just his are proactively so.

We were there, cueing up scenes, placing music, and the naked person enters, and then the butt appears. It was really fun to work on. It’s not a porno movie, but it’s not *not* a porno movie, either.

What brought Yo La Tengo to John Cameron Mitchell?

The original stage version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch had film projection interludes, and they had hired Georgia’s sister Emily to do animation. That was our entrance. He’s a wonderful guy—he sang with us at one of our Hanukkah shows. He approached us about Shortbus and we were very interested.

Those Hanukkah shows at Maxwell’s are the stuff of legend now.

We really do enjoy it, even though it’s completely exhausting. We put them all together ourselves—we book everybody ourselves and everything else we need. There has to be someone, for example, to get [the New York Dolls’] David Johansen to Hoboken. And then the mix CDs, we make those by hand.

It’s going to be difficult this year—we’re going to be on the road until the week before Hanukkah. We’re going to have to work on it on the road and it’s going to get tight.

Is there any one artist in particular you’d love to secure for Hoboken?

Oh, there are lots of people, and people we’ve been trying to get for years. I’m not going to say, because saying it out loud will jinx it. But we hold out hope forever, every year.

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