For music obsessives who also play, it's impossible not to be inspired by a group like Yo La Tengo — down-to-earth, dedicated artists who have effectively beat the game, earning both a living and total creative freedom via their music.
The indie-rock renaissance band, which hails from Hoboken, N.J., but considers Nashville a second home — they've recorded here numerous times, most recently for 2009's Popular Songs — plays Exit/In Tuesday. Local art-country iconoclasts and longtime pals Lambchop support.
Since 1993, when the core Yo La Tengo lineup came together for the shoegazey Painful — bassist James McNew joining singer-guitarist Ira Kaplan and his wife, singer-drummer Georgia Hubley — it's been one quality record after another for the trio. Heartfelt, laid-back songs spiked with Kaplan's thrilling, never-gratuitous guitar solos.
Besides the band's obvious foils Low — a similarly understated, albeit darker, lifer band with a married couple on guitar and drums, and their best friend on bass — no other group from Yo La Tengo's generation has stayed together as long while aging as gracefully. The band's 13th studio album, 2013's lovely Fade — which notched their best-ever chart showing, No. 26 on the Billboard 200 — ranks right up there with cross-genre catalog standout I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, from 1997.
Asked by the Scene if Yo La Tengo is the most harmonious band in the world, McNew laughs over the phone. "Well, two of us are married to each other, so there's that. It is, in a lot of ways. We're a lot alike, we think a lot alike, and we spend a lot of time together. But we work hard. A lot goes into it. There [are] bands you see sometimes, and ... what they do seems effortless, as natural as, like, blinking. But then you find out [they] practice eight hours a day, seven days a week. A lot goes into making something look or seem that way, definitely."
Chief among Yo La Tengo's defining traits is their encyclopedic repertoire of covers, as those lucky enough to have witnessed their hometown Hanukkah concerts at the late Maxwell's in Hoboken — or local enough to have tuned in to their annual on-air pledge-drive sets on Jersey City's legendary WFMU — know well.
A stopgap of sorts between Fade and whatever comes next, last year's Stuff Like That There LP found the group not only reprising the template of an early favorite, Fakebook, from 1990 — acoustic-based, with nine covers (The Cure, Hank Williams and The Lovin' Spoonful among them), three reworked originals (most notably I Can Hear the Heart's "Deeper Into Movies") and two new songs — while bringing guitarist Dave Schramm, who played lead on Fakebook, back into the fold.
The set lists for the Stuff Like That There Tour (which features an acoustic set) invert a common observation on the band's electric shows — that they're heavier and more intense than expected — by taking harder-edged songs like "Deeper Into Movies" and the triumphant "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" (off 2006's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass) and unplugging them, giving them a newfound meditative quality.
McNew points to the acoustic reworking of "All Your Secrets" (originally from Popular Songs) as a microcosm of the whole project.
"The original arrangement of that song is organs ... electric bass and drumkit, and a pretty composed vocal arrangement," he explains. "The acoustic arrangement isn't all that different, replacing the organs with acoustic guitar and replacing the rhythm section nominally. But even though [it] isn't a radical reworking, it feels like it [is] ... like all of a sudden the song is running. It hits a stride in that arrangement that it didn't in the other one. It adds new life. It's exciting to discover something like that."
Not unlike Yo La Tengo's music, the rest of the Scene's brief chat with McNew is all over the place, but streamlined. We discuss upright bass, which he's learned on the fly for the acoustic shows ("a colossal pain in the ass, but I love the sound of it"), and touch on band pastimes like Nashville hot chicken (referenced in not one, not two, but three song titles) and their beloved New York Mets (defending National League champions) before circling back to more pertinent matters — a follow-up to Fade, the possibility of a 20th-anniversary deluxe reissue treatment for I Can Hear the Heart next year (as longtime label Matador did for Painful a couple years back).
Neither is on the calendar yet, and it's not lost on McNew. "How fortunate we are to not have to force it," he says. "Matador doesn't call us every day asking.
"I like making albums, personally," he goes on, "but times have changed, and I think we're open to maybe not making them, making singles ... who knows what. We're into anything at this point. It takes us a while to come around ... but once we start working, we work like lunatics."
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