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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Yeasayer thrives on restlessness

Indie-rock band not afraid to take chances with sound

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Every summer, growing up in Philadelphia, Ira Wolf Tuton moved the chairs in between musical pieces at his uncles’ chamber series. Both are classical musicians, the sons of his great-grandmother, a concert violinist who journeyed from Russia to teach at the Curtis Institute of Music. And Tuton’s father is a jazz bassist who used to tour Europe in Dixieland bands. So while his family may not fully understand the experimental pop music Tuton makes in Yeasayer, his indie-rock band for 10 years, they can still relate.

“There’s one side of it where an older generation sees us written about in The New York Times and says, ‘Oh, that’s legitimate!’ ” says Tuton, by phone from Brooklyn, where he occasionally interrupts a half-hour interview to warn someone not to park in a certain spot near his home. “But we just all really believed it, and believed in ourselves, and it was happening no matter what. Everybody in my family has always been incredibly supportive: ‘We will support you with whatever you do, as long as you really go for it.’

“But it is very different from the traditions that the rest of the people in my family have done.”

Tuton, 37, joined Yeasayer in 2006, after moving to New York at the same time as singer Chris Keating and guitarist Anand Wilder, both from Baltimore. (Wilder’s cousin is married to Tuton’s sister.) They shared a gift for melody, and a desire to swerve between unusual sounds and rhythms, like the synthesizer effects and Middle Eastern chanting and percussion throughout the band’s 2007 debut, “All Hour Cymbals.” With every album, the band determined to move to a new place — Yeasayer’s 2010 breakthrough “Odd Blood” opens with what sounds like a system of underwater pistons and a growling robot, then shifts to herky-jerky but straightforward pop songs like “Ambling Alp” and “O.N.E.”

“Some artists get stuck into what people might expect — pumping out the same version, just more on steroids, each time,” Tuton says. “The other side is through thrusting yourself in different situations, different environments, where you have a different level of comfort, different pools at your disposal, different production techniques. I find those all to be a way to figure out where your honesty is in the process, in a way, because you’re not beholden to the way you worked on something in the past. That’s part of the artistic development, that’s always been a core of the band, from album to album.”

For the band’s fourth album “Amen & Goodbye,” which came out in April, Yeasayer took extreme measures to find that different artistic environment. Drawing inspiration from famous studio tinkerers such as David Bowie and the Beatles, as well as ’90s rock bands like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, Tuton, Keating, Wilder, drummer Luke Fasano recorded at Outlier Inn, in New York’s Catskill Mountains, among chickens, Angora bunnies and goats.

Different approach

“Amen & Goodbye” opens on a reflective note, a brief electric-piano ballad called “Daughters of Cain” surrounded by soaring harmonies, then takes a sharp turn into bendy synthesizer effects and a harder rock ‘n’ roll song called “I Am Chemistry.” The whole album, perhaps Yeasayer’s best, has this pendulum-swinging feel, from the more conventional and catchy “Silly Me” to the soft and atmospheric “Prophecy Gun.”

“We try to take a different approach on every single song. As much as ‘Silly Me’ is kind of that saccharine, fun pop moment, ‘Prophecy Gun’ is that meditative, palate-cleansing break,” Tuton says. “We entered into this — and we have in the past, but definitely on this album — to really craft something with a strong arc that could touch on a lot of the different sides of our writing, arrangement, emotionality and message.”

The experience was so artistically satisfying that Tuton later bought a house 20 minutes from the studio, in a small town next to a lake. “Kind of going into my Thoreau era,” the bassist says, referring to the “Walden” author famous for simplifying his life. “It was a great place to be meditative and self-reflective. I’ve tried to continue that after the fact.”

At first, on the phone, Tuton seems a bit tense, as he searches his house for his keys during the interview. About five minutes in, he interrupts himself to say: “They were in my pocket!” He relaxes at that point, discussing the challenges of adapting Yeasayer’s complex arrangements and layered studio sounds into something the band can reproduce on stage.

“In the same way that the album has a playability, sound and humanity, that’s something we’re bringing to the live show as well. I would like that to stay exciting — I think it can, because you’re not relying on a pre-programmed thing that’s going to sound the same from song to song,” he says.

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