Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew as Yo La Tengo are absolutely one of our very most favourite bands. This Stupid World - their latest of seventeen albums - is an absolute gem; a warm and flowing set with all the different nuances from across their amazing career. We love it and we leapt at the opportunity to talk to Ira about it… and record shops, naturally!
Yo La Tengo, Photographed by Cheryl Dunn.
Deluxe: It’s been fairly well documented that you recorded this new set at your Hoboken practice space, but when you went in to set about work, did you have “a record” in your minds or was it more of an organic process?
Ira Kaplan: Well, a little of both. We’re always playing and James (McNew) is frequently recording us, so we’re always sneaking up on making a record, sometimes for quite a long time before we decide that's what we're doing. At a certain point we kind of identified the nine songs and focused in on them.
D: I actually just heard about your Bunker Sessions, so I am about to dive into them too!
IK: That was kind of like a promo thing we did. I think with a couple of those songs, it's possible they were the first time we had played them live. That's really the nature of record promo right there, you know? (laughing) a low pressure scenario with a film crew photographing you while you play a song for the first time!
D: (laughing) I guess the post-pandemic live scene will have affected how much you play out too?
IK: You know, yes and no. I mean, we had done our Hanukkah shows not that long before the Bunker Session but we’ve long been in the habit of not playing our songs before the record comes out, I think in the case of both There's a Riot Going On and This Stupid World, we picked three of the songs and did them a single time each at the Hanukkah shows leading up to the release of the record. I think Sinatra Drive Breakdown was played for the first time at the Bunker Session.
“We kept tearing it apart and putting it back together and finally came up with something that we were happy with.”
D: It might seem like a funny question, but do you feel that Yo La Tango is almost two bands in that you're both a live band and a studio band and there seems to be quite a lot of difference between those two iterations?
IK: Well, I mean, I don't feel like we're two bands. I think we're one band that doesn't always do the same thing twice (laughing). That's closer to my take on it.
D: On release, there was a lot of critical praise for the album’s production. Knowing that this was your first self-produced release, was that gratifying?
IK: I feel like maybe there was more made of that than is needed as we’ve gradually done that, even with There's a Riot Going On, the three of us recorded almost that entire record by ourselves. We did mix it with John McEntire - and he had a lot of input and put in a huge amount of work, but we’ve slowly changed the way we work. As I referred to kind of sneaking up on songs, we even snuck up on doing that [producing the record]. It wasn't like we went in knowing that we were going to mix the record ourselves.
James poured so much of himself into the sessions that over the course of recording and doing rough mixes, we kind of felt like, “you know what, maybe, maybe we can do this ourselves?”
D: It’s a really good point because if you have the technical ability to record and mix and produce the songs, then who could be better to drive those ideas into where you want to take them than you as a trio. To that end, did any of the songs evolve during recording or were they quite fully formed ideas?
IK: (laughing) No, we frequently don't have fully formed ideas. You know, Miles Away really developed a lot in the recording of it. Brain Capers was also a song we just kept mixing and mixing and mixing. That is the luxury of working the way we work, we never had to settle or feel like the clock was ticking, we kept tearing it apart and putting it back together and finally came up with something that we were happy with.
I also want to come back to something that you were saying. I don’t think that the band - earlier in our life together - could have done it without an extra person, not technically, but in that the producer or the engineer ended up acting as the arbiter.
D: I suppose it’s very much about ensuring that the song has all the opportunity to go wherever it needs to go.
Illustration: James McNew for Deluxe/Drift
IK: Yes. You know, I've referenced our Hanukkah shows a couple times and we have gotten into the habit in recent years of not repeating a song over eight nights, which means playing a lot of our old songs.
D: You have a pretty expansive repertoire…
IK: As part of our preparation sometimes, it can involve listening to old songs that we have only a hazy memory of. It can be kind of remarkable because we haven't heard those songs in forever, so we revisit them and that new live version becomes the version.
D: Yeah, for real. I love that.
IK: The recorded version is, as you were saying in a slightly different context earlier, done now. The live version can keep evolving and breathing.
D: I love hearing a song that I know and love evolve, almost like it’s out of control. I am not necessarily insinuating that your live shows are out of control.
IK: Absolutely. Almost going back to your first question, we've never made records thinking about how we're going to play the songs live and we've never worried about it. When we finished the record there was a pretty intense set of rehearsals to try to figure out how to play these songs live. Maybe not different, but I'd be surprised if anything sounds just like the record.
D: (laughing) Have you ever had to kind of resort to the internet and actually like look up chords for some of the older songs?
IK: For our songs? (laughing) I don't believe so, it all comes back. We would, we're not too proud to do that.
D: I have to ask a little about record shopping. Do you remember your first record shop experiences?
IK: Well, I probably inherited some LPs before my first purchase, but I do remember driving around with my dad, going on like errands that I probably didn't want to be doing in the first place. I would frequently ask to listen to the radio and the answer was always no. And then one day, for no clear reason, it was yes, and which was a magical day.
The next time that I was in a department store with my mom, I bought The Rolling Stones’ Let's Spend the Night Together / Ruby Tuesday on 45. Let's Spend the Night Together is the cooler song, but Ruby Tuesday was the one I heard on the radio. On my next excursion I bought Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever, oh, and also around that time I bought The Return of the Red Baron by the Royal Guardsmen. I don't know if you know The Royal Guardsmen?
D: You’re not the first person to mention them to me, but I only really know the one about Snoopy.
IK: Well, The Royal Guardsmen put out a song called Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron and it was such a hit that they did the sequel, The Return of the Red Baron, and then they did another sequel called Snoopy's Christmas.
D: (laughing) Such a rich vein.
IK: So I think I might have bought a standalone single of Return of the Red Baron and then bought Penny Lane… Oh man, and I Think We're Alone Now by Tommy James & the Shondells and (Feelin Groovy) by Harpers Bizarre. All records that I still own.
D: It’s a really good set of first purchases. Thinking about cruising to the radio that day and making first purchases, what do record shops mean to you?
IK: I guess it's just, it's my life. Like, you know, I've spent so much time in record stores. I actually didn't know I was gonna bring up those 45’s because we - me and my younger brother - used to accompany my mom to the department store as there was a supermarket connected to it. So she would go to the supermarket and we'd go to the record department. We haunted that place long enough that we got to know the kids - although they seemed like authority figures to us - who worked there. Those experiences were such a huge deal for me.
D: Do you still search out shops?
IK: It becomes something when I'm on tour, you know, when we go to a city and usually you don't have a ton of time before we have to get to soundcheck and sort of to find the local record store, they know what's up. It’s always a great experience, but it's just that the meaning has changed over the years.
D: Ah man, I knew what I was gonna tell you. I love how This Stupid World sounds so different in each season. I hope you can hear it and you’re all proud.
IK: My pleasure. I mean, we are proud of it.
This interview ran in print in Deluxe Issue Twenty Seven, first published in December 2023.