The many sides of Yo La Tengo

Written on July 21, 2011 – 12:22 am | by Jaxon Hallahan

It may be an off time for Yo La Tengo, but that’s an entirely relative term.

As the New Jersey band’s frontman Ira Kaplan explains, the veteran alt-rock trio is in the midst of writing for another record, working on music for a short animated film and he’s also getting set to begin rehearsals for a tribute concert to girl groups, where he’ll be one of musicians backing iconic singers such as Maxine Brown and Lesley Gore.

“And we’re trying to figure out what kind of folk act we are,” Kaplan jokes. “We’re having a board of directors meeting this afternoon, so we’ll see where that leads us.”

The latter, of course, is a nod to the band’s unlikely but welcome appearance at this year’s Calgary Folk Music Festival, which sees them doing double duty on Saturday, performing in concert as well as participating in a workshop.

Anyone familiar with Yo La Tengo’s almost 30-year career and more than a dozen albums will know that the boundaries they’ve pushed are more in the realms of rock and pop, and as torch bearers, like Sonic Youth, of the smart, experimental and artier sounds the Velvet Underground explored in the late ’60s, early ’70s. (The comparison even earned them the bigscreen role of a VU-esque band in the film I Shot Andy Warhol.) It is a sound very much at home in an event such as, say, Calgary’s Sled Island — in fact, they played the fest a couple of years ago — but one that pushes even further the ideas of what folk music is.

“We’re enough students of history to know how elastic terms can be. … It’s a stretch, but that’s a good thing, I think, for a festival to stretch. It’s a good thing for bands to stretch,” he says.

“We’re always intrigued by those things, change the context rather than just try to enforce our will on somebody. It’s just kind of what kind of synthesis of things can we come up with … to tweak what we do. We like doing different things, we like the challenge of being in different scenarios rather than take the same set to a variety of places. We’d rather allow it to push us into a slightly different presentation.”

That also describes the method to the music-making of Yo La Tengo, which is rounded out by Kaplan’s wife Georgia Hubley and, since 1992, James McNew.

From one song to the next, let alone one album to the next, their material can be as sweet and pristine as the most melodic pop or it can be drenched in feedback and more about atmospherics than cohesive tunes.

And that unpredictability has allowed them to move with ease from soundtracks — such as the aforementioned animated film and undersea documentaries — to rock albums — like 2006′s wild I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass — while keeping their audience guessing and, ultimately, interested in what they’ll do next.

“That goes both ways. Through the magic of the Internet, we’re well aware of how irritated people can get when they don’t get what they expect.”

He laughs. “I think there are people who appreciate that about us and I think there are people who are kind of aggravated by it. Which is just another reason to listen to what feels right for you and let the rest of it take care of itself, because you can’t anticipate who’s going to react what way.

Following their own muse has certainly served them well. While never really breaking into the mainstream, Yo La Tengo have, nevertheless — or possibly because of that fact — maintained a career that, unlike many of their contemporaries’, doesn’t rely on nostalgia and remains consistently vibrant. Critics remain enamoured and new generations of alt rockers are continually discovering them and getting to know their past.

For Kaplan, like his audience, keeping the musical explorations going and stretching conceptions of what Yo La Tengo are, has helped keep things interesting for him for the better part of three decades.

“That’s certainly a big part of it,” he says. “But I would turn that on its side as well and say that it remains interesting. I’m not sure we keep it interesting, it just is interesting. …

“This is just our idea of enjoying ourselves.”

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