Yeasayer in China... Yearight!
Chris: I threatened with them that on the next record we might do a full 70 minute ambient one-track album but they said they’re down for that.
Think of the hot bands in the world right now and they don’t come much more sizzling than Yeasayer. The world and its wife has blogged about the genre-hopping Brooklyn band and it’s not hard to see why. SUPERSWEET were lucky enough to grab some time with Yeasayer’s vocalist Chris Keating, a down to earth and rather affable chap, who was more than happy to answer our questions as he waited for the band’s tour bus to be repaired in a chain hotel in Bristol. We chewed the fat on any number of topics including: hype, Rihanna and finding love (his now wife) on an airplane.
SS: When you first came out the amount of hype surrounding the band was unreal, how did you cope with it? Were you being invited to the coolest parties?
Chris: I honestly don’t really notice. We kind of just do what we do and I think we’re always looking backwards, remembering where we came from. We always remember our smallest worst shows as opposed to the best ones. You always remember your worst reviews and the harshest criticisms. I think it’s important not to get ahead of yourself really. It was cool to start being asked to do festivals and I got asked to do some music with different people and various different things. [But] nothing like getting invited to some fancy party or anything. Not that I’d want to go anyway. I know all the musicians in New York and we have our own parties! (Laughs).
SS: Did you feel any pressure to deliver on Odd Blood having got such glowing reviews for your first album? Or was it more pressure from yourselves?
Chris: Yeah , it was pressure on ourselves really, it didn’t feel like there was much external pressure really. Mainly because I felt like there were so many people out there who hadn’t heard of us. Our first album hadn’t sold a million copies or anything. It’s not like we’re The Strokes or the Arctic Monkeys trying to follow up a successful first record having come out of nowhere. We just look at it like we’re climbing up a set of stairs. We were really excited to get started and start something new.
SS: What's your ambition for the next record? Sell as many albums as The Strokes?
Chris: I don’t really care how much it sells, but yeah I’d like to play to bigger crowds consistently, although I’m pretty happy playing to like 1,000 or 2,000, that’s what we get when we play in the States everywhere. We’re just trying to get more opportunities. You find as you get bigger you actually have less opportunity to do weirder stuff because you have pressure from your record label to repeat the success of a single or an album.
SS: Did your record label find it weird that you naturally headed towards a more poppy direction on your second album without having to be coerced?
Chris: I think we’d always talked about that to them; I’d always said that’s what we wanted to do when we were talking to Mute Records. I don’t think they really believed us but they signed us up anyway. When they heard the second record a couple of guys at Mute were like: “We didn’t really think you were being serious” and we were like: “Oh no, we just wanted to do a more poppy record, that’s what we always wanted to do”. I threatened with them that on the next record we might do a full 70 minute ambient one-track album but they said they’re down for that.
SS: Do you think indie artists are more willing to admit to being influenced by contemporary pop music? Some of the music on your new record is closer to Rihanna than Animal Collective…
Chris: Yeah, I think that’s probably a good thing. I think there’s less of a divide between the independent music community and mainstream music. I think a lot of that has to do with the internet, filesharing cultures and iPods. Every musician in New York I know is going to have a couple of Rihanna songs on their iPods but also some Gang of Four, Suicide and the Boredoms or whatever. Their iPods run the gamut from experimental stuff to mainstream stuff like Jay-Z. I think that’s great, it good to mix it up. I think that’s a defining element of this musical generation, it’s kind of like a melting pot.
SS: Did recording the new album in quite a remote, rural place have an effect on the sound of the new record?
Chris: I’m not sure that the environment necessarily impacts on the record but I think the fact that we were fairly isolated and didn’t have anything to do apart from the music was beneficial. That contributed to the sound because we were working all the time on music. There was nowhere to go out, no restaurants, we ate out one time I think. You’re just stuck with all your instruments in the same room.
SS: How does your song-writing process work? Is it a process of adding elements and textures to an original idea?
Chris: That’s what we definitely did on the first album, then on this album we were really conscious of subtracting elements too. I was reading about the way Prince would work when he was writing a lot of his songs; he would just add and add and add a lot of pieces to his music but then he would end up stripping away 90 per cent of it. He tried to not find the most obvious path through the song, he would find a riff that really worked and just keep that. You sort of hear that in some of his music, it’s so sparse but there’s a kind of strange quality that doesn’t sound like it could have been conceived as a sparse song. We try to do that but I don’t think we’re very good at stripping away our elements yet. We still have a mass of crazy shit going on which we really enjoy. I really like ear candy. We actually talked about recording direct to tape and trying to work all analogue on our next album.
SS: The song ‘I Remember’ is about meeting your wife on an airplane. How did that come about?
Chris: We’d actually met before, when I was working a job building props for photoshoots. We were both on a job, building cabanas on a beach in Miami. That was kind of fun because it was the middle of winter so normally we’d be in snow but we were living by the beach for two weeks. I had met her once before and then we met down there again and we ended up flying home together and that was kind of the starting of our relationship.
SS: I heard you had a fear of flying at the time? That’s must not be too fun what with being in a globe-hopping band and all?
Chris: I still don’t really enjoy it. I’m pretty convinced I’m going to die in an airplane but you know I just drink a lot on the plane, that’s my cure.
SS: What’s the strangest thing you’ve read about yourself recently?
Chris: I don’t know man, I’ve read enough stuff to stop reading it. I read in Rolling Stone that we all took acid in New Zealand and came up with the idea for the new album, it’s not really accurate. I also had an interviewer call me up the other day and say: “So I heard you got bullied in school?”. I don’t know where that came from because I really didn’t. I went to a really small school that was like all theatre and music nerds where we called all the teachers by their first name and shit. So it wasn’t really like a bullying atmosphere, we didn’t have any good sports teams so their weren’t any jocks in school.
SS: What happens after the North American tour finishes in May, will you take it easy for a bit?
Chris: No, we’re doing all the festivals and then we’re going to Australia, Japan and hopefully South America. We’re actually going to be going to Uganda in August or September for like a week, hopefully that will happen. We’re actually going to be working on some music with these kids. It’s for this non-profit organization called Invisible Children, who we gave a song to for a little film they made a while ago. They have some schools which they run for kids in refugee camps and they have a music programme. So they’re going to fly us over there, I’m not sure in what capacity we’re going to work, maybe helping the teachers teach music or showing the kids instruments and stuff.
Words: Will Holloway ?
Photography: Stuart Leech