After postponing their December date in The Button Factory, Yeasayer are scheduled back in Ireland to play the suitably, or in this case unsuitably, smaller Village venue in Dublin. Amazingly enough, you can still grab tickets to our gig of the week. We sat down and talked to Anand Wilder about everything from his newborn child, Usher’s oily torso, Coachella SS Cruise, their ever expanding on-stage set up and Justin Bieber.
Yeasayer were originally meant to play a Dublin show in September, but due to Anand’s wife giving birth to his first born child, this was pushed back to the 1st of December – “we had to postpone the tour because she came a little bit early, we kind of had to make that executive decision to push back the European dates. I think that was a good decision. And now, we were planning on going on this Coachella cruise as a family but they have this arbitrary, no under 6 month children allowed, which is annoying”. Here at Goldenplec, we like to offer our logistical brain on how he could smuggle his baby on to this amazing Coachellea cruise, Anand ultimately comes up with the best solution – “Yea, I think I’ll just put her in my suitcase”.
In preparation for this tour, Yeasayer have been beavering away with The Creators Project, Casey Reas and many more visual artists in order to bring a more immersive visual concert element to their forthcoming tour. How did this come about we ask? “…it was kind of a long process with Creators Project which is a device collaboration with Intel … Vice were giving us these artists, then we settled on Casey Reas, because we felt he was the most in tune with the kind of visuals that we were used to and he would also take it to the next step.” With such a commitment to a much bigger visual show, is this making the difference? “It’s awesome. You can just see that the crowd are way more amped about it. It’s one of things where you kind of take it for granted, a live show like that, when it’s Rihanna or Jay Z. But with a smaller band like us who aren’t able to afford that show, it comes as much more of a surprise.”
As a band, Yeasayer are renowned for switching up their sound. This has brought them both critical acclaim and also a sense of wider confusion at what kind of sound will come next. We asked Anand how they approach a new album: “A lot of the time, we look back on old work and repudiate it and say I can’t believe we made that; it’s horrible. That kind of helps you move on and do something different. It’s not like we sit there and say we have to repeat the success of ‘Ambling Alp’. We risk failing and not repeat ourselves.” It must be hard though, as a band, you have to be true to yourself and play music that is of the time and also commercially viable right? “Yeah, I mean you’re also limited by your own limitations as a singer, like I’m never going to be able to sing like Usher, I’m never going to be able to write a song like Prince, I could try but it’s just like you’re always going to be working the constrictions of your lack of imagination I guess.”
So looking back on the first album, ‘All Hour Cymbals’, we wonder had their opinion changed over time? “There is a lot of things that stay the same about your process, you always go back to your old bag of tricks, like looping something or singing some lines over and over again before you can get the right melody … I remember listening to ‘All Hour Cymbals’ a couple of years after it was released and thinking wow those are some weird sounds, I don’t even know what or how we made that, is that like a guitar or what? That is kind of something that is a philosophy … to try and create sounds that are unrecognisable, unidentifiable, illicit, interesting, visions or imagination, it’s different to what you expect when someone’s playing a guitar or a drum set, or a cymbal.”
With more notoriety and popularity, we ask Anand if this was expected or anticipated by the band? “When we made the (new) album, we were trying to get away from that muddy, ambient crowd rocky thing we were doing with the first album. We were like, lets see if we can make some pop songs. So I wasn’t surprised, I was pleased with any kind of acclaim we got or any kind of popularity. And also that we worked, we didn’t have to make any compromises, they were all songs that we believed in … you realize, if you want to get bigger, you have to dumb it down even more. It’s like you reach that wider audience, if you want to reach an even wider audience, you kind of have to play the Justin Bieber game or something and really make stuff dumb or boring or just completely repeat yourself so that people find it easy to digest and it becomes something that becomes expected. I don’t think people want to be challenged, in terms of, I think there are people who do want to be challenged and those are our fans.”
Well those fans will be waiting, just like all of us here at Goldenplec, for this gig in the Village on the 1st of December.