Last April Brooklyn-based trio Yeasayer released their most ambitious and bold record to date with an outstanding artwork. Amen & Goodbye is their fourth album and it’s another notable mark on their discography and we grabbed Chris Keating to know how was it like to work on this album, which had some setbacks during its process.
You guys have been together for a decade now and you recently released your fourth album. What do you think it has changed over these years within the band and that had an important impact on the band?
We are all in different places in our lives like you start to grow up and you get a little wiser and a little smarter when you’re making albums. We always try to make a different album every time, so we don’t get stuck in a pattern and sometimes that’s hard because we have to really draw ourselves into trying something new. I don’t like when bands make the same album over and over again. We always think like “If we don’t have anything new to say, then we’re not going to do it at all.”
Before you even started to work on this album, you sort of went through an identity crisis because you were so burned out of the touring that you did before. What kind of mechanism you guys have to reinvent yourselves and your music in each album released?
When we’re making a new album, I try to stay updated on new drum machines and new synthesizers. I always try to work with new softwares, but for this album in particular, we were really inspired by the 60’s and 70’s rock and things that we love like psychedelic rock and we wanted to recontextualize it and maybe record some of that music and turning into something like a collage, a sound that it was very collage together.
When you were about to record this album, you went upstate New York to an isolated studio, but then something bad happened to your recordings and you lost almost everything. What can you tell me more about that situation and how were you able to overcome such mishap?
We didn’t lose almost everything because we were early in the process and so we decided we were going to try to record a take up in the mountains there and we’d been recording for a while and getting some ideas before we realized that we lost some material, but you know those accidents to the process. It wasn’t something that we were like “We’re done! We lost the album.” It was more like it became part of the process of making the album. It’s like you’re making a drawing or a painting and accidently you spill some paint on it and you thought it was great, but then you realize that the spill made it look better. We worked with that process and it became part of the idea of the album and it was like “We’re gonna take what we have and link it together with other songs and just try to make every accident work.” We were all about that idea.
All the songs are kind of a collection of certain themes and I read that it’s like a collection of strange fables from the Bible of a universe that does not yet exist. What did inspire you to create such appealing themes around these songs?
We’re more interested in themes of religion and religious stories. I’m not really religious, but my family members are like my grandparents are religious. Moving into the United States can be a really dogmatic religious country in some ways and other ways not so much, so it just becomes a thing to talk about and ideas to approach that we find interesting. There’s so many crazy stories in the Bible that people actually believe.
“We always try to make a different album every time, so we don’t get stuck in a pattern…”
What’s the meaning behind the album’s title, Amen & Goodbye?
We were thinking like “What if this is our last album? What should we call it?” and it seemed appropriate to call that, and also with the themes of religion and the ideas of death, it seemed to fit with the concept of the record pretty well.
I have to mention one of the important pieces of the album, which is the impressive artwork. There’s so many details that make us wonder about their significance. What can you tell me about the creative process and all its elements that define it?
Basically, I was a big fan of the artist, David Altmejd, and I just got in touch with him. He agreed to work with us and I was really happy about that. We had these ideas of incorporating a lot of characters from other songs that we made and historical characters, people from the news, pop culture figures like a decapitated Donald Trump and that kind of stuff. There’s a lot of references in the cover that are like from ideas and quotes that we have in different songs of the album and it just manifested itself which is really cool.
For Amen & Goodbye, this was the first time you worked with a producer, which was with Joey Waronker (drummer – Atoms For Peace/Beck). What did lead you to the decision to work with him?
I’m a big fan of his, he’s one of the best drummers today. I saw him play a few times with Beck in 1996 when I was in high school and then he played with R.E.M. for a while… I’m really inspired by the rhythm sections stuff that he does on Atoms For Peace, I just thought that whatever textures he was getting were really incredible. If you’re going to work with a producer, it should be someone who was a musician. Sometimes producers are kind of telling you what to do and I don’t think that works for us, so what we wanted was someone who was a musician and basically he just added so much rhythmically and made us rethink a lot of rhythms and sort of reinterpreted some of the rhythmic ideas that we had started already. It was a perfect combination.
You also had guest musicians in the studio like the track “I Am Chemistry” features guest vocals from Suzzy Roche of The Roches. How was it like to work on this song with her in particular?
We definitely wanted a female lead vocals on this album. I think it’s important to have a female voice and we thought who could we work with and we have friends that we thought maybe to do it, but then we thought it would be more interesting to work with someone from the past that we were inspired by. Some of The Roches albums were really inspiring while working on our first album, just the way they did the vocals on those records and so reached out to her. She agreed to do it. She came in and she’s in three songs of the album singing really prominent parts and it was just really cool.
When I read about this album and what you guys have been through, you really had some ups and downs, but the final result is really brilliant. Were you guys expecting to get the whole album together, even with what you went through and the things that happened while recording it?
We don’t really ever know what to expect when making a record. You know, there’s not a really concrete plan. You just start writing and demoing, and writing about certain types of things. I write songs and Anand writes songs and Ira brings things he writes, and eventually it just starts to feel to come together, but I think it’s important to take your time. I like the album format, I like to make the album cohesive and interesting. I’m really happy with it and how it turned out. It’s different from what I imagined it, but it really turned out really well.