Brooklyn-based psychedelic dance wizards Yeasayer have made quite a name for themselves since their formation in 2006. The band will be touring through December to promote the release of their new album, Fragrant World. The tour will include a show next Thursday, August 23 at the Majestic Theatre, sponsored by Jonk Music and the official pre-party for the inaugural Summer Set Music & Camping Festival. I caught up with Yeasayer’s Anand Wilder this week to talk about the new album, David Bowie, and the moon.
Yeasayer got a lot of attention when you first came out. All Hour Cymbals and Odd Blood both had a great critical reception and won over a lot of people. Fragrant World will be your third full-length album; what kind of pressures are you dealing with now that Yeasayer has established itself?
“None really. I think the hardest thing with the band is probably just, you know, staying together and hoping that we can keep doing this as long as possible. I don’t really feel any pressure to out-do ourselves or repeat any successes. I mean, we didn’t put out Thriller and then have to top that, you know? We put out an album, it sold better than our first album, and we gained a lot of fans. I’m pretty confident that we can keep putting out good music, we’ve just gotta stay together!”
Is that a problem right now?
“No, it’s not a problem at all. But I think that’s always the thing about a band — it’s a band of people, you know? It’s a group. It’s an amazing thing to be able to say, ‘The Rolling Stones stayed together for 40 years.’ That’s just completely insane. People move on a lot. I don’t feel the pressure of having to repeat ourselves or out-do ourselves, but I do feel the pressure of having to keep everything going.”
Fragrant World seems to have a darker aesthetic than your previous releases, both musically and lyrically. There’s a distinctly prophetic feel to some of this stuff — “Henrietta” [written by member Chris Keating about Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose immortal cancer cell line has been kept alive for medical research since her death in 1951] feels like it was written by some kind of Ace of Base electro party sage. Can you talk a little about the ideas you were working with for this album?
“I think ‘Henrietta’ is dark and prophetic, but to me it’s more of a story song. There’s some beautiful imagery of the actual events surrounding Henrietta Lacks, her demise. And then this weird idea of immortality and afterlife, a kind of tangible manifestation of the after-life through her cancer cells.”
I’ve heard that “O.N.E.” from Odd Blood was made a little “funkier” after you played it around live a few times. How does performance influence your writing?
“For Odd Blood especially, we had just come off a year-and-a-half of touring and wanted the sound of the record to be a better representation of the energy of our live show. This album we didn’t really work on that many of the songs live. We played ‘Demon Road’ live, we played ‘Henrietta’ live, we played ‘Devil and the Deed’ live, but all the other songs were just kind of demos that we had been working on at home. So the live show didn’t really play as much of a part in the creation of this album. But we have tweaked a lot of the songs now. In the live show the songs have taken on totally different qualities. I mean, they’re similar, but we’ve changed a lot of things.”
One thing I really admire about Yeasayer is how much your sound changes from release to release. Growth and change are vital to the longevity of a band. So far you’ve moved away from the really distinct world influence that was evident in your earlier work and really streamlined your arrangements. What accounts for those changes? What are interested in doing next?
“I think the goal for me is always ‘I just want to write a song’ and then you come together and mess around with the production. I think the really liberating thing about being in Yeasayer is that we don’t really have to stick to any particular template. I think with the first album we set ourselves up to do a wide range of pop styles, from kind of African guitar-y world influenced stuff, to pretty straight-forward dance music, to slow ballads. We always want to defy genre, to remain free, to marry our songwriting to various styles of production. So I don’t know what the next step is going to be — we’ll figure that out once we’ve finished touring. But it’s always to write the next song.”
Yeasayer is asked to play a show on the Moon — what does that look like and who are you playing with?
“We’d open up for David Bowie — like, late ’70s era David Bowie. We’d sing songs about space and life on Mars and stuff like that. Obviously we’d have to have a really awesome light show because it’s really dark on the Moon. And you’d have to have a really good supply of water, moon water. A lot of moon water, you know, a lot of drugs for all the people on the Moon. Everyone would start freaking out, like, ‘Oh my god we’re on the Moon, what are we doing here, oh my god my food is gonna explode, we’re gonna die from compression and suffocation.’ You’d have to give some weird calming drug to everyone so they could hear the music through their space suits and still have a good time. Or, maybe they’d be in some kind of indoor structure.”
It’d have to be some kind of dome.
“Yeah, and you’d hope some evil guy doesn’t turn off the air during the show. Because you’d need a lot of air.”