Luke McGarry

Yeasayer grew out of an abandoned musical about coal miners and released All Hour Cymbals last fall on We Are Free. Guitarists Anand Wilder speaks now from his home in Brooklyn.

Is Yeasayer better drinking music or walking-on-a-treadmill music?
Anand Wilder (guitar): I don’t know—I’ve actually had people come up to us and say, ‘I love running to your music!’ On the other hand, I’m assuming people enjoy it a lot more when they’re drunk because the shows where people aren’t drinking are never that good.
Is that more because of certain neuroses in the crowd than anything that has to do with you?
I hope so. I don’t drink at all anymore—to protect myself from becoming an alcoholic when I’m on the road six months out of the year. And I learned to enjoy myself. But like in Manchester—the crowd was not moving one bit. We’d just played Glasgow to a great crowd—everyone was having so much fun! And we were like, ‘What’s wrong with this crowd?’ But it was Sunday. They can’t get wasted. They have to work the next day. It’s kind of pathetic people don’t know how to enjoy themselves.
They still came out to see the show.
That’s true. And they were very enthusiastic. They clapped the most after the last song! They wanted an encore—but we’re not gonna do an encore. They barely clapped—too little, too late.
As an audience member, what can someone do to most effectively encourage an encore?
Go crazy the whole time.
That’s a big commitment.
You gotta commit. Keep screaming. And a chant—if you get something rhythmic from the crowd, it’s very hard to resist.
YEA-SAY-ER?
‘ONE-MORE-SONG!’ We definitely got chants in Sweden and Norway we couldn’t understand.
Do you agree with your bassist Ira Tuton about that review that said Yeasayer is basically Animal Collective playing Queen?
I think he was more trying to say that even when reviews are aimed at bringing us down and making us sound like a crappy rip-off band—that whole review was calling us a Spin Doctors kind of thing, and then they said the Spin Doctors were good? And then they said it sounded as if Animal Collective were playing a Queen tribute, and we were like, ‘That’s kind of cool. If Animal Collective played “Bohemian Rhapsody,” we’d be pretty psyched!’ But I don’t think that’s our mission statement.
Is Queen a part of your mission statement?
I love Queen—I think they’re amazing. We try to get that same level of melodrama. Like, ‘That’s too over the top! Let’s keep pushing it!’ We wanna be as uncool as possible.
In one interview you said: ‘You have these frat guys in Atlanta who are too sophisticated to listen to Creed and Nickelback, so they’re like, “Maybe I’ll read this site Pitchfork and find out about this band Yeasayer or Dirty Projectors.”’ Are you saying Yeasayer is the new frat rock? Pitchfork is a valuable frat-rock resource?
In one sentence I managed to offend frat boys, Atlanta, Pitchfork and the Dirty Projectors, who now want nothing to do with me.
Actually it seems fairly complimentary toward frat boys.
Yeah—I saw on Stereogum they quoted it, and in the comments was something like, ‘This is one frat boy Anand Wilder doesn’t have to worry about.’ But the whole idea is that touring around the country, you expect a certain kind of audience member to show up: the indie guy, with the horn-rim glasses and the button-up shirt, and he’s clapping on his chest instead of rocking out. Then we did a show in Atlanta—well, lots of shows, but Atlanta was just the most extreme case because a guy grabbed the mic from Chris and started doing a frat chant—where the audience are frat guys going nuts, and they don’t seem to be the stereotypical indie nerds. It’s a very real cultural shift—maybe spearheaded by Animal Collective coming to the mainstream, despite being very experimental and hard to listen to. I’m grateful for them breaking it open. The stuff on the radio is so bad—ten or fifteen years ago—
Frat boys had a home on the radio?
Yeah, and now Phish is done, Dave Matthews—
You’re pretty close to saying you’re the new Phish.
If we’re gaining some of those fans, it’s not a problem. I’m glad. I don’t want to be a fringe act. I wanna do everything a fringe act can do, but I do wanna have wide appeal. I wanna live off music.
How did it feel to find your album used in your hometown record store?
Oh, God, that was amazing—the greatest day of my life! Our relationship with our hometown is not the greatest as far as publicity. I just saw a review in the Baltimore Citypaper like ‘Yeasayer sound like TV on the Radio plus Native American music’ or something, and then it just said ‘they suck.’ That’s the love we get from Baltimore. It’s kind of ironic. People are bitter about the Baltimore brain drain.
What’s the status of your coal-mining musical?
Have you ever seen Matewan? It’s like that with music. It’s not like I have experience as a miner, but I don’t think Lionel Bart had experience as an orphan for Oliver. We’re musicians—we write songs and hooks and choruses. The title is ‘Break Line’—the line in a coal mine marking the point where it would collapse. It hasn’t been completed, but all the songs are written and demoed. The whole idea is to get all the Brooklyn musicians to record it. Basically it’s two working families in western Pennsylvania—I was thinking about putting in Centralia—and one picks fruit and the other are coal miners, one’s black and one’s white, one goes on strike and then breaks the strike, one of the sons marries a daughter from the different clan… it’s pretty epic. It needs to be. I was a history major in college—I always loved movies about coal miners. Even in high school I always wrote papers about the government not doing enough to prevent the coal mine management from breaking strikes.
What do you think of the American labor landscape today?
I don’t know—I feel like the whole union/management dichotomy—I don’t know if it really exists anymore. It’s just a question of a shift in the economy. All those union jobs I think went overseas. It’s globalization—‘You’re gonna strike? Well, fuck you!’ But the problem is not sending jobs overseas. It’s letting the economy stagnate and not developing something new. Not allowing a transformation to happen—just a transformation in the way our economy was run. The government could subsidize clean energy—and then clean-energy jobs could be produced.
Did your parents have better quality-of-life at your age than you do?
I don’t think so. I see my dad being stuck in a job he had for his entire adult life. If he had any kind of dreams of going back to school—that was it. Now—and maybe because we’re even more spoiled than our parents’ generation, but there’s a lot more leeway. You don’t graduate college and decide on a career for the rest of your life. People are more autonomous and mobile. I think people have more choice.
What was your last steady freelance job?
I was a prop stylist. It can be a lot of running around. But the coolest thing—you get to respect the infrastructure of New York City. You discover all these different parts. Here’s some weird sweat shop making clothes, or a flower-shop district where all the fake flowers are made. There’s so many nooks and crannies. It’s good to know those things if you ever make a video on your own. Like fake blood—now I know that’s on 31st!
Is your grandmother really worried about how you are perceived as a ‘dark’ band?
No, I don’t think she’s worried. I mailed her all the lyrics. That’s what old people want—they wanna know what you’re saying. Before she even listened to the album, she was asking ‘What’s the inspiration for that song about killing someone?’ And I was like, ‘Just listen to the song.’
Is she the best interviewer you’ve ever dealt with?
The most direct, I think.

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