Yo La Tengo

Four concerts. Four cities. Three countries. Two states, a province and a comunidad. Seeing a Yo La Tengo concert is like going home. The first Yo La Tengo concert I went to was in Madrid. My friend Brad told me about their show, and I had limited knowledge of their music. I still wasn’t sure if they sang in Spanish or not. I remember Brad said that he wrote them and asked if they needed any help navigating Madrid, translating for them, or something like that. I guess they responded that they had someone, although being from New Jersey, none of them spoke Spanish. Brad gave me some discs to prepare myself for the show, and since then, I have been working on a pretty solid collection. Their music fit in well with my life back then; their musical skills impressed me and their songwriting has a wide breadth of influences. It is complex, able to plumb through the depths of darkness while simultaneously glancing at the lighter side of life. Anyways, after drinking a couple of bottles of cheap cava in a plaza, like good madrileños, we went to the concert, and I was mesmerized by their musical command, by their ability to meld complex rhythms and melodies, but mostly, by their simplicity in just being. Since then, I have seen Yo La Tengo in Kansas City, Lawrence, and now Vancouver. Unlike the Flaming Lips, another indie rock band of their age, whose concerts can totally send all of your stimuli receptors into complete overdrive, overwhelming all of the pleasure zones, after four Yo La Tengo shows, I have never been blown away. And I feel that is something for which they should be admired.
Yo La Tengo is the musical embodiment of understatement, the antithesis of “one hit wonder,” which is why they are so alluring as musicians. Songs like “Sugar cube” reveal the balance between bitter and sweet, what love is like when it’s real, which is an overarching quality of the band’s music. Their songs sound like they came from a true love of just making music and not worrying about the other more insidious byproducts of the music industry. Each of their albums is crafted with care and rides the line in a balance between rocking and soulful, funky and beautiful. They quietly unravel as they portray a bit of the “American experience.” For example, songs like “From a Motel 6” sound like traveling the interstate, wandering with eyes open but a bit numb to the surroundings, overwhelmed by the bigness of it all. “From a Motel 6” also fits into the band’s aesthetic because even after some 25 years of making music, I’m sure that they’re not staying at the Hyatt when they’re pulling through Cleveland. Other songs like “Tears are in your eyes,” from the album And then everything turned itself inside-out, is one of the most peaceful and numbingly beautiful songs I have ever heard. One of the most startling figures about their music is that with the nine albums that I have by them (I believe there are about 12 or 13 out there), there is no one album that sticks out. Each album brings a new look to their sound; as they age, their music gets better, more complex. Like a good red wine. But going back to their earlier, rawer sounds is always satisfying. “I heard you looking,” from their 1993 release Painful, with its long, slow, triumphant guitar solo, feels to me like the Kendalino anthem, a song that keeps me going in times of darkness, and reaffirms my Kendalinoisms. Yo La Tengo records are the kind of albums that slip under a pile of books or clothes and then one day you discover one of them again, you stick it in the CD player, and it might not be instant satisfaction, but sooner or later, one of the grooves gets under your skin, and you might turn the stereo off to go do something else, but before you know it, the music begins to follow you around all day, haunting you. Songs like “Stockholm Syndrome,” with its unique combination of lyrical subtlety and musical understatement, are particularly creepy with lyrics like:
No, don’t warn me
I know it’s wrong, but I swear it won’t take long
And I know, you know,
It makes me sigh; I do believe in love.
It’s almost as if the band hasn’t been trying not to “get big.” They certainly have a gift for songwriting—some of their hooks are unforgettable, their melodies poignant, their skills with their instruments are remarkable—but they set out to write songs that are not appropriate for mainstream radio play because of their length, their quirkiness. Sometimes they’re too dark. Sometimes, too whimsical.
I believe that my attraction to Yo La Tengo has to do with their ability to do it all—to freely engage in long instrumental jams with droning qualities that can make one fall into a trance like the 16 minute “And the Glitter is Gone,” the last song on their new album, songs that speak to my jazz background that are heavy on improvisation, but also their slow, subtle ballads, like “Pablo and Andrea” or “More stars than there are in heaven” that beautifully point to meaning in silence, also grip my attention.
The band’s penchant for quietness reveals itself in its longest form on their album Summer Sun, which some critics found too underwhelming, but for me, recreates the calmness one experiences when sitting in bliss in summer sun. Equally gifted with quiet as they are with loud, most of their albums strike a fine balance between both volumes and intensities, and tend to function better as a whole than as individual songs. They’re not the kind of band that you’ll be worried about hearing that one of their members’ egos blew up and that they can no longer stand each other, so they break up into little factions, or continue to play together despite hating each other, just because they can make some more money. The band members of Yo La Tengo aren’t playing music to get attention. They look kind of like computer programmers, nothing flashy, just kind of brainy. It appears that Ira, on guitars and keys, is the leader of the band, although the band seems rather anarchical in its leadership and organizational styles. Georgia, Ira’s wife (it’s coincidental that their names mirror those of the Gershwin brothers), keeps a solid beat on percussion, and has an indelible predilection for using brushes on her drums, a sound that I personally like a lot but also fits into the sound of the band very well. And James was a hired ax who responded to a bassist wanted ad and eventually fit into the program to round out the trio. The reason that their music is so good is that all three of them just enjoy playing music together; they don’t care about all the other bullshine with which the music industry weighs itself down. I believe that Ira and Georgia’s marriage has lasted for so long, despite being on the road all the time and working in an industry devoted to flash in the pans, because they truly love each other and truly love to play together. Unlike so many songs in pop, country, rock, and other genres that only sing of the beginning or the end of relationships, the music of Yo La Tengo speaks of the unfathomable and much harder subject to tackle in a song: the middle, the real meaningful part of a relationship. The hard part. The part where love is love and not infatuation. And you can tell that their music is the product of love and not of a fleeting fad that is passing by. Their music is the result of playing for the love of playing, and that is the best kind of music to listen to.