Yo La Tengo - Here You Are

Song Exploder

Hrishikesh Hirway

Music

4.8 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2018

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yo La Tengo formed in 1984. The band is made up Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew. In March 2018, they released There’s a Riot Going On, their 15th album. They made the record themselves—they recorded it entirely in their rehearsal studio with James handling the engineering duties. The album came together slowly, over a few years. In this episode, Georgia, James, and Ira break down the experiments and accidents that led to the the closing track from the record, the song "Here You Are."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.
0:16.5	Yolatango formed in 1984. The band is made up of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNeil.
0:23.5	In March 2018, they released There's a Riot going on. They're 15th album. They made the record themselves.
0:30.5	They recorded it entirely in their rehearsal studio, with James handling the engineering duties.
0:35.5	The album came together slowly over a few years. In this episode, Georgia, James and Ira break down how they made the closing track from the record. The song, Here You Are.
0:54.5	I'm Georgia. I'm James and I'm Ira. When we started working on what ultimately became Here You Are, we were recording as a means of writing, as a means of rehearsing, not consciously aware that we were working on our new album.
1:19.5	We don't approach anything with a plan. The song just kind of comes out of whatever we're doing and we just follow where it's going.
1:29.5	One thing leads into another, into another, into another, over a long period of time and it doesn't move in a straight line at all. This song in particular.
1:39.5	The song had a completely different rhythm. There was a Passio beat and Drumkit.
1:50.5	And the upright bass.
2:00.5	Layered them in together.
2:04.5	But we switched it up.
2:07.5	Ira took the Passio and ran it into a looping delay.
2:14.5	It sounds kind of like chirping birds and crickets.
2:19.5	And then we went back and recorded more to play it in a completely different mood in a different rhythm.
2:29.5	We had a little drum circle going.
2:32.5	But we didn't get rid of the original drums. We lowered them in the mix.
2:39.5	And layered them in together.
2:43.5	We love the texture of things and the spatial quality of how different instruments take up room in a different way.
2:54.5	One thing that's really special about our space where we record and where we rehearse is it's just kind of a big mess of a room.
3:04.5	You know, we don't clean up the studio because we have to get out or there's not an engineer who puts things away.
3:10.5	It's just kind of like a room that you can just go into and go, oh look, that guitar's over there.
	...

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