Yo La Tengo

After a dip into soundtracks, the New York indie-rock trio return to the basics

Ira Kaplan, James McNew and Georgia Hubley in Tokyo last year Photo: Harumi Aida

One of the fun things about living in Japan these days is that, to get people to buy the more expensive domestic pressings, record companies have taken to pre-releasing albums here. This is why I’m sitting down with James McNew, principal bassist and sometimes singer with acclaimed New York band Yo La Tengo, to talk about their new album a full two months before its US release date.

I’m Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass represents the trio’s 12th album over a remarkably fertile two-decade career, one of amazing stability since McNew joined the husband-and-wife team of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley in the early ’90s. “It certainly was nice to cut loose after working in such close creative quarters,” McNew says of recording the disc, as he settles into a couch at his Japanese distributor P-Vine’s offices.

The new album comes on the back of a load of film work, which saw Yo La Tengo scoring no less than five feature-length movies, including Phil Morrison’s Junebug, and Old Joy, starring Will Oldham. McNew says while the band learned a lot “working to picture” and meeting specific demands from directors, the time had come for a new album.

“We were coming up with more and more song ideas and realizing that we need to devote our time to this. It did get to the point that we were trimming film work down because we knew what we had to do, and that was writing a record and recording it.”

The resulting 15-song opus, I’m Not Afraid Of You, was recorded over a busy month last winter in Nashville with producer Roger Moutenot, a setup that has become a tradition with the Hoboken, New Jersey-based group over the last several albums. “It turns out that it’s pretty inexpensive to work there because it’s the industry of the city,” notes McNew. “There’s a recording studio on every block.”

The roly-poly, eternally childlike McNew isn’t about to explicate the contents of each song, but let’s just say that compared with 2003’s Summer Sun, I’m Not Afraid Of You is an extroverted affair. “We’re doing a lot of things on this record that we’ve never done before. In the last couple of years we’ve played a couple of weddings for close friends, so we end up learning lots of insane cover songs, and along those lines we released a record of a show we do on WFMU [an independent radio station in New York], where people name any song and we have to play it whether we know it or not, which is really fun even though we make idiots of ourselves.”

“I think both the weddings and radio show had a lot to do with this record. There are lots of styles of music that we’re huge fans of: We were always fans of funk and soul records from the ’60s and ’70s, Brazilian psychedelic records, and anything that influences us comes out in some weird way. It doesn’t spit itself out directly, but some part will come out unconsciously, and maybe it’s a little more overt on this record. We played some things more bravely in, for example, a soul style or in a way that maybe we would have obscured more in the past. As we get older we become less shy and more confident in that way.”

I’m Not Afraid Of You contains the blasting squalls of feedback and mumbled lyrics that are de rigueur for any self-respecting New York indie-rock group, as in the 10-minute opener “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.” But it also includes numbers such as “Mr Tough,” which with its brassy falsetto vocals and horn section evokes old school mid-’70s soft-rock, and “Daphnia,” a creepy, slow-motion, acid-rock instrumental.

One factor in keeping Yo La Tengo together and creatively fertile over the years is the unusual lineup of the band, in which McNew plays third party to Kaplan and Hubley’s marriage, and all three trade off on drums, bass and guitar with equal aplomb. This may have forestalled the ego clashes that are the typical downfall of rock bands.

“Certainly, as close as we are and as much time as we spend together, privacy is a wonderful thing,” explains McNew. “I know it as much as they know it, so it all seems to work out. It’s probably better than not being in a group with a married couple. The level of personal communication is very high, the level of encouragement is very high… I get my own room—it’s awesome!”

Last in Japan in 2005 to do a series of club dates as well as an evening in which they played original music for the experimental underwater films of French director Jean Painleve, Yo La Tengo are looking to early 2007 for their next Japan tour. McNew, for one, can’t wait to return.
“This is my favorite city in the world except for New York,” he concludes, easing back into the sofa. “I feel very comfortable here.”

I’m Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is available on Matador Records, released in Japan by P-Vine.

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