Yeah Yeah Yeahs Blitzing It!
For the first twenty minutes of HUCK's interview with Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, she is cheerful and talkative, albeit a little nervous. Then guitarist Nick Zinner arrives and she suddenly changes. Her conversation becomes more hedged and hesitant. Every comment she makes is directed to her diminutive bandmate for approval, which is rarely forthcoming. Zinner meanwhile says little, and what he does say is barely audible. Drummer Brian Chase sits between them, utterly silent, while the room buzzes with low-level tension.
Fortunately, this in-band tension continues to drive the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to make records that are passionate, powerful and unpredictable. New album It's Blitz
HUCK: What is the reason for the long gaps between records?
Karen O: The gaps probably have to do with just pacing ourselves. ‘Are we ready? Yeah, we're ready now.' But I think the problem is that once we do start we can get caught up in a vicious cycle of self-doubt and then euphoria.
Did the new record have a troubled gestation?
Karen O: No, this one was really different because I personally felt the only way we could write a record is if we really had a different attitude about it - a feel-good attitude. It was really different from last time, that way, which is great because writing studio records is so difficult. Especially today when you have the option of putting maybe 500 tracks on something and taking them away, ‘Chinese Democracy'-style.
So, the interpersonal dynamic has improved, has it?
Karen O: Yeah yeah yeah... I have the job of always shoving everyone out of their comfort zone, including myself. Nobody likes that person! When someone's really trying to provoke you into really going somewhere new...
Do you feel like you've grown in confidence and taken control?
Karen O: I feel like, earlier, that wasn't necessary because we were just starting off and every song we made we were highly satisfied with - we could do no wrong, in the beginning. It was after people started taking us seriously when we really had the identity crisis - that's when this role had to be born... Out of my own need, my lack of patience with doing the same thing, or lack of attention span for doing the same thing, I really always wanted to push it somewhere new. Because the thing is, you can't do the same thing twice. Even if you tried. If you were a genius you couldn't do the same thing twice, so why be a second version of the first thing that you did? It seems just so inferior to going somewhere else.
Why the move west?
Karen O: I was grieving the dissipation of the [New York] scene. That was so exciting when it came up and when it started going away I felt almost a sense of grief, and I wanted to just get out and move onto the next thing. I just felt almost too nostalgic for when everything really happened, because it was like a flash - the shelf life for those kinds of things these days is super short. So it was hard for me to stick around and watch that specific scene die off.
Brian: Everybody wanted to play music and they were very passionate about it, but then for it to become a huge international success out of something so innocent was very jarring. And that scene can't really sustain itself in that environment necessarily so it needed time for it to crash.
What was the cause of the identity crisis during the Show Your Bones era?
Karen O: More than anything it was just being taken seriously - that spun us out. Honestly, it was the last thing we were expecting. We were so innocent it was ridiculous. We were passing out flyers and getting really psyched that 200 people were showing up to our shows, and just had no aspirations. I didn't know what touring meant or anything like that... It's definitely a lot to take in, especially in your turbulent twenties.
You played your first sober gig during the Show Your Bones tour. What's the current policy?
Karen O: Now it's just a happy medium between the two where I don't, like, deny myself a drink, but I don't get wasted anymore, which is really good because at the end of a show I'd be really like, ‘Wow, that was great' - but I'd just know that nine out of ten times it wasn't great but I just thought it was...
Did the Karen O stage persona exist before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs?
Karen O: I remember when I was in, like, the fifth grade, I was a really shy kid and I went to a school where there were only like sixteen kids in my grade, and there's a variety show type thing and I remember I put on these really dark sunglasses so I couldn't see - they were like the darkest sunglasses I've ever worn, I couldn't see anything, and I did The Beatles, I lip-synched to The Beatles' ‘Twist and Shout', exactly. Jaws were dropping, because they couldn't believe that that was the same person. Because I had no inhibitions and I really milked it for what it was worth. It blew the teachers' minds, because I was a really quiet little kid... It's been brewing for a while.
For the full interview, check out HUCK#015, out now.
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