Inside out

Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan talks about his downtown jazz, boho marriage and stately new record.

By Andy Battaglia

Feb 29, 2000 | On their glorious new album, "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out," Yo La Tengo free-associate dub, folk, electronica, experimental rock and vaguely jazzlike phrasing into a 77-minute document of stylized style mining. The group's every utterance, however, is instantly recognizable. After 13 years of making music together, the trio -- who call both Hoboken, N.J., and Brooklyn, N.Y., home -- musically wink at one another like old friends acknowledging thoughts already well understood.

It's a sustained conversation that hears subtlety as giddy screams -- and one that helps the new album sound both exactly like and not at all related to any Yo La Tengo record before it. The familiar reference points are all there: Ira Kaplan's guitar dramas, Georgia Hubley's finessed drumming, James McNew's loudly understated bass, the trio's shared wistful vocals. But cast in a newly consistent atmosphere -- all lazy dusks and distant, cotton-pulled cloud masses -- they articulate more than the band has ever attempted to translate.

Typically reserved in his own quiet, quasi-unassuming way, Kaplan shared the following thoughts. His words are either microscopic cracks in the record's code or reasons to look to it for answers offering real resolution. He spoke over the phone, cozy at home while Hubley, his wife, flipped through records to prepare for the night's coming DJ set at an album-release party.

This new record has a stately air that separates it from the group's older albums. Is that something you've seen happening as you've moved on from drawing a mostly cult audience?

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We're not oblivious to what's going on around us, so if we get a well-positioned review in Rolling Stone, it's hard not to think about that. But I wouldn't say we think about it very much at all. When we were making the record we didn't have any idea what the response would be. We could make a case for people who've been interested in the band being disappointed by it or being intrigued by it. But that kind of conjecture doesn't ever seem to lead to very positive results.

Does it seem to you as if the notion of indie rock has grown out of its own self-willed marginalization, that the wall separating a small community and a larger audience has crumbled a bit?

I don't know that I fully agree with that. There are still plenty of people who are perfectly happy to maintain that wall, or a sort of distance like that. But [as] for our band, we've always gone on the road, done interviews, done things to try to get our music in front of people. Our last record ["I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One"] sold a lot more than our earlier ones. Bands like Pavement made lots of commercial inroads that changed those perceptions. And just being around for a certain length of time changes the way people approach a band. But I've always found it odd when people have ever referred to us as lo-fi. That's always been mind-boggling because we've been in 24-track recording studios for all these records. I think people have wanted to think of us as being in our bedroom making records and just never emerging.

Do you hear anything on the charts you find interesting in any way?

I am completely 100 percent oblivious to whatever is on the charts. I spend 10 seconds a week looking at the Top 10 in the Monday business section of the New York Times. That's my only connection. But I guess I hear that stuff when I go to basketball games. That's where I first heard [Chumbawamba's] "Tubthumping."

You are a big Knicks fan. Does that make you a Bill Bradley man?

[Laughs] I'm sorry to say it does. It's embarrassing but true. When the New Jersey primary rolls around, I may just have to cast my ballot for the '69 Knicks. It's nice to be a part of the electorate making that choice for horrible reasons: "I like the way you used to move without the ball ... I think you'd make a great president."

You're also a big baseball fan -- Mets rather than Yankees, right?

Yes. Unlike in basketball, where I have only good feelings for the Nets and wish them well -- except when they play the Knicks -- I'm the classic baseball fan. I like one team to dislike the other. I just really don't like the Yankees' owner, and since he wants to be synonymous with his team, I'm going to let him. [George] Steinbrenner reminds me of [Rudolph] Giuliani. He's just a bully.

You go to a lot of downtown jazz shows in New York, and you've sort of tapped into that scene recently. [Percussion phenom Susie Ibarra plays on the new album; Yo La Tengo recently released a double 7-inch recorded with members of jazz act Other Dimensions in Music.] Has that mostly improvisational music influenced your approach to the band?

I would imagine it has. I always think that is happening with whatever we're listening to. It's hard for me to compare record to record because they're from such different times and the memories are so different. But it doesn't feel like that aspect is so entirely different. The songs are written based in improvisation at the start, and we try to leave songs unfinished so we can make spur-of-the-moment decisions in the studio. My feeling is the difference with this record affects the way people hear it almost as much as our approach to it. Because the new songs are more stylistically similar, I think you notice all the little arrangement touches; it almost calls attention to them because they are the differences in these songs a lot of times. Before, you could say there's a fast one, there's a slow one, there's the one Georgia sings. There were ways to describe the songs using much broader terms, but now a lot of the differences are in the details.

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