Growing Pains: Words with Yo La Tengo

Hoboken veterans Yo La Tengo first formed in 1984, evolving from obscurist janglers to much-loved indie rock titans over the course of their thirty-year career. After a flurry of feet-finding experiments between their debut Ride The Tiger and fifth album May I Sing With Me, the band’s sound eventually coalesced into something of a defining blueprint with 1993’s Painful. Combining their fondness for sweetly understated melodies with avant-garde tricks and a greater emphasis on atmospheric texture, it set out the stall for the ensuing twenty years, establishing their signature ideas and making them a force to be reckoned with amongst the 90s indie rock boom.

Still one of their most beloved albums amongst an ever-adoring fanbase, Painful now receives the expanded reissue treatment courtesy of Matador Records, YLT’s home since that record’s initial release. Packed with extra tracks, alternative versions, demos and more, Extra Painful is a treat for those already under the spell of these songs and their woozy charms – and a superb introduction for those yet to be swayed. For curiosity’s sake, The Skinny gave singer Ira Kaplan’s memory a prod…

Hi Ira! Painful is often thought of as the album that first brought together the signature elements of Yo La Tengo…

I would agree with that. We’ve adopted the shorthand of saying ‘in a lot of ways, it’s our first record’.

Do you have any particular memories of making the album?

I’m not sure how anecdotal they are! We had never worked on a record that way. Even though James [McNew, YLT bassist] had been in the group when we did May I Sing With Me, he was kind of there as a fill-in. By the time we were writing and rehearsing songs for Painful, he was living in Brooklyn and we had ceased to have other jobs, so we got into the habit of practicing during the day and working on songs.

We were really just kind of reaching for… not exactly a sound in our heads, but we just felt like there’s gotta be something else. I think the more we worked on it, the more we felt like we were slowly getting somewhere, and doing something better – certainly different – than what we’d done before. And it was fun! It was like the office, coming in every day instead of that Tuesday-after-work thing.

You’ve been quite dismissive of the records leading up to that point. Was there any sense of dissatisfaction with what you’d done previously?

Uhhh… I’m not sure. You know, it’s funny having been interviewed so many times – like you, I’m aware of what I’ve said, but it’s a little hard to remember whether it’s true or not! The older records that I feel most fondly about are President Yo La Tengo and Fakebook. In the case of May I Sing With Me, I think we had played a lot of those songs live too many times before we recorded them – we just kind of lost the excitement of discovery. The songs on Painful were not played live very much. There were exceptions to that, but by and large they hadn’t been played live before we recorded them.

It was written and recorded in the immediate aftermath of Nevermind, an era which seems to have been romanticized as an indie rock goldrush...

Uhh… that doesn’t sound familiar to me. When it comes to the music we make, I’ve never understood why anybody likes it, and simultaneously I’ve never understood why everybody doesn’t like it…! I can see it from both sides. So it’s never seemed impossible to me that our music could reach a wider audience, and yet I’m shocked that anybody cares at all. I don’t know how much that had to do with Nirvana or anything like that; just on a personal level we felt that we were making better music, so maybe it would reach more people.

I’ve always been intrigued by the inclusion of two very different versions of 'Big Day Coming'.

The first one was the way the song was written, and then [producer] Fred Brockman suggested we do a more uptempo, shorter version . I think he wanted to replace the other one, which we had no intention of doing, but we were open to the challenge of doing it in a different way. One night in the studio, we thought the organ would work instead of the guitars as the foundation. James had gone home, back to Brooklyn, thinking we were done working. Then we were like ‘before we go, let’s just try this…’, and it felt immediately like it was good. I recorded the singing right away, just ‘cause there was a lot of enthusiasm at that stage. It just came together that quickly.

I’m also interested that the bonus tracks on Extra Painful include the acoustic version of that song, which you played on the Fade tour in 2013. Was there something of a rediscovery process for you in putting the package together?

I’m not so sure… a couple of things surprised me. One of the download-only tracks is an excerpt from one of our Sleeping Pill [YLT’s drone alter-ego] shows, and it’s been forever since I heard one of those. I did not know what it would sound like, but I kind of enjoyed it! I have reasonably strong memories of that time, so in some ways the rediscovery aspect was more in the artwork, where we were uncovering artifacts that we hadn’t seen in so long. Because as you say, we’d done the acoustic version of 'Big Day...'; we’ve continued to do that a lot. I think a lot of the things we don’t do any more, we’ve built on in some ways, so they don’t feel as far away as, say, a piece of ephemera which got put in a box, and you didn’t even know you still had it.

The extras also include tracks like 'Smart Window', which has more of a psych-rock feel than the rest of the album. Did you feel that these songs just weren’t in keeping with the tone of what Painful would become?

I guess so. We were uncomfortable enough with it that, even when we put together [best of/rarities compilation] Prisoners Of Love, we didn’t include it. I don’t think that song was ever really under consideration; when we were talking about this package with Matador, we were admitting that there was an outtake, but we couldn’t promise to put it on the record…! And then we listened to it and thought, ‘oh alright, we’ll let that one out into the world’.

It's the band's 30th anniversary, and the album just turned 21 as well – old enough to drink in the US. Why did you choose to re-release this record in particular?

Well, I think it did have a 30^th anniversary aspect. Once the notion of doing some kind of reissue came up, it just made sense to do the first one on Matador.

With Yo La Tengo being such a close-knit group of family and friends, do you think it might possibly be easier for you as a collective to feel sentimental about things like anniveraries?

Well, I have nothing to compare it to, so I dunno. I’m not sure that I feel that sentimental about it. I feel like it’s an accomplishment, and that’s why we’ve chosen to make something of it.

With your last album having dealt with themes of ageing and mortality, and fans understandably concerned following your own recent health worries, there might be questions over the long-term future of Yo La Tengo. Do you plan that far ahead?

No. And I think it’s a big reason why we’re here now, that we didn’t plan. It would be foolhardy to say ‘let’s do this for twenty five years and then we’ll stop’. We’re excited by what we’re doing, and we enjoy what we’re doing, so we just keep doing it. 

How are you in terms of your health now?

I dunno. I mean, honestly, I think that’s what that experience and other experiences in the world around me indicated most strongly – you don’t know, so don’t treat it any other way.