Living & Arts

Worthstock preview

In print | May 1, 2008

As part of The Phoenix preeview to Worthstock 2008, The Phoenix had an exclusivve interview with Yo La Tengo’s bassist James McNew [pictured center].

Anna Zalokostas: You’ve been playing music for a long time, both with Yo La Tengo and separately, so I wanted to ask about what changes you’ve noticed in the music industry, especially recently with albums being made available digitally.

James McNew: Well, quite obviously, the Internet was not what it was today when we were kids. You would listen to the radio and probably for all three of us [in YLT] at the time, we were getting interested in music that wasn’t being played on radio stations, or at least on radio stations on the right side of the dial. There would be records that you would read about in a magazine and say, “Wow, that sounds pretty cool,” but then you had to go find them somewhere. It’s not like you could just go back to your laptop and hear them within five seconds of hearing the band’s name for the first time.

There’s definitely good and bad things about that … I mean, I would have liked it. It would have saved me a lot of trouble. At the same time, I think not having that immediate access forced me to use my imagination a lot more and I think it’s just sort of driven me into this world really deep, really quick. I didn’t get tired of it ever. It just sort of seems endless and exciting.

AZ: What sort of things did you listen to when you were younger?

JM: There were always records being played in the house, and it’s not like my parents were making me listen to the The Velvet Underground when I was 2 years old. It kind of worked out really great because my mom was the Beatles and Bob Dylan and kind of the nice side, and my dad was the Rolling Stones and James Brown and kind of the naughty side. So I had both and I think that was a very healthy way to grow up.

AZ: I know music preferences change often, but who are your current favorite new artists are and also which older bands you’ve been listening to lately?

JM: I’m always more interested in listening to music from other times. I like all sorts of stuff from the 60s and 70s, and the 80s and 90s yielded some really great music as well. Wow, there’s your pull quote. I’ve really gone out on a limb there with my musical taste.

Lately, I’ve been listening to records I’ve had in my collection for more than half my life and, I think, have kind of gone back to to see how I feel about them now. The record “Damaged” by Black Flag has held up more amazingly than any other record in my record collection. I bought it in high school and still have that exact same copy and it still sounds amazing.

I guess they’re not exactly new but I’m pretty fond of the band Why? from Oakland, California. They have a brand new record out called “Alopecia” that is really tremendous. And Au Revoir Simone, a New York band.

AZ: Both good choices. Is there a musical act who you really wish you could have been able to see live, but missed out on?

JM: Oh yeah, thousands of them. Mathematically, the percentage is kind of decreasing these days because everybody’s getting back together. It’s like, “Oh! Now I can see them.” That has its ups and downs. I’ve seen some bands reunite and play and it’s been just unbelievably good and sometimes it hasn’t. The band Mission to Burma, a band from Boston who broke up in the early 80s, were just gods in my mind. I listened to those record everyday. They got back together four or five years ago … because they had a bunch of new ideas. So they put out two full albums of brand new material and they just played a show in New York. They’re a working band. They weren’t done. They’re just as good and now they have this kind of 20 years of age and experience added to the power they already have that is really kind of overwhelming. I’m really moved by that.

AZ: Talking about new ideas, I wanted to ask about your music making process. When you’re making new music, is it more of a conscious decision to do something different for a new album, or do you just get together and whatever comes out, come out?

JM: We kind of just let it happen and see where we are. It comes in cycles. We’ll write a bunch of songs, record them and go on tour and stay busy with that for a couple of years and we all kind of know when it’s time to do it again and we start over again from zero. It’s been a pretty gratifying way to learn. It … reflects on where you are in that time and how you’ve changed. It’s not as though we try to focus group our albums and say well, the last one had too many slow songs, let’s try some fast songs.

AZ: Last question: if you were to blow a ton of money on one really huge purchase, what would it be?

JM: I might buy the New York Knicks basketball team. And I’d probbaly find a way to bankrupt or at least put out of their misery forever the people that own the team and have completely run it into the ground. I would take over and somehow return the team to glory. That’s really been bothering me lately.