Yo La Tengo: ‘We Tried Harder This Time!’

Yo La Tengo are back with a brand new album, ‘Fade’, due for release early next year; the follow up to their 2009 long-player ‘Popular Songs’.

To celebrate, the New Jersey band’s frontman Ira Kaplan popped over to London to have a chat about the release.

‘I was looking at an e-mail I wrote to Matador when we finished ‘Popular Songs’ and the e-mail was basically saying ‘It doesn’t look like we were successful coming up with a shorter record. We tried but we couldn’t do it!’,’ he told DIY, when asked about the new record’s comparative shortness and cohesiveness.

‘I think it’s been our desire for a long time to make a shorter record and I think having tried and failed the last few times, we tried harder this time! It’s funny - cohesive’s a funny word to me. It’s certainly shorter… I’m okay with ‘cohesive’. Well, I hope the others are cohesive too. I’m happy with what people think of it, it’s not for me to say.’

He went on to explain that the band have taken a slightly different approach in naming the tracks, too: ‘This time around, we actually did want every title to directly reference the song. So, a few of them still don’t come out of the lyrics but they have a clear reference. Some of the [older] titles – ‘The Crying Of Lot G’, ‘Detouring America With Horns’ - were finding a nice sounding title to go with the song. This time we tried not to do that.’

Visit DIY in January for the full interview.

The band will release ‘Fade’ on 15th January through Matador Records, the tracklisting is as follows:

1. Ohm
2. Is That Enough
3. Well You Better
4. Paddle Forward
5. Stupid Things
6. I’ll Be Around
7. Cornelia and Jane
8. Two Trains
9. The Point of It
10. Before We Run