Over the last couple of years, it seems many bands have been getting increasingly political. Do you want to make a political statement through Yo La Tengo?
I think there are political statements implicit in anything, and I think there are other ways to express politics than by singing a song about, you know, how much Ronald Reagan sucks. Right now we're being a little more overt about our politics. Let me backtrack-I think that there are other ways of expressing political opinions. But it's a subtler way, and a lot of the people that we might agree are in our audience have just kind of fallen for an all-politicians-are-the-same, they're- all-crooks kind of simplicity that is pretty dangerous in this juncture in our history. Whether the Democratic Party is as enlightened as you or I or somebody else might wish, the differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are profound, and it's just important to recognize that and act on that.
And this tour has a political aim?
Our tour is taking place only in swing states, and to a much greater extent than before we're going out of our way to express ourselves explicitly. During the course of the show, I don't think anyone is going to mistake it for a political rally; but at the same time, I don't think anyone is going to walk out without knowing where we stand. I mean, I've always thought that people knew our feelings anyway. What matters to me more than people knowing how we feel is that people don't vote in this country. I think it's not only a problem but it's a reflection of the way political campaigns are run. I hate to sound like a crackpot conspiracy theorist [laughs], but some of that is intentional. I think that the power structure has a lot to gain by people not voting. And so people have come to feel a certain sense of futility to the political process that is self-fulfilling. When you're not part of it, things happen without your input; and the election of 2000 demonstrated-in Florida and New Mexico and a few other states-just how a few votes would have really made a big difference.
What can Madison expect from Yo La Tengo?
There will be a lot of people playing with us on stage. I think anyone who has heard our band knows that we're not averse to being subtle. There's something in the presentation of this tour that just seems appropriate to the message in a way that I just feel is almost self-evident. Our show has been referred to as a variety show. The show in Madison is going to be a real wild one. We're going to have Mark Greenberg, who has played in the Cocktails and Eleventh Dream Day; Rick Rizzo from Eleventh Day; David Kilgour from the Clean and his solo records from New Zealand. A lot of our friends and people that we really love will be encompassed in the show. They'll be playing our songs, we'll be playing their songs. I don't know, we'll kind of just see what happens.
Which part of music do you prefer: recording, and trying to create a sound or the live performance ?
We enjoy them both, which is why we do both. I think if we didn't like playing live, we'd find a way to just make records. They're very different, this tour that we're doing is a pretty vivid example of that. One of the things I love about playing live is how things can change so completely from moment to moment, and night to night. And, when you're making a record, you're working on one thing that's really meant to be heard over and over again. You know, when you play if something doesn't work you try to remember not to try that again. They're really two different approaches to the same thing. Sort of to that end, we've never spent a lot of time trying to sound like our records, or make our records sound like our live show.
What do you think about the new crop of indie darlings like the Strokes, the Hives and the White Stripes? Do they owe more to classic bands then you did?
It's not of great importance to me one way or the other. I don't pay as much as attention to new groups as I did when I was younger. I don't think it's really that different. I think that is the goal of the bands and the people who sell them-just to make things seem new. Thatt also tends to be the main accusation hurled at bands that nothing is new. If you look back at a lot of the punk-rock bands that at the time were supposed to be making such a radical break from what came before them, you can see very clearly what their part in the historical timeline was, and how influenced they were by other music. It's kind of a marketing thing to say that they represent a rejection of everything that came before them. That stuff is to me is just part of what you have to do-to make it seem like your some new variation.
In your downtime, do you and the other members feel that you're sick of music, in general? Do you feel like you can't sit back and listen to music as you once did?
Well, I don't think it's always the same. Music, it's on in our lives much more than its not. It occurred to me yesterday, you know, we were driving from Cleveland to Ann Arbor and the Indians were playing, so I had the baseball game on. You know, it's a big part of our lives, [but] I'm not as obsessive about listening to it and purchasing new records as I was when I was younger. That said, it's usually on but we're also on the phone all the time, so it's on on a level where it kind of exists in the background a lot of the time.
-Interview conducted by DJ Pangiburn
