If someone else happens to be listening, fine. “No matter what I’m writing about, I always feel like I’m talking to Georgia and James. “You know, yes, I would say the lyrics that I write are, if I’m not … ” He starts again. The central lyric, “I wanna see my heart’s reflection in your eyes”, couldn’t be less guarded, but Kaplan visibly squirms when I ask if it is about his love for Hubley. Yo La Tengo are massive softies: My Heart’s Reflection is one of their many beautiful, rather smoky love songs with half-sung, half-spoken vocals. We were unplugging ourselves, knocking drums over, we couldn’t contain anything – and walked off stage convinced we had our shot and could not have blown it more.” And it was like Carrie or something – destruction everywhere. Emotionally, we were completely keyed up. It was with Sonic Youth, a higher-profile show, and we wanted to be really good at it. “I think I could walk you through it, second by second,” he says, marvelling at “the sheer anything-could-happen emotion of that show,” as Kaplan giggles.
#And then nothing turned itself inside out rar professional#
“We had no goals at all, I would say, other than: how can we do something that we like?”Īs you might surmise, this was not a mercilessly professional outfit – it took until album number four, Painful, for their lineup to solidify with the arrival of bassist James McNew, who was blown away by a 1990 Yo La Tengo performance in Boston. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, then dating and now married, formed the band in Hoboken in 1984 “with no plan other than we liked the feeling of playing together”, Kaplan says, in the offices of their long-time record label Matador, discussing the band’s favourite songs from hundreds in their back catalogue. And flicking through their own music is like rifling through the record bins: across their 15 studio LPs, various film scores and other ephemera, there’s delicate balladry, squalls of feedback, ambient moods and anthemic indie rock. Indeed, with their cover versions of everyone from the Cure to George McCrae – not to mention their perma-rumpled anti-glamour – you could imagine them behind the counter of an independent record shop. “37 Record Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster”, ran a headline from the Onion in 2002 – the joke being that the New Jersey trio are a band beloved of musos, and ignored by pretty much everyone else.
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