Yeah Yeah Yeahs with Jenny Eliscu

Journalist Jenny Eliscu joins Yasi to talk all things Yeah Yeah Yeahs, from their wild early days in New York to their place as one of the most important bands of the 2000s. They discuss the term indie sleaze, debate whether the Yeah Yeah Yeahs deserve the crown as the era’s best band, break down why “Maps” remains an all-time classic, and explore the tensions that have shaped the band throughout its career. Plus, growing up in the spotlight, surviving the hype, and where the Yeah Yeah Yeahs fit in today’s music landscape. Episode PlaylistListen to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Playlist here. Subscribe on YouTube. Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalekGuest: Jenny Eliscu @jennylsqProducer: Rob SundermannEditor: Adrian BridgesAdditional Production Supervision: Justin SaylesTheme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 01

  What's with this band, anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really like this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain.

• 1:15Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is about the Yaya Yas. We are starting a mini arc. And for lack of a better word, I've come around, actually, you guys. I will call it an indie sleaze arc. Because you know what? We don't have another name. And I know, we'll talk about it. My guest today, who we're gonna talk about this with, who has a different idea, is music journalist and absolute legend Jenny Ellisky. Welcome to the show, Jenny. I'm so happy to have you on.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  It's an honor.

• 1:53Yasi Salek?

  I know, I understand. Because as a person who was also like marginally there, I mean, actually, quite a bit there. Like, I did have the Janet from Three's Company haircut. I was wearing the American Apparel leggings, babe. Like, I had tip-to-tail, whatever they're calling this, I was doing it.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  DV?

• 2:09Yasi Salek?

  Honey, DV.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Oh, my god.

• 2:11Yasi Salek?

  Honestly, I wore a lot of American Apparel. Like, beat-up Converse, like, the gamut, you know? But we didn't call it anything. And how do you refer to it now? Post-in, like, there's just no name for it.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little bit annoying. I mean, I was reminded in, you know, refreshing my memory about stuff for this, like, it was, yeah, some people called it a garage rock revival, like, which was like the closest thing to... And it did sort of begin that way. Before it became, I guess, what they, what they consider indie sleaze, because my understanding is that the kids think of indie sleaze a little bit more as the tail end of it.

• 2:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, a little more like...

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Like leaning into when you're getting your, like, TV on the radios and Walkman. Like, a little more mid-aughts into later aughts.

• 2:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  As opposed to that, like, 2000, 2001. But I hate the name indie sleaze.

• 3:07Yasi Salek?

  I think it was just that I actually sat and thought about it. One day, I was like, indie sleaze? And I was like, no, kind of accurate. It was, it was like, it was 90s indie, but so much sleazier. That's exactly kind of what it was. It was like slicker, it was, it was like more fucked up. Like, there was the lame of it all, even the costuming of it all was like, it was something, I don't know, I was just like, I was like, you know what? I'll, I'll allow it. This episode is brought to you by Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing. If you saw the band when they played at the bar or stopped mid-festival to look at the stars, then you're ready to embrace the haze with Hazy Little Thing. Citrusy-smooth and easy to drink,

• 3:51Yasi Salek?

  it pairs with nights that don't need a script. Brewed with the purest ingredients for finest quality, there's a reason it's America's best-selling hazy IPA. Embrace the haze with Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing. Enjoy responsibly.

• 4:07Yasi Salek?

  I saw a journalist in a British publication that I can't remember, maybe like Melody Maker or Enemy or something, called it Trash Rock, which actually I thought was also a good name.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:17Yasi Salek?

  Um, yeah. There's just like no way to refer to this period of time in a short... I mean, nobody likes a genre shorthand anyways. Like, there's never been one.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  But I love it, I love a sub-genre name. I love a post-rock. I love a slowcore.

• 4:31Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  You know?

• 4:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  I feel like, that's why I'm just sort of like, oh, I feel like, I would say, we, as a society, like, maybe could do better. But also, I defer to the young people. They came up with indie sleaze, it stuck. Who am I to say? You know, I just feel like I defer...

• 4:46Yasi Salek?

  Who are you, you're Jenny Ellisky. You were literally there at the birthplace of it.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  You can't see it when you're in it, sort of, like...

• 4:51Yasi Salek?

  Not only were you there, you midwifed the birth of indie sleaze. So I think you can have quite a bit of input if you wanted to.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  I've surrendered to indie sleaze as being what it's called. It's, it's, I don't think it's going anywhere. And hearing you say it, actually, Yasi, it feels like it's, it's growing on me.

• 5:05Yasi Salek?

  I, maybe I'm just like coming around, you know? I'm like, I'm just, I'm, maybe I'm just literally picturing myself in those Cobra Snake photos and being like, not a bad name.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Maybe I need to find more pride in my own sleaziness at that age, you know? It's like, sort of, where I'm just like, was it really that sleazy? I guess I have this sort of like, um...

• 5:24Yasi Salek?

  It was kind of sleazy.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Denial, I'm in sleaze denial.

• 5:27Yasi Salek?

  I, okay, well, I can't wait to get into all this. I'm so glad to have you, because like I said, you were there from day one. I have like an interesting relationship with this period of music because I'm just a tiny bit younger than you, but also I didn't get to New York till 2004. So like, by the time I got to New York, in my mind, I was like, everything's over. Not even, not even thinking about this. I was like, the 90s are over. So I was like, I missed everything, I don't care. And I was also like, a little more at Max Fish with TV on the radio than like at Cabin with The Strokes. So like, obviously, I was aware that The Strokes were over there at Cabin, but it wasn't really my world as much as like the other part of it was. So I didn't have a lot of comings and goings with it.

• 6:12Yasi Salek?

  And I don't know if you ever have this, like, if something happens concurrently to my life, but I wasn't part of it, I don't have the mythological, like, it's one thing to look up to like things that happened when I was 13 and it was the 90s, or things that I was like part of. But because I wasn't part of it and it was like right there, I kind of am like, oh, yeah, it's cool. Like, when people are like, The Strokes are the best band that ever lived. I'm like, are they? I mean, I like The Strokes a lot, but it's like, I guess, I guess that's like, I have just a bit of distance from it. But you were part of it. So I feel like you're gonna have such great things to say.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  I hope so.

• 6:50Yasi Salek?

  And I'm gonna say something controversial right at the top, because I was really hap, I'm really happy that I did Yaya Yas first, because I am one of the best one. I think people don't actually talk about it enough. They don't get their flowers enough. I think Karen O is up there in the mantle of our greatest female frontwomen that are like, front people in general, of course, I'm not trying to be gender, but I mean more like, the way that like, we would have a Mount Rushmore of like Chrissie Hynde, you know, Courtney Love, like, these, these like incredible women that like inspired generations. Like Karen O is right up there.

• 7:32Yasi Salek?

  And I sometimes think she doesn't get as much credit because she was a bit later. Do you ever feel that?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, I think that the ecosystem of indie sleaze, because I'm just gonna accept it and call it that, that's the term.

• 7:49Yasi Salek?

  We can make up a new one right here if you want.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Ooh, give me time, give me, give me the shots of latte. Um, the ecosystem of it, it's your classic, where the scene is only really great as, with all of it.

• 8:05Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a multi-part organism.

• 8:08Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  And not that I don't love the, my favorite bands and artists from that era, I love with the burning fire in me, like the way I love The Beatles or The Kinks or Pavement or something. But, you know, I don't think of, for instance, Pavement as being part of a scene, you know? Even though they were, even though there were Silver Chu, there were artists they were connected to, but, and I love The Strokes and Yaya Yas with that intensity. But I think part of what made it all so exciting was that it was happening together and that you didn't just have The Strokes in a bubble. You had The Strokes and Yaya Yas and, and Liars

• 8:51Speaker 03

  and TV on the radio and Moldy Peaches and Long Wave and Interpol. And they were all a little bit different.

• 8:59Yasi Salek?

  And DFA and...

• 9:00Speaker 03

  And DFA and Electric Clash. And the fact that they were all just different enough from each other, but also decidedly part of like the same scene, made all of them stronger for happening simultaneously. So...

• 9:15Yasi Salek?

  I think that's all right.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  You know, thank God, we had Yaya Yas at the same time as The Strokes, you know? I think it, it makes you love The Strokes more, it makes you love Yaya Yas more, all of them more, knowing that they weren't just an isolated event.

• 9:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It was so special also because, obviously, the 90s had really turned the focus on to like Seattle, right? Like, it was like, everything was kind of about grunge in Seattle and bands were like picking up and moving there to make it. And the idea that like New York was dead as, is like a music desert is so interesting because it's, it had such a rich history. And when did you move to New York City?

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Oh, I moved there when I came out of my mom's womb.

• 10:02Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you're from New York City?

• 10:03Speaker 03

  I am, yeah.

• 10:04Yasi Salek?

  I didn't know that, Jenny. Okay, so you've just been there.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:07Yasi Salek?

  So what, and you, obviously, a deep lover of music. What was your experience with what was happening in like actual New York City music? Like, what was popping at the Mercury Lounge when you were like 14?

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Well, um, Mercury Lounge didn't exist yet when I was 14, but you're exactly right. I mean, there was... It's in retrospect such a brief period of time that things felt dead. But if you were my age and just a little too young to have gotten into Sonic Youth, when they were really happening, just a teensy bit in retrospect. And just a little bit, before that, just a little bit too young for Living Color, right? And all of that great Black Rock Coalition and CBGB stuff from that era. And definitely too young for the earlier CB stuff.

• 10:54Yasi Salek?

  Of course, yeah, yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  You're, you know, I was born in 1974. You're, you know, I'm like getting into indie music and stuff in my teens and high school. And hearing some like, you know, California punk rock Descendants and shit like that.

• 11:11Yasi Salek?

  Love the Descendants on this program.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  UK shit, Lush and My Bloody Valentine and the New England Dinosaur Jr. Pavement kind of vibe. And it was like, what is going on in New York in 1990 to 1997, 1998? It felt like there was not much happening. Even though Sonic Youth were minted at that point and making great records, it was like...

• 11:40Yasi Salek?

  When was Pussy Galore?

• 11:42Speaker 03

  So Pussy Galore also is a little bit like, a little bit before my time.

• 11:45Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  And so it's just sort of like, but what's for...

• 11:49Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  What's for us? And the first thing that came along was Jonathan Fire Eater.

• 11:53Yasi Salek?

  Yes, perfect. I wanted to ask you about Jonathan Fire Eater. So did you like have a relationship with that band when you were younger?

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I went to see them every time I could. I remember going to see them at the, at the top of the World Trade Center. They did a show in the, was it the rotating, I believe it was, the rotating, the rooms rotated at the top of the...

• 12:15Yasi Salek?

  Like the one at Eliak's.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  Oh, damn.

• 12:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, there's a restaurant there that does them.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Possibly the only time I ever went up to the top of the World Trade Center, R.I.P., was to see Jonathan Fire Eater, which was a weird show. They also, I saw them at Brownies and other places. But I was working at CMJ at the time. This is, you know, when did their first EP came out, like 97, I want to say, something like that?

• 12:42Yasi Salek?

  I'll tell you, I have it right here in my beautiful little notes. Not the major label, did you?

• 12:46Speaker 03

  The major label, yeah, DreamWorks, pre DreamWorks, they had the EP that had given me daughters on it.

• 12:51Yasi Salek?

  That would have been maybe like 96 or 95, actually, because 97 is when they signed.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in that zone, yeah.

• 12:56Yasi Salek?

  And how did you find out about them?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I was working at CMJ and we were just hearing, and actually props to my friend and former colleague Cheryl Baczek, who we were office, my office was next to her office. And she was obsessed with Jonathan Fire Eater. She was friends with their manager. She was like talking about getting a Jonathan Fire Eater tattoo. She was obsessed. And so I would hear, it must have been that she was listening to, you know, somebody sent her a single or the EP and she was blasting it. And I was like, oh, I fucking love this.

• 13:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's really good.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:32Yasi Salek?

  I actually hadn't listened to it at all until doing this research and I was like, okay. By the way, the reason we're talking so much about Jonathan Fire Eater, a band that you might not know about, is because they were, well, again, as Jenny was saying, kind of like the first wave of like... They're from Jersey, right?

• 13:51Speaker 03

  They're from DC.

• 13:52Yasi Salek?

  They're from DC, okay. But like, kind of like establishing themselves as like a New York indie band and like getting this sort of like hype going. And they inspired quite a few of the bands that we now are going to talk about in the Indie Sleaze. There are all the famous of the Strokes, we're like, we've never heard, we had never heard of that band.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that tracks, but you know, and, and The Walkmen was most, most of the members of Jonathan Fire Eater, minus singer Stuart Lupton, R.I.P., who was still alive when The Walkmen formed.

• 14:20Yasi Salek?

  Yes, he made his own side project.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Exactly, but you know, I think it's, it's more so, well, one, you had the proximity, Jonathan Fire Eater were from DC, but they were, they were based in New York. They were a New York band. They had met as kids in DC. And they brought Garage Rock Revival to New York, which was simultaneously happening in Detroit. And that's where you had bands like The Go, who were the predecessors to The White Stripes and other artists of that era. And I'm sure there were other cities, probably like Austin and stuff, where Garage Rock Revival stuff was happening in 97, 98, you know, the, there was a, yeah, exactly. There was a Memphis contingent of Oblivians and shit like that of Garage Rock Revival.

• 15:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  It felt like Jonathan Fire Eater really brought in the Moog of it all and brought back. And this is also somewhat concurrent with the Nuggets box set.

• 15:20Yasi Salek?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  And...

• 15:23Yasi Salek?

  This came up in our White Stripes episode.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Psych, geisty as hell moment of where you're just like, oh, Moog, Garage Rock, psych, sleaze.

• 15:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and I think what I was really struck by with Jonathan Fire Eater is like the flamboyance. Which I think you don't, like, well, no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say The White Stripes were flamboyant at all. Like, I wouldn't say The Oblivians were, I mean, they were crazy, but they weren't flamboyant. There was something very flamboyant about Stuart Lupton's like stage presence and like, you know, and Karen O will say it, and I think I have some quotes from her, but like she took a lot of her moves from him. You know, like he was, he was rapping the mic cord and he was like, like a very sexual performer, which is, is very interesting. They also, I was kind of interested in how like, they were like kind of the first cautionary tale of like,

• 16:12Yasi Salek?

  they got a bunch of hype, they signed this huge DreamWorks record deal and imploded. Like, they did not perform and the band fell apart.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, and also just I'll say, you mentioned Pussy Galore.

• 16:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Credit to Pussy Galore and John Spencer Blues Explosion, which again, like if you're my age, whatever, it felt like a little bit like, a little bit before my time, just enough that I was like, I'm too late to jump on the Blues Explosion bandwagon now. And, but, and that's, you know, I would think that probably Stuart Lupton would have said that things like that were...

• 16:48Yasi Salek?

  Inspirational.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Inspirations, but um, yeah, it definitely felt like as a fan at that point of the nerdier kind of indie rock, the Pavements and stuff like that, that, or even if you look at like Dinosaur Jr., you know, it was a don't look at me kind of a thing. Or an ironically, look at me.

• 17:07Yasi Salek?

  Negative charisma is what I call it.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 17:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like a, you can't help but look at it, but it's like a black hole, like, do not perceive me.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And to have Jonathan Fire Eater as these like, just super charismatic, cute, incredible musicians. I mean, Matt Barrack obviously is one of the best drummers of all time. They were all amazing. They really delivered live. They were really, really good live. And if you were a fan of theirs, it was annoying that they got backlash. It was really annoying. And then they signed to DreamWorks. DreamWorks was a new label at the time. And it, and the backlash, and it was like that chatter around that killed them in a way that was so sad as a fan of theirs.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  And to fast forward a little bit, when the Strokes came on the scene and know-it-alls in New York, and listen, I'm a fucking know-it-all and I hate myself for it, but...

• 18:06Yasi Salek?

  But you do actually know it all, so it doesn't count.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  People would be like, oh, you really like the Strokes? They're just Jonathan Fire Eater redux. And I'd be like, first of all, Jonathan Fire Eater were amazing and they were too good for this world. And then like, yes, God bless if the Strokes are like Jonathan Fire Eater, that's not a diss, first of all. Second of all, you don't know what you're talking about.

• 18:27Yasi Salek?

  I hope those people are like really happy now, knowing that like the Strokes absolutely like proved the test of time and are like, you know, still making albums and like moving hearts and minds. Jonathan Fire Eater is important to start with. Um, okay, but let's start actually, you know what I want to start with? I want to read two quotes from Karen O, if you don't mind. This is the first one. "Do I think being a girl had anything to do with our outsider status as a band? I think it had everything to do with it." This is the second one. "We've always been coming from the position of being the underdog of the one female-fronted outsider band. We came up when the Strokes exploded. I remember playing a show with the Strokes at Don Hills and before we knew it, they were the band that saved rock and roll or whatever. Then we released Fever to Tell and The White Stripes released Elephant at the same time.

• 19:12Yasi Salek?

  We were like definitely always the underdog. And being the underdog is a great fucking position to be in, man. It's so good. For a little while I grappled with it, but I think that's why we're doing what we're doing. We're still around and people still care. It's like growing up not being incredibly good-looking. If things don't come easily to you, you're always struggling, you're always fighting. You never expect anyone to ever pay attention." It's such a through line in the AI as music and, and just career, this like idea of being an underdog. And I don't want to say I don't want to get gendered because it's impossible. It's impossible to not talk about gender, especially when you're talking about rock and roll, especially when like to this day in any scene, there's usually one band that has a female front person or women in it at all, you know?

• 19:55Speaker 03

  And then they call it a girl band.

• 19:56Yasi Salek?

  And then they call it a girl band. I will always remember, again, I was here in, in Southern California, going to CineSpace, you know, indulging in my own Indie Sleaze fantasies. But my best friend at the time was a girl named Rachel, who was half Korean, she was a musician. And I remember so starkly her being like, oh, fuck, well, I can't do it now. It wasn't, you know, like, it wasn't, oh, she's doing it, so I can do it. That's not how, that's not how people felt, you know? It was like, there's, there's only room for one.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 20:29Yasi Salek?

  Not just one woman, one Korean-American woman, you know, like, and I thought that was so interesting. And it's kind of is still true. It's like, people talk a lot about like breaking down barriers, but like they still kind of only let you have one.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I remember like at the time, you know, when I was, early days at Rolling Stone and covering like industry stuff and that sort of reporting. And it was like the PDs at, the program directors at K-Rock and stuff like that, like being quoted as acknowledging that once they had filled the slot with your hole or your garbage or whatever, done, that's it. Because they believed, and maybe they focus grouped it and maybe it was true, that people would change the channel if they heard more than one woman.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  And this is just a quick sidebar to say that I get sometimes, occasionally, randos who hit me up because they hear me on Sirius XM. And they will complain, men, that I play too many female artists. Or they have some spin on it. And let me just say, we all play the same stuff all day. That's the way radio-

• 21:48Yasi Salek?

  It's programmed.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  That's the way radio actually works. Is, you know, but because I am a woman, speaking with a woman's voice, it is perceived that I am just like ladies only over here.

• 22:02Yasi Salek?

  They're drowning vagina and they can't-

• 22:03Speaker 03

  And so, and this is still in, you know, 20, 30 years later. So that must've been true. It's disturbing to think that that recently, that it was just like, oh yeah, listeners be like, another, another lady, get it, go.

• 22:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, changing the channel, man. What is this? Okay, we're actually gonna start our story with Nick Zinner.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 22:25Yasi Salek?

  I get why you guys were not expecting that, but our story starts with Nick Zinner.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  We're going in age order.

• 22:31Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, I feel like because he was actually kind of the one making music first, was immersed in, in the New York scene. Um, he is, he is a Sagittarius from Sharon, Massachusetts? Question mark. Couldn't actually get a full, uh, a full read on this, but Nick Zinner, if you're listening. Um, I did run into him at the Ice Age Show and told him that we were doing this episode and he was like, uh-oh. And I was like, no, oh, it's great. We're gonna celebrate you. Um, he grew up super into metal, is what I read. Um, Slayer, Testament, and also once got thrown out of a Guns N' Roses show because he was taping it.

• 23:10Yasi Salek?

  Um, and he just grew up playing guitar and making four tracks of himself playing, um, Mick Mars solos and stuff. Fucking cool. Went to Bard College to study photography, played in a band called the Boba Fett Experience, which later changed their name to Challenge of the Future. Did you ever see Challenge of the Future play?

• 23:29Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't believe so, no.

• 23:31Yasi Salek?

  Um, so this is kind of the band, this is, uh, from the Bard Makes Noise website, um, which is a website about bands that went to Bard College. The five members originally met while attending Bard College in the early 1990s. Discovering a shared love of bands such as The Fall, Can, Spaceman 3, and The Birthday Party, they formed a group in 1993. So that's where Nick Zinner's vibe was coming. And they were like, we're gonna go to Williamsburg, Brooklyn and make it, babe. This is back when people did not move to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I just want to point out. Even when I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2004, it was like crickets. Nothing was happening. New York Muffin, that Sea Town, I'm trying to think of anything else. Mini Market, I used to get cool clothes there.

• 24:14Yasi Salek?

  That's about all that was happening on, on Bedford Avenue. Um, they broke up in 2001, um, which is a little, our timeline's a little iffy, but in 2000, while I believe that band was still happening, Nick Zinner met Karen O at Mars Bar. Did you go to Mars Bar a lot?

• 24:34Speaker 03

  I tried not to.

• 24:37Yasi Salek?

  Why? What was the vibe at Mars Bar?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Danger, a little bit of danger, but you know, hey, it's indie sleaze, so it was, it was, it was on the sleazier side of the, of the options.

• 24:50Yasi Salek?

  Of the spectrum of places to go to.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:53Yasi Salek?

  Well, there's also Cokey's. I mean, there's a lot that stayed till I was there that you're like, are you gonna get sleazy?

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:58Yasi Salek?

  Lit?

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:00Yasi Salek?

  Lit is a place where God does not exist. I just want you to know, that is a godless area.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  And then the dark room.

• 25:06Yasi Salek?

  The dark room.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  But yeah, Lit, Lit came along ever so slightly later. Mars Bar was there, I don't know. It was there when I started, you know, in the 90s, when I started going into the East Village. And, you know, not to go dark, but it's like, oh, I heard stories about that, people having, you know, getting jumped outside, you know, like, it was a little bit on the like, sort of, oh, careful, careful leaving Mars Bar. Sure no one's following you leaving Mars Bar. Like, that was sort of as a more like innocent, you know, I was just like, oh god. Um, and places like Brownies, um, were more kind of my, my orbit.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  But, you know, Nick Zinner, like, he was a scene stirrer. He was around. And I remember when I first heard about Yeah Yeah Yeahs, maybe before I first saw them, and it was like, I don't even, I knew Nick's name was Nick because it was sort of like, in the scene, it was like, oh yeah, that guy Nick, who like, looks like Nick Cave.

• 26:12Yasi Salek?

  Totally, mini Nick Cave, I believe they called him.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so it's like, ooh, I don't know that guy, but that guy's cool. I know who you're talking about. Oh, it's his band. So he was the one person I knew of him from the scene when Yeah Yeah Yeah started playing.

• 26:27Yasi Salek?

  There was some great quote, let me see if I can find it. Um, oh, from Mark Spitz. Okay, it's from Meet Me in the Bathroom. Thank you to Lizzie Goodman, heavily, um, relying on Meet Me in the Bathroom for this. He said, "Around 97, 98, there would be these parties in Brooklyn where it'd be artists living in full warehouse floors, so you could have a whole band coming in and play. And I can't tell you how many parties I went to, where there was a keg, the Missy Elliott record playing, and then a shitty band with a lead singer with a beard. The guitar player of those shitty bands always seemed to be Nick Zinner." So again, he was really, he was in the scene.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  He was around, but he always had, you know, he's, he's always had this just beautiful, pure vibe that he has now, where he, you know, you rarely saw him speaking, you know, like, and we weren't friends then, but it's like he had this aura of silence to him that was very like impressive, you know?

• 27:18Yasi Salek?

  Mysterious and alluring.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  And he is, as we were saying, he's like ageless and timeless, and he just has this beautiful, like, he comes from someplace else.

• 27:28Yasi Salek?

  Just ethereal, incredible cheekbones. Good job, Nick Zinner. Whatever skincare you're doing is working. Okay, so let's do a Karen O now, sidebar. Karen Lee Erzolak, born November 22nd, 1978. Cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius, so that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah. But also it makes a lot of sense, which we'll get into a lot, with her sort of dual personality. Maybe not a dual personality, but her persona versus her personality, that you see a lot with the, the stage Karen, and then the, the, you know, lived experience Karen. Um, she was born in Seoul, Korea, the daughter of a Korean mother and a Polish-American father. Her dad owned a clothing and jewelry manufacturing company,

• 28:12Yasi Salek?

  and her mom was a fashion trend consultant, which is why she's so fashionable. Raised in Englewood, New Jersey. Um, she talked to Nylon in 2009 about how she was a little bit ostracized for her, uh, ethnicity. She said, "If we were playing Spin the Bottle, all the boys would be pretty bummed to kiss the haffy. But as you grow up, you start to realize what an asset it is to have that as a part of you. It shapes you." Um, there's also a really great, if you guys are interested, conversation with her and Michelle's Honor of Japanese Breakfast, that they did, I think for Rolling Stone, I wanna say, Rolling Stone?

• 28:48Speaker 03

  That sounds right.

• 28:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, podcast, which is great, where they kind of bond about their experiences growing up, um, half Korean in America. Um, she said her dad put her on to amazing music. She didn't say what, but I'm assuming, I'm just gonna go ahead and assume there was probably a lot of like, great Leslie Gore and like doo-wop, because she is super into that, which we will talk about when we get into the music. She said she wrote her first song at age nine on the piano. It was a corny girl group doo-wop love song, I'm paraphrasing what she said. Uh, she also said she had like a best friend who was like, this is amazing, this is incredible, this is Mozart. And she was like, oh my god, thank you. Like, gave her the strength to keep going. I wish all of us to have a friend like that from the beginning.

• 29:30Yasi Salek?

  She also said the first record she bought was by The Doors, um, Strange Days, the one where people are strange on it.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  It's so interesting. Have you done a Doors Band Splay?

• 29:39Yasi Salek?

  Sure have. I'm a Doors truther.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah. Because The Strokes too, is the, like, I-

• 29:45Yasi Salek?

  Not for you?

• 29:46Speaker 03

  I mean, it just was one of those like The Dead, where I just didn't, it just didn't, as like little indie punk rock age that I happened to be, it was just sort of like not cool to like The Doors, and so- I think you had to be slightly bit younger than me to be like, to give them a fair shot. And I've never gone back around to be like, let's do it!

• 30:05Yasi Salek?

  The thing about The Doors, and I've said this on this podcast a million times, and I'll say it a million more times, they were like, kind of one of the earliest punk bands.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:12Yasi Salek?

  Which I think is like, really overlooked about them. And I don't know, that's probably why The Strokes liked them. I think Julian is like such like a musical, you know, like, I picture him like a beautiful mind with the, or the meme with the lady who's like doing, like, that's how his music mind works. But like, for a lot of the people, like, the, the posturing and the vibe of Jim Morrison was very punk. I mean, he inspired Iggy Pop, you know, to start-

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:36Yasi Salek?

  Making music, like, what's more, you know, punk than Iggy Pop? So anyways, that's my Doors sidebar, but she also loved Karen O Michael Jackson. Comes up a bunch of times. She was very inspired by Michael Jackson, which makes a lot of sense to me in terms of like, again, the flamboyance, the performance, the glove. She always wore that one glove. Um, she said, "When I was younger, it was more appropriate for girls to imitate Madonna, but I always wanted to be Michael Jackson." This episode of Bandsplain is presented by Sierra Nevada. Life's about embracing the haze. What does that mean? Living in the moment, seeing where the night takes you, being up for the adventure.

• 31:19Yasi Salek?

  And there's no better way to embrace it than with Hazy Little Thing by Sierra Nevada. Hazy, citrusy, smooth. Juicy, but not sweet. Hoppy, but not bitter. America's best-selling hazy IPA for good reason. Hazy Little Thing. Enjoy responsibly.

• 31:40Yasi Salek?

  She did sketch comedy in high school.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 31:44Yasi Salek?

  Which I thought was kind of cool. She said that it helped her pick up a sense of physicality.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 31:49Yasi Salek?

  So I was like, oh, that makes a lot. I mean, because she is such like an incredibly embodied performer.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Definitely. But she's quite shy, is that interesting too?

• 31:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I mean, I guess taking sketch comedies will help you sort of

• 32:05Yasi Salek?

  break a little out of your shyness, right? It's got to, because it's like, there's nothing more. As someone who did sketch comedy and stand-up comedy, there's truly nothing more humiliating than than standing on a stage and trying to be funny and trying to be like, please like me, you know? Um, did you ever do stand-up comedy?

• 32:21Speaker 03

  I have not, not yet.

• 32:23Yasi Salek?

  It's never too late, babe. You know what? It's never too late. You're young still. And then she got really into music. Lots of bands that she lists, but one very important one, which we already just talked about, was Jonathan Firegater.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:39Yasi Salek?

  Her friend took her to a concert and she said about them, "Those guys had so much fucking chutzpah sex appeal. They're kind of scrappy, skinny, effeminate dudes, but just so fucking sexual, just primal sex oozing out of their pores. It was fucking awesome." I I kind of associate that also, like, when I think about indie sleaze and I think about the New York of it all, I'm like, yeah, New York bands should be sexy, you know? Like, it's not Seattle, you know? It's not like the doldrums of Rain and and like, it's such a different vibe. Like, I I love that the idea of that kind of coming back into the water with these New York bands.

• 33:18Yasi Salek?

  Karen also said she would go see The Makeup and PJ Harvey.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, The Makeup, yeah, that's.

• 33:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Ian Sivonias.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Sivonias, yeah.

• 33:25Yasi Salek?

  Sivonias is how you say that.

• 33:28Yasi Salek?

  There's so much PJ Harvey for me and Karen O. Do you feel that too?

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

• 33:33Yasi Salek?

  And not just in Karen O, in the Yaya, I was like, I hear a lot of it in the music as well, even though obviously PJ Harvey's had like multiple eras of types of music, but when I listen to Fever to Tell, I can hear quite a bit of PJ Harvey in there.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's interesting, too, how much of The Cure is in all of those, I mean, the, if you are just limiting it to The Strokes, Interpol and Yaya Yas, like, over time, not in the more primordial visceral, earlier music, not so much, but if you think about the music they've made in more recent years, heavy, I mean, Yaya's heavy Cure sounds and The Strokes, of course, you know, on New Abnormal and stuff like that, like, yeah.

• 34:19Yasi Salek?

  I think The Cure is one of the greatest bands that's ever existed and every band today walks in their walks in their footsteps and.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  And weirdly underrated somehow.

• 34:29Yasi Salek?

  Somehow, even though, like, so massive, but still somehow a little bit overrated, I mean underrated. She goes to Oberlin College. Famously also Liz Pheron went there. Then they both have great music careers from it. She said that they had a winter term, which is two months where you're supposed to take off because it's winter in Ohio is apparently just like miserable and you shouldn't even go outside. And so she decided to learn to play guitar. And she said, "A buddy of mine introduced me to Neil Young, who I have to say was extremely influential. He's got that super unconventional voice, but so much feeling, so much heart. His voice and Jeff Mangum's from Neutral Milk Hotel, they were the two people who got me thinking I could be a singer. I wanted to sing my heart out like those guys." I loved that. I'd never

• 35:13Yasi Salek?

  heard her say that. I'm a huge Neutral Milk Hotel fan. And then I was like, oh, that makes so much sense, because he does have such an unconventional voice. I also like that she did this because one of, another hill that I love to go ahead and lay my corpse on is that they let men do that. They let men have unconventional singing voices, but like, women often are not given quite as much grace around that.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:39Yasi Salek?

  And I love that Karen was like, I can fucking do it.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's also interesting when people who have like a genuinely beautiful singing voice regard themselves as having had, like, to work on it or something like that. And you're like, well, but you have the voice of an angel.

• 35:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But I do, I don't, I mean, I think I love Karen O's voice, but I see what she's saying. It's like a little

• 36:03Yasi Salek?

  how do, I don't know how to describe it, how I hear it to my ears, like, it's a little girlish and scratchy and like a little bit yeah, it just has a lot of personality in it. It's, it's, she's not Ariana Grande, you know?

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there's this sort of flattening thing that when you mentioned Jeff Mangum, because obviously the Neil Young falsetto thing, we hear that, but like the thing she does when she's being more, when she's letting it rip a little bit more, or what Hamilton Lighthizer calls letting the dogs out.

• 36:37Yasi Salek?

  Who, who, like that, okay.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. When she, and it's the, it's the sort of the more funny comic voice that she does, that's a little bit like squi, it's like, I don't know, you know what I'm saying? It's like, it's sort of like, things get kind of squished down in this way that's really like signature.

• 36:55Yasi Salek?

  Like a little compressed.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 36:57Yasi Salek?

  Totally, totally. I love when she screams. I love it. Because it is, it's so unique. Like, we were talking about Courtney Love earlier, like, that's a different scream, you know? Even PJ Harvey, that's a different scream. Like, hers is like, you can absolutely pick it out of a lineup, an audio lineup. She said, "The first song I ever learned on guitar was by Mazzy Star. Hell, yeah. Soon as I learned to play a little guitar, I started writing music. I didn't really care about really knowing how to play. I know pretty much as much now about playing guitar as I knew then. I'm dead serious. It's slightly embarrassing. From the four lessons I took when I was 18 years old, I've been able to write hundreds of songs. You don't need to know much to write a good song." It's not too late for us, Johnny, should we?

• 37:35Speaker 03

  If you've got the music in you, you know?

• 37:37Yasi Salek?

  She said then later, um, she played some songs she wrote at a party and people were crying. And she was like, I didn't like it at Oberlin, so I moved to New York. I don't know if those two statements are related. They came one after another. I like to imagine that she was like, ugh, fuck this.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just remember, I remember after seeing Yaya's play and then hearing that when she and Nick started playing together, um, that it was folky, like cat powery sounding stuff. And I couldn't picture, until I started to hear some, some of the slight, ever so slightly later, Yaya's stuff, I couldn't really picture it. And I was just like, oh, like Neil Young, Cat Power, folky vibes. I was like, wow, okay.

• 38:19Yasi Salek?

  Did you, did you ever, did Unitard ever play out? That I couldn't get to the bottom of.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Not that I noticed or not, that caught my attention. I don't, I think it was, if I understand correctly, it was like Karen and Nick met at Morris Bar, they, oh, I like this, I use it. And they started playing together and they were doing that kind of a sounding thing initially, and I don't know if they, and they wrote the song now known as Our Time.

• 38:44Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  As a Unitard song, that I assume had a more cat powery, folky incarnation. But I don't know if they played shows in New York at all.

• 38:54Yasi Salek?

  I couldn't find any information about. I know she was doing open mics at Sidewalk Cafe by herself, pre, pre-Unitard.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was a whole, I mean, that anti-folk scene, that was a whole other.

• 39:06Yasi Salek?

  That's like the moldy peaches of it all, yeah. Is Sidewalk Cafe still there? I like really vividly can picture it in my mind.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  It was until recently, but so I don't know if it still is. As an expat of New York.

• 39:21Yasi Salek?

  The idea of being really shy and then taking your guitar to Sidewalk Cafe, I mean, like, I'm gonna play some songs. I would die.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  I feel like it was pretty low stakes, you know? It was like open mic, you know?

• 39:33Yasi Salek?

  So I would probably pass away.

• 39:37Yasi Salek?

  She also said, so she was enrolled in NYU, she was a film student, and every Sunday night, her and her friend, quote, "A rockabilly Korean girl who only watched French new wave films," sounds like one of the coolest people alive.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:50Yasi Salek?

  Would go to Shout, which was, did you go there?

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:54Yasi Salek?

  A mod dance party at Bar 13?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:57Yasi Salek?

  What kind of music did they play? Like the jam and stuff?

• 40:00Speaker 03

  The jam and like, you know.

• 40:04Yasi Salek?

  The Who?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  I want to say like 96 Tears, like Cusack and Astoria, that kind of stuff.

• 40:09Yasi Salek?

  Sure, that sounds so fun.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting too, because it, and you know, it's like, because there was also the Smiths Night at Bar 13, and there was the night at Von, and there was like.

• 40:21Yasi Salek?

  We had them, you know, I think about a lot, actually, that, does that even exist anymore? Because like, when I was here as even like a pre of age person, we had like Tiger Beat and these like 18 plus club nights that were like themed around a genre of music like we're talking about. Does that still happen?

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do. I mean, they do. At Zebulon, they do a new wave dance party.

• 40:48Yasi Salek?

  Oh, that's true, that's true.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, so which is like, you know, it's like when you think about.

• 40:51Yasi Salek?

  Shannon Cornet, I think she did DJs at that. Yeah, that's true. You're right. I'm just like 44 years old, like, I don't know what's going on.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Like where you're like, oh, this is what the version of wanting to hear 60s, you know, psych rock thing, like.

• 41:03Yasi Salek?

  New wave dance party sounds so fun, I want to go.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Right? I know. What, sometimes I'll be at a show at Zebulon that's like an early show because they're like gonna clear out the olds and bring in the kids who want to hear new wave. I love new wave, but I'm just, it's a different thing. But yeah, that, there were those sort of cooler, more like retro garage rock kind of nights that then kind of pivoted into what was the Tiz Was and the Motherfucker.

• 41:26Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  And eventually your Miss Shapes and that kind of thing.

• 41:29Yasi Salek?

  Shout out to Justine D, one of the coolest women to ever exist and still being extremely cool and gorgeous. I thought she hung the moon when I was living in New York.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Justine and I just went to Just Like Heaven Fest together.

• 41:43Yasi Salek?

  I saw your photos on Instagram. I was so jealous. I was not in town. I was at Just Like Heaven, The Cure show in Edinburgh. So I was having my own version of Just Like Heaven.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 41:54Yasi Salek?

  But yeah, I was, I would have loved to see Justine. She probably doesn't even remember who I am. I haven't seen her in 20 years, but.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Well, it was funny because we met, I was going to that kind of shit and stuff, but I hadn't met Justine and I went to the UK with The Strokes in summer of 2001, writing about them for Rolling Stone and stuff, and they were playing at Reading and Leeds and Glasgow and at, we were in like the VIP, like for, at Reading. And I had bought, while I was in London, I had bought a Small Faces t-shirt.

• 42:23Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  And Ogden's Not Gone Flake, uh, and I was introduced to this table of people Justine was sat at and she was like, ooh, cool Small Faces shirt.

• 42:33Yasi Salek?

  You hadn't met her before that.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  I hadn't met her before that. And she was like, ooh, cool Small Faces shirt. And I was like, thanks. And she's like, wait, you're not English. Where are you from? And I was like, I'm from Queens. And she's like, I'm from Queens. And we've been sisters ever since. So we celebrated our 25-year friendiversary seeing this reunited, reunited for The Strokes.

• 42:54Yasi Salek?

  At Just Like Heaven in Pasadena, California.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Two girls from Queens.

• 42:58Yasi Salek?

  Really touching. Well, I don't know if Justine D was at Shout at this mod dance party, but Karen O and her Korean friend who only watches French New Way films were. And apparently she was like, I needed to like do this persona there. She said, I'd have like seven cosmopolitans and be doing knee slides on the dance floor. Like she was like kind of honing or crafting, crafting sounds like an artifice, letting the dogs out of this side of her that hadn't really had the chance to breathe, you know?

• 43:34Yasi Salek?

  Also, that was really cute. She said the first day she ever did her open mic at Sidewalk Cafe, she was 21 and she said she was wearing a polka dot, uh, black and white dress that she got at a thrift store. And that day she got a tattoo because she wanted to commemorate the beginning of like her doing music. And she was like really non-committal. So she was like, I'm getting a tattoo. And it was of a B on her shoulder. Very sweet. Nick said, I felt the chemistry from the very first time we ever played music together. We were just hanging out in her old apartment above Odessa. I lived in Williamsburg in an illegal loft with 10 other people. That's a cliche at this point, I know. She was playing songs she'd written on acoustic guitar for me and I was like, those are rad. Let me record them and play on them. I immediately knew I would be making music and be somehow involved with her for a while.

• 44:18Yasi Salek?

  I felt it, just whoosh, immediate connection. So we did this Unitar project.

• 44:24Yasi Salek?

  We don't know what it sounds like, but we can guess from our time.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 44:29Yasi Salek?

  Also, a lot of other, I'm, the Yaya's have like Inside You, There Are Two Wolves. And it's like the freak out, amazing, more like electro clashy disco-y. And then they have these like really beautiful, honestly, kind of elevated doo-wop songs. To me, that's, to my ear, like that's what they sound like. They're these girl group love songs, you know, but sort of brought to a different level with Nick's guitar and stuff. And so I'm like, oh, maybe that's sort of what those early songs sounded like, but stripped down, you know? We don't know. What we do know is that Nick Zander said, New York, when I moved here was awful because everyone was so serious and cool and into heroin. All the bands were dark and serious. We had our dark band. Unitar was super dark.

• 45:12Yasi Salek?

  But that lightness, that silliness was inside of us and Karen was an expert in bringing it out and embodying it. We really needed that and New York needed it too. Karen said, I was all about getting free and causing trouble. All I wanted to do was cause trouble. Like if I had a night where I didn't cause trouble, I'd be really disappointed in myself. I lived for it. Love that. New York was fun.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  It was.

• 45:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 45:35Yasi Salek?

  No, I'm sure it is still now too.

• 45:36Speaker 03

  It was just, again, it's so weird in retrospect when you think about like how time feels and now to think about like, oh, okay, so, I mean, late 2000 is when The Strokes did their Mercury Lounge residency. December of 2000 is when The Strokes did their Mercury Lounge residency. That brought, that was how I first saw them.

• 46:00Yasi Salek?

  Brought the house, brought them all the attention and.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. Less than one year later is 9/11.

• 46:06Yasi Salek?

  Insane.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  You know, 10 months later, and then everyone was real sad. And so then it was like, it wasn't fun. It was fun, but it was fun. It was distracting yourself from fear and trauma in this way that, you know, obviously if you're like in your twenties or something, like you're, you know, there's, there's a little of that energy anyway, where you're just, everything feels sort of dramatic and.

• 46:35Yasi Salek?

  Totally. You get fucked up to kind of just like cope with the angst of being 21 years old.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Exactly, but.

• 46:42Yasi Salek?

  The added layer of the horrors.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  When I think about it, sometimes I forget. And then when I remember like, oh yeah, from, from 9/11 on, we were all so traumatized that it's impossible to separate like those choices for trying to go somewhere else and trying to distract yourself and, you know, I remember the phrase that came up at the time was disaster sex, which was just sort of like, oh, after a disaster, you know, you have sex to distract yourself, which is different from disaster sex, obviously.

• 47:15Yasi Salek?

  Of course.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Um, and then there's disasturbation for those who don't have a partner.

• 47:19Yasi Salek?

  Of course, we want to be inclusive.

• 47:22Yasi Salek?

  Well, we're not on 9/11 yet, so we'll, we'll talk about the freedom prior.

• 47:30Yasi Salek?

  So you mentioned earlier, like that you went to some of the earliest Yaya's shows. So I guess what happened is at some point, Nick says that Karen turned to him and was like, we gotta make a rock band. And he was like, ugh, why? This is cool, Unitar. And she was like, no dude, trust me dude. He said that she always said dude, like every, which as a woman of vocal fry experience, I absolutely relate. Except I parlayed dude into babe. So she said, you know, let's do it. Come on, this is what we gotta do. And he said, okay. And we started telling everyone, we're gonna start a rock band. It's gonna be fucking awesome. And so I guess they wrote a couple of songs.

• 48:13Yasi Salek?

  They drank brass monkeys and in two hours they wrote four songs. The first song they ever wrote was Bang. And they were just like, you know, still at the bars being like, we got this cool rock band. And the, the name, they were at a bar and they heard, it's just someone saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, mm-hmm, that's the name of our band. And then they bragged about it so much that someone was like, okay, you opened for, uh, The White Stripes at, uh, Mercury Lounge, which in fairness, that wasn't like a very scary thing, right? Cause The White Stripes were not a known quantity at this time, but it was still a real show. Were you at that show by any chance?

• 48:54Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I'm pretty sure the first time I saw Yaya's was at Warsaw.

• 48:59Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Down the line, there's a bigger Yaya show where they headlined and TV on the radio opened for them. But they were, I want to say first of three or something. And I don't, I truly, they erased my memory of anything that came after them. It was just.

• 49:14Yasi Salek?

  Just phenomenal.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  It was, I, it actually made me happy. It made me smile. It made, you know, it made me feel better. It's like, I'm assuming it must have been post 9/11. It must have been, or it could have been that summer right before, but it was just like Karen doing the thing, you know? The pouring the beer all over. And she was just laughing. She was cracking herself up. I was, I hadn't seen anything that was that much fun.

• 49:44Yasi Salek?

  Joyous and free.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  I don't think I'd ever seen a young band that was that much fun before that.

• 49:51Yasi Salek?

  That's so cool. Well, this show with The White Stripes was September 2000. And I think they were like first of four or something. And they didn't have a drummer, so Karen was like, well, I have a friend. I went to Oberlin with his name's Brian Chase, uh, he'll drum for us. And he was like, okay. And they had one rehearsal and then they went ahead and played the show. Nick Zander said, no one was there. There was one English guy and some of their friends. And The White Stripes stayed at Karen's afterwards. And then they started playing some shows and they made the demo, the master EP. Now you were working at this time in.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  I was at Rolling Stone.

• 50:33Yasi Salek?

  You were at Rolling Stone?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:34Yasi Salek?

  I read that this master EP, which was again, not commercially released. It was just made to get them shows, started really making the fucking rounds. Did it get into your hands at Rolling Stone?

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And now that I'm thinking about it again, the, the show, the Warsaw show would have been summer of 2001 because it was the night before the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island.

• 50:55Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  So it'd been like July or something. So, I mean, yeah, they really, Brian, they had Brian on drums. It was, the whole thing was, was, you know, they had been playing a little bit. I think the EP came around to me after I had seen them play.

• 51:11Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Within a matter of days, weeks, you know? And it's actually my, my editor, Joe Levy, shout out.

• 51:23Yasi Salek?

  Shout out. He's quoted in my doc. We'll hear from him.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  I believe it was, he called me into his office and he showed me the EP, I think somehow. It's, someone had sent it to him and he was like, have you heard this band? And I was relieved to be able to say, I have, they're amazing.

• 51:39Yasi Salek?

  You're like, I'm a boner.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  I'm doing my job.

• 51:41Yasi Salek?

  It's called the master EP, you guys, because it's just like a close up shot of like Karen from Lips Down. And she was wearing this like sick, so fucking early 2000s thing, which is like this big nameplate necklace with like rhinestones that says master in all caps. It's such a fucking cool. And they should have made merch of it. Maybe they did actually. So yeah, so you were like, I know that band.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  So I was just like, yeah, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I said, they're great. I saw them at Warsaw. They're amazing. And luckily, because at that point, The Strokes, as much as Yaya's might have been underdogs relatively.

• 52:17Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  The Strokes had cracked it open just enough in mainstream media for people's antenna to be up to not want to be too late on the next thing.

• 52:25Yasi Salek?

  Right. Because The Strokes had proven the like, oh shit, like we, we kind of heard about this and then like, it was a thing.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were, they were like buzzworthy enough that it was, you had to cover them, you know, or be seen as being out of the loop.

• 52:38Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  And so when Yaya's came along, it was like, there was, and I was just really lucky to be in the position I was in. Having gotten it right with The Strokes, I had, it was like, I had to build a trust. There was a trust that I was like, okay, I'd written about The White Stripes and it was, so it was like, okay.

• 52:55Yasi Salek?

  I like how you're being so humble. Johnny Ellis, you really flew the flag of The Strokes. I feel like you helped a lot getting them the buzz that they had.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  It was gonna happen, you know, it's one of those where it's just like, it was gonna happen.

• 53:10Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  It was gonna happen. There was no stopping something like that, but I

• 53:14Yasi Salek?

  You were at ground zero.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Right place, right time, and

• 53:16Yasi Salek?

  Poor choice of words.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Being insistent enough that

• 53:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  And pushing past people of an older generation, being like, oh, you, you really, you, like, I remember Joe would say, like, "Oh, you really wish you had gotten to see the jam, don't you?" When I would be barking about the Strokes. And you're just like, "It's not just, this is new. It's new." I'm not just reci- you know, I was, I was like, trying to push through a little bit of the older guard, trying to dismiss this new stuff as just being a, a poor facsimile of something older. And there's, now I'm the person who has to remind myself when I'm being momentarily dismissive of some young thing, that I'm just like, "Oh, it's no My Bloody Valentine." Just be like, "Okay, let the kids have their..."

• 53:58Yasi Salek?

  Listen, we're, we've been rehitting nachos since the dawn of time. That's part of the continuum of rock music, and that's fine. It's baked in. Like, as Jim Jarmer said, "It's not where you take it from, it's where you take it to," you know? We wanna hear that. We wanna hear a bit of the DNA of, you know, the earliest rock, you know, Little Richard carried on through, like, that's what makes rock music cool.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:24Yasi Salek?

  And then it just goes in all these, like, insane directions. Um, okay, so Master EP is floating around, you guys. Rob Sheffield said... Where was Rob Sheffield writing up this time?

• 54:36Speaker 03

  At Rolling Stone.

• 54:36Yasi Salek?

  Oh, Rolling Stone.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  He was, he was there. He was, he was into it. He was there.

• 54:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he said, "The Yaya's EP was really hard to find and should have been hard to find because it sounded like crap." Nick once told me that it was on a cassette and he put it, he put his jeans in the laundry, so the tape went through the laundry, and that's where they mastered it from. I was like, "You know what, dude? I believe you. It sounds like it was recorded in a dumpster." Um, the one we hear now is remastered, so I don't know if I could hear it the way it was originally heard, maybe on YouTube or something. Um, importantly, it got two places. Well, besides Rolling Stone. It got into the hands of Asif Ahmed. Am I pronouncing his name right?

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Asif, Asif, yeah.

• 55:11Yasi Salek?

  Into the hands of Asif Ahmed by The Bartender at Odessa. He said, "People kept giving it to me. At one point, I found myself with nine copies of this fucking thing in my apartment. I finally played it one night. Our time came on and I was like, 'Fuck, this is a great song.' My friend Rachel suggested I manage them. I'm like, 'I don't know. Brian looks like Eddie Munster, the other guy looks like Eugene Levy, and they're all really pretentious.'"

• 55:33Speaker 03

  Asif is hilarious. One of the funniest roasters.

• 55:37Yasi Salek?

  It was great.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  He's a great roaster.

• 55:39Yasi Salek?

  And "Meet Me in the Bathroom," you can tell this person gave absolutely not one single solitary fuck. He was like, "I'm just gonna tell you what I think. Here it is." Um, and it made me laugh a lot. Um, but he did, he does become their manager. The demo also made its way, this is where I got, like, real Berenstein Bear situation, but maybe you can help me. So, the demo made its way to the Vice offices and to Sush Alvi's hands, one of the founders of Vice, who booked them for the Vice five-year anniversary party.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 56:08Yasi Salek?

  At Spa. I remember Spa. Justine D., who managed that night, said they were paid $400. Now, here's my problem. Vice was founded in 1994.

• 56:18Yasi Salek?

  This show was in 2000.

• 56:21Yasi Salek?

  But it's a five-year anniversary party.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Hmm. Sometimes it takes a while to get your shit together.

• 56:25Yasi Salek?

  Okay, okay, 'cause there's just no date on this party, so I was like, "Was it in 99?" They didn't exist in 99. And he goes, "Okay, so it's 2000." Um, did you go to the show? Do you remember?

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Don't recall.

• 56:34Yasi Salek?

  No. Apparently it was the biggest show they had played to date, because before that, they had mostly been playing Brownies, I think, and that one Mercury Lounge show.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  And like Lux on Grand Street.

• 56:45Yasi Salek?

  I never went there. No. Was it tiny?

• 56:48Speaker 03

  It was tiny.

• 56:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Um, so yeah, they were playing really small shows, but then that was kind of a big show. And then the, that paired, I mean, Vice was, Vice in 19, in 2000, bro, like,

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:00Yasi Salek?

  Come on, no. That was the heyday of...

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, do's and don'ts, off the chain.

• 57:05Yasi Salek?

  I know there was, like, there was some problematic situations around Vice, but at that point, it was fucking cool.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:13Yasi Salek?

  Like, we would rush to grab the Vice from the fucking outside of the American Apparel, wherever you picked up your Vice.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:19Yasi Salek?

  And you would like, be like, "Oh, my God, like, what's in it?" Asif said that then they played a huge show at Brownies in December, and that's when it was like, the, the hype had, like, hit the fan. And there was managers,

• 57:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:32Yasi Salek?

  Labels, like, everyone trying to sign them.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  That may be the show for which you see

• 57:37Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Man in the basement.

• 57:38Yasi Salek?

  We have to, we'll have to flash the, um, Jenny just found this video on YouTube that's just like, really funny handheld footage of backstage at a Brownies show at the Yaya's, where Jenny has gorgeous smiling faces there, talking to Karen O., and you see, like, everyone just kind of milling about, and it's like, so early on. It's very cool.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, well, do you know when, 'cause obviously Touch and Go ended up releasing

• 58:02Yasi Salek?

  Not until 2001.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  Not until 2001?

• 58:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Um, yeah, it didn't get, like, a formal release until 2001. So, your old boss, Joe Levy, your old editor, said, "I saw them three times at Brownies in that period, and they were three of the best shows I have ever seen." Thanks to Jenny Alaskia telling you to go see them. Um, "All the things people talk about when they talk about Yaya's were there. Karen O. grabbing three beers in her fist, drinking one and pouring the other two over herself and over the mic stand. You know, all this unhinged, deeply hilarious, completely spontaneous behavior. At the first show, it was all girls in the front. They were all her friends, they were giving her drinks, and there was a sense that there was something happening here and involved girls, all in on a secret that nobody else understood, which was completely exhilarating. Because 99.99% of the shows you go to, you're lucky if there's a single girl there, let alone the sense that girls are not just participating,

• 58:49Yasi Salek?

  but in control." I love that.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting. I had forgotten that, but totally true, that, yeah, there was this, there was this...

• 58:58Yasi Salek?

  Like Karen gang, like...

• 59:00Speaker 03

  And also, yeah, just the idea that Karen doing her thing gave girls permission to... It's that, it's that eliminating the male gaze thing.

• 59:11Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Well, it's like, I mean, well, if you're a girl at a show, there's a presumption, like, "Oh, you're there 'cause you think the band's hot, you wanna fuck the band," you know, like? And it's like, that's kind of taken off the table. Again, obviously, there are gay people, but like, you know, like, in a broader sense, like, okay, like, maybe you're just there to fucking have fun.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and even just

• 59:32Yasi Salek?

  Which is also available to you.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Even just like Karen doing that persona, it wasn't for, it was, it didn't feel like something done for the male gaze, you know? It felt like, it felt like, you know, the way now people talk about, like, girlhood, you know, the memes about, like, girlhood. It's like, that's sort of like, girlhood, pure girlhood, minus male gaze. Even though there's like, a sexiness to it, and it's funny, because I, like, was rereading, uh, the Rolling Stone piece I did on Yaya's, and there was this quote from Karen about how people at the time would be like, "She's over sex, she's..."

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  And I didn't remember it. I don't remember that being a point of conversation, because I guess, in retrospect, I don't really think about, even listening to the music now, like, I don't really think about it as being, like, uh, about sex or something.

• 1:00:29Yasi Salek?

  Although there were some pretty explicitly about-sex songs.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, but I guess it did feel like there was a certain element of freedom from heteronormative bullshit.

• 1:00:41Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:00:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Well, I, I was, my pink pussy hat, back on my head, but I was like, yeah, like, to, like, elaborate maybe from what I'm hearing from your point is, like, there was a lot of ugliness. In a cool way, right? Like, Karen O. wasn't afraid to be ugly. Like, it's not beautiful and sexy to pour beer on your head, you know? Some of those costumes were in war crimes. And she'll say it. She's like, "Oh, Christian Doi would make my costumes, and she would try to make the ugliest thing possible, and I would, like, cry because I had to wear it, but I would just fucking wear it, 'cause it was like, it was like an experiment. It was like an art project." Like, what can, like, where can we push these boundaries?

• 1:01:21Yasi Salek?

  So it's like, yeah, in a sense, it was like, sexual, but in another sense, it was like, she wasn't afraid to show all these ugly parts of her. And I, I talked to Cody Krichlow, who we will, who's the fucking greatest, coolest artist. Um, but he did their, all of their first, um, all their first artwork and merch and stuff around the first album. And he was like, "Yeah, I remember. It was so cool. Like, we would, like, go through photos, and she would pick the ones where she looked the most busted." And I'm like, "Oh, it's so rad," you know? Like, it's such like, I don't think we see that that much anymore, you know? And I, and I think part of it is because, like, we live in a post-social media world, so it's like, the obsession with being attractive and hot has, like, kind of trumped everything else.

• 1:02:06Yasi Salek?

  And I'm not immune to it. No one's immune to it. I mean, maybe some people are immune to it. But back then, it's like you were being perceived within a physical space most of the time and less on a two dimensional screen. Like, it was like, yeah, you'd be in a magazine or whatever. But like, that gave this freedom to have because there is something really hot about being unhinged and being free like that without it being like a typical sexual presentation.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. And yeah, of course, there's no overestimating the absence of phone filming, you know, like, we had digital cameras, obviously, but like, you, no one was filming with their phone. So that frees you up a bit. But it's like the sense of fun, the sense that she was laughing her ass off and she was like messing up and laughing. And, you know, there's some of that in the Strokes, too. I remember the early Strokes shows where you're like, like Julian would fall down some, and you would just be like, well, and there's a sense of like, you know, or the Libertines, which obviously different thing, but where you're just like, oh, it's falling apart in front of your very eyes. And to see a woman doing that where she's just like laughing and having fun and not just, yeah, like you said, like

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  just sort of like posing and like contemplating how she looks all the time. It was so great. It was so rare, you know? I mean, it was a la, props to Kathleen Hannah.

• 1:03:28Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I mean, there, obviously, there are, um, there are precedents for this. And P J Harvey, like, when P J Harvey went through her, like, drag era, like, that wasn't beautiful.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Right. You know, like, generational, like, I did get to see Bikini Kill at Mercury Lounge, and that was a similar thing. And there was very, like, girls to the front, boys, we're gonna, you know, like, get out of here. And Kathleen Hannah doing her thing. And it was fun and rebellious. So I guess that would be the one other thing that I personally was the right age to have seen before I saw Yaya Yes. But, um, in that vein of where you're just like, oh, thank God, we're having, we're just having fun.

• 1:04:07Yasi Salek?

  We're having a good time. Yeah. And I, and I think a lot of what I read was that Karen O was like, we didn't take it seriously. Like, this was, it was just for fun. Like, they had no aspirations to make it, you know, like, in that beginning, they were just like, we're just like, it's a fun project to do something. I want to talk a little bit about that persona, though, like, that, what we're talking about, this expression of the Karen O onstage persona. So in early 2003, she did this interview, and she was like, when I started piecing together the persona of Karen O, I was trying to do it in the most, let's see how much I can get away with. And let's put something out there that's basically untouchable and a parody of itself. So people can't take it that seriously. But everyone took it really seriously and have been taking it very seriously. It's been this inner conflict. It changes the nature

• 1:04:52Yasi Salek?

  of the way I conceived it, my persona, in the beginning, to be really lighthearted and punk rock and party about it. And then everyone takes it with a lot of weight. And it's a conflict with it's like, should I be taking this more seriously? And I don't think I could exist if I took it more seriously. There's so much in there that I'm like, so fascinated by. It's like, the idea of protecting yourself by making something that you're like, this is so silly and crazy that you, it's not me, you know, you can't take it seriously, is so, it's, it's so interesting. Like, because that goes back to, like, her being shy. And then also, she said it, and I, I think that a lot, like, the Yaya Yes were kind of the most punk out of all of these bands, you know, the spirit was so punk.

• 1:05:36Yasi Salek?

  And you don't, I don't know, like, not that the Strokes weren't, but they kind of weren't, you know, and like, Interpol, not really, you know, like, maybe TV on the radio a little bit, but not, even not really, you know, like.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you're right. I think that on that, on that spectrum with this group of artists.

• 1:05:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  Closest would be the White Stripes, but the White Stripes being a much more, very deliberate, very manicured, very the red and the white of it all.

• 1:06:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  But there's, there's also the range of like, what's, what's art driven versus popularity, aspirational popularity driven, and the spectrum of that, where at one end of it, you do have the Strokes, which was always this sort of like, thing that was bound for a larger world. And Yaya Yes, and the White Stripes felt more like, like, underground, you know, underground art music that didn't care if it got, it was happy to be indie, you know, it was perfectly happy to be indie.

• 1:06:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I think that's totally right. Um, anyways, I love that. I just, I guess as someone who like, I think a lot about persona because of the world we live in now, which is like, Karen O was like a really ahead of the game, but it's like, we all, we are all now kind of floating personas because of social media and because of the internet. And it's, if you do a job like me or you, like, that compounds it, you know, a million, like, there is a Yasi persona coming into your ears right now that is not necessarily me. It's not not me, you know, it's like, kind of this, like, weird Venn diagram. And hearing Karen talk about it as something that she sort of did both, like, intentionally,

• 1:07:25Yasi Salek?

  but also because, like, she couldn't not, it was like an exorcism almost. I really like it. I really, I really like reading about it. One more quote from your former editor, Joe Levy. But let me stress again that, yes, everyone had the sense that we were seeing something special, but not important. It was a fucking nobody rock band on Avenue A in New York City. There wasn't any chance it was gonna turn out to be important. Did you feel that way?

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:07:53Yasi Salek?

  No, you felt, you were like, oh, yeah, this shit's gonna pop.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  I don't know if I thought it was going to become kind of like mainstream or anything at all. You know, and I don't know that I felt that way about the Strokes or the White Stripes or anything.

• 1:08:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  But I felt that it was important. And I think that comes from having had that, like, little interlude where it didn't feel like New York was contributing timeless indie rock to this era when it's like, oh, we got Pavement, we got Dinosaur Jr., we got Super Chunk, we got Archers of, you know, like, from the mid 90s up through. And then this stuff started to happen. And I felt like, no, these are canon, this is canon. So it felt important. I don't know if I, at that point, was like, cared, I don't think I cared, you know?

• 1:08:47Yasi Salek?

  About, yeah.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  About what, you know, it just felt like, okay, well, I know the difference between something from the indie world that is now gonna make a permanent mark on what this generation contributed, you know?

• 1:08:59Yasi Salek?

  Did it feel at all like what had happened with, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and stuff was sort of like, flash in the pan is not the right word, but like, like a Haley's comment, like, okay, that happened one time. Like, it's, the indie is not going to break over again like that.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  I, for me, just because, again, of my personal trajectory, like Nirvana, you know, when I heard Nirvana, they already had gone from Sub Pop to, to Geff and D G C. And Nevermind was blowing up. And that's how I heard Nirvana. And then I went and listened to Bleach and the beginning of my, like, getting into discovering indie rock. And then I was working at CMJ, which was this, like, you know, music publication for college radio, but also had this, like, South by Southwest-y event every year. And I was in college at the time. And so I was super deep into indie shit. But I was also aware of all of the records that were coming out. And what D G C was doing post Nirvana, that they signed Sonic Youth,

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  you know, that Warner Brothers signed The Flaming Lips and Built to Spill.

• 1:10:10Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  You know, and Doug March famously negotiated to have Warner Brothers give him health insurance for his family, which was like, groundbreaking thing, because it was like, the moment when they were all, it was a feeding frenzy, post Nirvana.

• 1:10:23Yasi Salek?

  They were like, oh, you have a guitar?

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  And so, as a fan of Flaming Lips and Built to Spill and these things, I was like, huh, the, the major labels feel like this is, feel like indie music is bankable. So what is, that, that must be real.

• 1:10:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But I guess it is kind of important to point out that, like, in the time era we're talking about, those, the dream of that had been a bit supplanted by, um, at least like in mainstream, like MTV and stuff, by rap rock.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:10:56Yasi Salek?

  Right? Like, by the tail end of the 90s, it was Korn, and it was Limp Bizkit, and it was Slipknot. And it, like, that's kind of the next thing that had risen to the top in terms of, like, mainstream rock. It wasn't Built to Spill.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it was sort of like, it felt sort of like this layer had been created.

• 1:11:19Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  That was like, maybe they thought at first, if you're D G C, for instance, you're like, we need our next Nirvana or something. But in the meantime, what's already, what are the kids already like?

• 1:11:30Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  They like, they like Soul Asylum, right? They like Sonic Youth. They like The Flaming Lips, who've been around for a long, and so this other layer that wasn't.

• 1:11:39Yasi Salek?

  Sort of like middle class.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, this sort of other layer of like, big indie, you know, because at that time, you had artists like.

• 1:11:45Yasi Salek?

  Well, Jimmy Eat World was, had, had fully blown up and made so much money.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  Those artists were selling, you know, 60,000 copies, like, you know, a, a big indie artist would be selling like 60,000 copies of a record, like a Slater Kenny or like an Elliott Smith or something.

• 1:12:01Yasi Salek?

  And it didn't cost them a lot of money to do or invest.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  If they just got one, you know, they just had, if they just got one, it paid for all the rest of them.

• 1:12:08Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

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• 1:13:44Yasi Salek?

  All right, well, let's, why don't we talk about the master EP? Because now in our timeline, let's say it's released so that we're in summer of 2001. Bang.

• 1:13:57Yasi Salek?

  Just a strong, I mean, I just like, it really took me back to being like, oh, if I had, if this demo had made its way into my hands and I put it on, that's the first song I heard, I would have been like, yes. Correct. I will absolutely follow this band to the end of the earth.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is kind of a perfect EP. And I'm curious to hear if you think there are any tracks that are like a little bit sub, but, um, because the fact that it, the fact that it starts the way it starts and ends the way it ends, you're just like, well, did it, how did it start that strong and then get better?

• 1:14:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  As it went.

• 1:14:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I think on my first listen, I found Our Time to be like, like, didn't belong there because it was so, such a different speed. But then obviously it's like one of the best songs on there. But like, the, the like, the first three songs, like how, like it pummels you with like, Bang, Mystery Girl, Arts, I really love Arts are the screaming. Yeah, I just, I guess Miles Away is maybe the one that I'm like, not like over the moon about, but I still like it.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  But Miles Away, it sounds like it could be something on Show Your Bones in a way. It, they were playing those songs all the time at their shows. So it's like, I think probably by the time I heard the recorded versions, I had seen them play it. So I knew all the songs.

• 1:15:10Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  And Arts Star was, I mean, live was the most incredible part of the set. I mean, Arts Star and Our Time, those were the things you waited for, I feel like, you know?

• 1:15:23Yasi Salek?

  I mean, but for me, it's like, as a, as a fuckson, you sucked. Repeated over and over again as a chorus.

• 1:15:40Yasi Salek?

  She was my Hillary Clinton. You were my president. But yeah, I mean, amazing. Arts Star, Our Time's such a good song.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  But that Our Time was like, felt really like the, the song, the most, it felt like medicine in a post 9/11 context.

• 1:15:56Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  And that was where, I mean, I remember I would cry during that song, like routinely at IAS shows.

• 1:16:02Yasi Salek?

  It's also like, what an incredible, Karen O is such a brilliant lyricist. And another thing I just honestly don't think she gets enough credit for, like she has so many lyrics that make my like arm hair stand up. And like, it's the year to be hated is so, A, just genius on its own, but so prescient, you know, like how that came to be true about this, about this band, about the world that they were in. Couldn't have known.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  And so glad that we made it.

• 1:16:29Yasi Salek?

  So glad that we made it.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  But also, obviously it's Crimson and Clover. I mean, the song is Crimson and Clover, but in a way where, as you say, the reheated nachos, where it's just like, who fucking cares?

• 1:16:37Yasi Salek?

  I love nachos.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Yasi Salek?

  Reheat them as many times as you want, babe. It's delicious.

• 1:16:53Yasi Salek?

  Again, I, I just like listening to it. I'm like, I can absolutely see why people were like, I gotta go check this band out. So Touch and Go put it out, like we said, in, in America. And then Wichita, my guy, Welsh Mark, always at the scene of the crime in the best way, put it out in the UK.

• 1:17:12Yasi Salek?

  And it was produced by Jerry Teal, I think in real time in the beginning, who was the former guitarist of Boss Hogg, back to the John Spencer blues explosion of it all. In January of, we're now in 2002, so 9/11 has happened. The Strokes played Saturday Night Live for the first time. And Albert Hammond Jr. Warye has been, were you at that Saturday Night Live tape?

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  I was not.

• 1:17:35Yasi Salek?

  No. I think it's very cool that they were supporting their compatriots. Because the IAS had opened for The Strokes at like Don Hills or something. So they had developed a relationship before The Strokes had gotten signed and gotten so big.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  And Albert is of Strokes, the most likely to do that kind of a booster.

• 1:17:54Yasi Salek?

  To put on another band.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So in January of 2002, The Strokes were like, really on their way up, right? Like This Is It comes out that summer.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Well, This Is It got pushed back because of 9/11.

• 1:18:08Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  They had to take NYC cops off. And so it was supposed to come out that very same week and it got, or the week later or something. And it got pushed back to sometime in October. But, I mean, it was, you know, it came out over the summer in the UK with the original cover with the glove ass.

• 1:18:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Iconic.

• 1:18:27Yasi Salek?

  What, such a better cover with respect to whoever did the other cover, who I don't know, but.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  So yeah, by early 2002, they were, you know, minted for that world that they were in.

• 1:18:36Yasi Salek?

  Lot of, uh, albums and artists that had sort of like shift gears around 9/11 because of, like Jimmy Eat World, I think that's like one of the most famous examples.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  Well, also, New Year's Eve, so The Strokes played the, at the Apollo on New Year's Eve, 2001 into 2002. Guided by Voices opened, David Cross did stand-up. I was that, that was amazing.

• 1:18:58Yasi Salek?

  Incredible stuff. I mean, we'll save it for the Strokes episode, but one of my favorite things about The Strokes is how much they love Guided by Voices.

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:05Yasi Salek?

  It's like one of the coolest things about them. As a, me died in the wool, Guided by Voices, Truth or? Okay, so in March, the IAS, this is, we're still in 2002, do their first tour, opening for Girls Against Boys. I assume that was a touch and go situation. And they hired Dave Sitak as their, is that how you pronounce his last name?

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  I think it's Sitak.

• 1:19:24Yasi Salek?

  Sitak. I cannot pronounce one single thing. It's incredible that I have a job where I talk for a living. Dave Sitak, Polish-American, was their driver and roadie. Cause I think maybe he had a van. Not really sure how they roped him into this situation. He says that he saw them play at their second ever show at Don Hills. And he said, there was probably about 60 people there. Brian and Nick came out on stage and started playing for a while. And I was like, this is pretty wild. Then Karen came out in a gold lame one-piece covered in olive oil and saying as if there were a million people there. We were just shocked. That sounds so cool. I wanted to see them at Don Hills when, when she comes out in a gold lame one-piece with olive oil on her.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  I know. The olive oil thing was a level up of, of stagecraft.

• 1:20:08Yasi Salek?

  You know what? Like shine it up, babe. Get, get sticky and shiny. I love it.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  It's like one of those things where when you hear about like how they make like, and like, like a Carl's Jr. ad, like no promo, how they make like.

• 1:20:22Yasi Salek?

  The food stylist or whatever. Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Like they spray it with whatever.

• 1:20:26Yasi Salek?

  One time I made my own blood for a Halloween costume. So the blood that they make for movies, I think this is, they use the same recipe. It's quite easy. It's corn syrup, red dye and chocolate syrup to give it that more of a like a maroon. And I was Carrie and I thought it was a really good idea. I just made a whole bucket of it and then dumped it on my head.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Yum.

• 1:20:48Yasi Salek?

  It's so uncomfortable. Like the idea that she performed like that, also, maybe it shouldn't have corn syrup, but I got bruises on my arms because like my arms kept sticking to my sides and I'd have to like, them off.

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  Jesus.

• 1:21:01Yasi Salek?

  So all I'm saying is I have a lot of respect for Karen O and her commitment to being uncomfortable on stage for the look. So they do that tour and on that tour, they play South by Southwest. Did you go to the South by Southwest as part of your job?

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  Again, I don't, I do not recall.

• 1:21:16Yasi Salek?

  You're like, I've been to 148 South by Southwest and I couldn't tell you.

• 1:21:23Yasi Salek?

  They played, the IAS played La Zona Rosa. And it sounds like it was a overwhelmingly amazing show. They went backstage, I guess Clinic had played during that band?

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  Oh, love Clinic. Yeah, sure.

• 1:21:39Yasi Salek?

  They broke into their backstage and stole their masks and they were wearing Clinics masks.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Clinic would wear, would wear, they dress up like surgeons.

• 1:21:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And then from this, a myth was formed that I have done journalism and busted. But the myth was that Karen O, who like, you know, she liked to have a few drinks. People said that she got wasted and pushed Courtney Love, who was backstage into the crafty table.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  Right. Which I mean, I guess Karen herself said that she had done that, but you know.

• 1:22:06Yasi Salek?

  Well, I think Karen, I don't remember that, but people said they did. That's what everyone says. She's like, clearly was like, I was blacked out, if you say so.

• 1:22:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:14Yasi Salek?

  But I asked Courtney Love and she said, that didn't happen. So I think this was just, uh.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  What is memory?

• 1:22:19Yasi Salek?

  You know, it's a funny, it's a funny. What really happened and didn't happen?

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Yasi Salek?

  And let's not let that get in the way of a good story, you know?

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  You funny little good for nothing, you know?

• 1:22:28Yasi Salek?

  Great story.

• 1:22:32Yasi Salek?

  It could have also, by the way, been Christian Joy. It could have been someone else. They were wearing masks.

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  We all looked the same.

• 1:22:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, everyone had a similar haircut. I never had the bowl cut, but again, we all, I had so many questionable haircuts. It was, it was our time to be hated for our bad haircuts.

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  Yep, yep.

• 1:22:49Yasi Salek?

  Janet from Three's Company, babe, that's, that was my, I had a mullet, like, it was like, I would get my hair Yuko straightened and then go to a woman named Athena in Silver Lake who would just like do whatever she wanted and I would just walk out of there with some like asymmetrical, just like craze.

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  I don't know if it was the same, and probably not the same South by Southwest in question, but I do remember a South by Southwest around that time where I was like leaving like the Driscoll or some hotel in the middle of the day and I saw this, like, a dude with curly hair and chucks. And I was like, look at fucking, everyone dressed like a stroke now. And it was a stroke.

• 1:23:20Yasi Salek?

  It was.

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  It was either Fab or Alberta, I don't remember. It was just like, fucking, everybody's dressed like a stroke now. I'm like, oh, it's a natural stroke.

• 1:23:26Yasi Salek?

  I'm in the strokes, me, I am. Okay, so they're blowing the fuck up, is what I'm saying. People are, the hype is real. Nick said, "We were all pretty freaked out by the vultures descending. We were the it band or whatever and there was so much crazy hype. It felt good, but it also felt super weird." Weirdo label people were calling me at home and on my cellphone. And I was like, "How did you get this number?" "Mistrust defenses up." But I also recognize how fortunate we were to have this happen because that shit never really does. So funny, right? It's like, really like damned if you do, damned if you don't. Like, I'm sure so many bands listening to this right now are like, "Okay, well, I would have liked to play eight shows and then have a major label calling my personal cellphone," you know, because that's just such like, not gonna happen now.

• 1:24:10Yasi Salek?

  Like, that is a thing of the fucking past. But like, I can also see how that would have been like, you started a band as a joke with your friend where you poured olive oil on your face and then next thing, like, things are getting really serious, really fast. Like, probably felt really scary. And they're like, I mean, Karen's what, like, 22 years old?

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:24:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, Nick's a bit older, but I think, I think Karen was 22, you know? Imagine being 22 and this is all happening?

• 1:24:36Yasi Salek?

  Karen also said much later in 2013 that one of her best friends died, right, as all this craziness was happening. I don't know exactly when.

• 1:24:48Yasi Salek?

  And she said, "I like really, the band really got me through it. Like, people asked why I kept doing it even though it was like really hard and, and like intense." And she said, "I was totally traumatized and devastated and lost. And if I didn't have the AAs taking me around the world, I wouldn't have made it." They toured with the John Spencer Blues Explosion alongside The Liars. Great band.

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  Well, also, they were just like Karen and Angus were just the coolest downtown indie it couple.

• 1:25:17Yasi Salek?

  What an amazing, what an amazing couple.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  Angus is so tall and it was just like, you, the, you know, they just looked super cool.

• 1:25:25Yasi Salek?

  Is Karen tall?

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  No, but.

• 1:25:26Yasi Salek?

  She reads as tall? You know how some people read as different heights, but like, then in photos, when you see her, you're like, oh, you're not, you're like Big Zinner's height. So you're obviously not that tall or like around.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's like average height, I guess.

• 1:25:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Karen said that she remembered being in the audience at a Blues Explosion show when she was younger and she said, "I was just psychically trying to send them a message. Just look at me, just look at me, just look at me. If he even glanced over in my direction, I would be like, yes." So when I finally met them, like when John and Christina were in the same place where I was, I felt legit. Like, I'm legit because they're here. They were really quite the New York couple of the 90s. It's interesting taking off the mantle, Karen and Angus. John Spencer said, "We toured with them in Australia, which was interesting and a bit embarrassing, because at that time, it was some of the last tours we did with a promoter that we worked with for several years and they were just being wined and dined and courted by labels and definitely by this promoter. And we were just sort of along for the ride, even though they were our support act."

• 1:26:24Yasi Salek?

  That's gotta feel, that's gotta feel interesting. They, of course, start getting popular in the UK because.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  God bless.

• 1:26:32Yasi Salek?

  What is, because God bless. Because what is more classic? What would we even do without the UK?

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  To tell us what we're supposed to like.

• 1:26:38Yasi Salek?

  To tell us what we're supposed to like, to re-import our own things back to us with their stamp of approval because they care more about art and rock music than we ever will. I thought this line from The Observer in the summer of 2002 was really interesting, just like, put us in like the time. "For the first time since the high times of 1997, an urban hymns and OK computer credible guitar music is hot. The scuzzy garagey sound of the vines, the strokes, the hives, the white stripes and the AAs is jolting vitality back into rock, but not one of them is British." He didn't mention the Libertines. Maybe they hadn't quite.

• 1:27:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would have been, they were a couple of years behind.

• 1:27:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and then obviously then the Arctic Monkeys will come to save the day in terms of British rock music. Okay, so they put out their second EP in November of 2002, Machine. Good stuff. Machine, Graveyard and the Pin remix. This is also on Touch and Go. And by the end of 2002, they had signed a deal. Do you remember people chattering about them signing to a major?

• 1:27:43Speaker 03

  I don't, not for the first album.

• 1:27:46Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  No. I mean, the only thing I honestly that I remember comes up in between Albums One and Two, and I can save that if you want to.

• 1:27:56Yasi Salek?

  Okay, yes, please. Okay, so, Asif said, "We almost, actually, the story about them signing is really funny." He said, "We almost signed to Warner, but then we did a meeting with Seymour Stein and he fell asleep in the dinner meeting we had later that month." And then Karen said something totally innocently about him falling asleep and it got printed in New York Magazine. So I believe that didn't, that, according to Asif, that tanked the Warner's deal. Sur Shalvi of Vice said, "They had a fucking lunatic manager. He was basically telling all the label bosses to fuck off. It was bad. Craig at Atlantic really wanted AAs and their manager's throwing drinks in his face, calling him a major label corporate evil piece of shit."

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  Asif, we love you, Asif.

• 1:28:35Yasi Salek?

  I loved this. Well, I bet it made, I bet it made the majors like want them more. It's like, oh, this is so cool. And also, they, I guess, what Asif says, they didn't want to sign to a major. They kind, they really wanted to sign to an indie. So it was like, all like, who cares? And he was just like LOL town with these like, you know, people whining and dining them, which is really funny.

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's also funny just to see more Stein of it all because of his obviously legendary history, but, and then also just the Bell and Sebastian song Seymour Stein, which is like, all, if you want to know about Seymour Stein's vibe when it came to trying to sign indie bands in the 90s and beyond, just listen to that song.

• 1:29:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm such a Seymour Stein fan in broadly, but then maybe not granularly, but I didn't know him. I'm just, he brought a lot of great music into this world, I'll, I'll say that.

• 1:29:24Yasi Salek?

  Again, Asif says in Meet Me in the Bathroom that they really just wanted to sign or stay with Touch and Go and Wichita, but then they got their first royalty statement back from Wichita Records and it was for $32. And Asif said he called them and was just laughing hysterically on the phone and they were like, "Why, what's so funny?" And he was like, "You got a real estate statement for $32." And then they started laughing. And he said, Karen was like, "Okay, we'll call you back." Maybe two years, two hours later, she called me. She wasn't laughing at this point. "All right, we're gonna do the major." This is his story. But, I mean, yeah, it's important to make a living.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, some context would be, if just the Touch and Go side of it.

• 1:30:04Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:30:04Speaker 03

  You know, Touch and Go was one of the coolest indie labels of leading up to that era and they kind of started to wind down once you got into the 2000s a bit, but like, it might not read contemporary ears, but Touch and Go like coming out of the 90s was like one of the coolest labels you could possibly be on.

• 1:30:22Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  And the kind of label à la Sub Pop, you know, or a Bar Souk or any of these where your royalty split was so much better. And unless there is a situation where there was some just major accounting, ugh, going on, like, you would be getting.

• 1:30:41Yasi Salek?

  It was a royalty for an EP that had just come out. You know, it's like, I'm sure it was.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the trade-off of that kind of a decision and it is a similar conundrum now, you know, even now, like, where you're just like, are you gonna take an advance that you may never earn back?

• 1:30:56Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  Or are you going to maybe get a nice 50/50 royalty split and make the kind of money that you can make if you're that one postal service album on Sub Pop? That, you know what I mean?

• 1:31:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, just carrying Sub Pop on its back for, for the past, whatever, several decades. It, also, I think it's important, the AAs said, and I believe them, I believe, I believe the AAs, that they were actually most motivated about more people hearing their music, which is, it's true, right? Like, this is pre, we got, we got to a point, maybe a bit after this, maybe mid 2000s, where you did have massive acts coming off of indie labels, right? Adele was signed to XL, The Arctic Monkeys are on Domino, you know, like, it became a thing where it was these,

• 1:31:49Yasi Salek?

  I presume it was probably the democratization that happened because of the internet, but like, indie labels became more able to blow up artists and get them into people's ears. That wasn't a thing yet. And I think from what they were saying is like, we just wanted more people to hear our songs. We wrote, we wrote songs that we wanted to be generational. We wanted like teenagers to hear them and like, less teenagers were probably gonna hear a Touch and Go release than an Interscope release, which is who they ended up signing with.

• 1:32:22Speaker 03

  And if you're in the, if you're in the recent history of, as we were saying, like with Nirvana and seeing what can happen in a best-case scenario. You know, that feels good. And this is also importantly, this is because the consolidation of major labels that was going on already at the time, but has now ground down to where there's basically one company, you know, it's sort of like, it's like one label.

• 1:32:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  I mean, not really, but there's three, you know, there's where they're so

• 1:32:47Yasi Salek?

  But that wasn't the case.

• 1:32:48Speaker 03

  There wasn't quite, you had more options. If you were being courted, you had more options.

• 1:32:52Yasi Salek?

  Interscope was cool as hell, man. Like Nine Inch Nails were on Interscope. There was like so much cool stuff coming out. Was it No Doubt on Interscope?

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. There was cool stuff.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Manson was on Interscope. Rock from the Crypt had signed to Interscope.

• 1:33:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It was, so I get it. I understand why they would do that. Nick said, we went with Interscope because they were like, we like what you're doing, fine. We wouldn't want to touch a thing. And we were like, we want that in writing. At the very beginning, we wanted to reach kids, teenagers. This is the time when music is the thing you identify with and identifies you and shapes your soul and your future self. And he's so right. He is so right. I mean, I found Nirvana. Nirvana was like my gateway to all good music. And because they were on a major and I was 11 years old, you know, like, or whatever, 10 years old, like, I probably would have gotten there, but it would have taken longer.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, because what they have when they're courting you is we can get you on the radio.

• 1:33:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And, and

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  And they can.

• 1:33:42Yasi Salek?

  And they can.

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  They could and they can. And that's still, and that's still the thing that moves the needle, you know?

• 1:33:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Does it, do you think it's still today does move the needle?

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Yasi Salek?

  Does it? I don't know much about that.

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  The only way you make money is if you're on terrestrial radio.

• 1:33:55Yasi Salek?

  Interesting.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  I mean, not the only way you make money, but it's, it's, if you're on terrestrial radio, you are making money.

• 1:34:02Yasi Salek?

  I don't remember the last time I've heard terrestrial radio.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:06Yasi Salek?

  I'd be in the car bumping Sirius XM, Love You, Johnny L. Skubert, it's the Dave Matthews Band radio station.

• 1:34:12Speaker 03

  Great, great.

• 1:34:13Yasi Salek?

  That's what we listen to in my car.

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  You need to do a, you know, they have that show, What Would You Play? That's the guest hosted, we need to get you a What Would You Play episode on D M B.

• 1:34:21Yasi Salek?

  On D M B? That would be my dream, if you're listening.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  I can work on that for you.

• 1:34:25Yasi Salek?

  Oh my god. I love it so much. Um, okay, well, let's talk about Fever to Tell. It's it is Time to Party. It's Time to Party on Fever to Tell, April 29th, uh, 2003. Um, I want to just say, here's what's happening in the music space in 2003 before we get into this. So, same year The Elephant by The White Stripes comes out, kind of a major deal. It's a lot of hip hop is really popular at this point. Get Rich or Die Tryin', 50 Cent, that shit is, that is my New York. Like when I, I mean, I moved maybe a year later, but Up in the Club, babe. It's Go Shorty, It's Your Birthday, the best. Come Away With

• 1:35:08Yasi Salek?

  Me by Norah Jones, huge major album. Linkin Park's Meteora, The Eminem Show, Beyonce Dangerously in Love, Black Eyed Peas Elefunk.

• 1:35:20Speaker 03

  Elephant and Elefunk in the same year, you know?

• 1:35:22Yasi Salek?

  You know, really spiritually connected albums, if you actually think about it. Evanescence Fallen, just shit is kind of weird, but cool, but weird. And not a lot of, I mean, Jets Get Born was pretty big.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But not a lot of big rock albums. If, unless I'm forgetting something from 2003.

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess 2003, you're, you are in the dying of nu metal.

• 1:35:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because like we said, Meteora, I mean,

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  Evanescence was kind of

• 1:35:52Yasi Salek?

  Hail to the Thief by Radiohead comes out, a lesser Radiohead album, if you ask me. Muse. We're kind of getting into like, the rebirth of, I guess, arena rock in a, the Mars Volta.

• 1:36:07Speaker 03

  Well, I guess the question for a more informed mind than mine is, is this the era that is the death, is that the death of rock as a mainstream commercial force? Because uh, this is when hip hop became the dominant commercial force on the radio and in general.

• 1:36:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Speaker 03

  Cause it is, you know, for a lot of us, the nu metal thing, like after you got that first sort of earliest corn stuff and

• 1:36:37Yasi Salek?

  The earliest corn stuff was great, which the earliest corn stuff was like early 90s.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, but I guess, I mean, like, yeah, that moment you were talking about earlier where it's like,

• 1:36:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, the Limp Bizkit, the stained

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  2000, 2001, like stained.

• 1:36:49Yasi Salek?

  I'm not a perfect person.

• 1:36:50Speaker 03

  My first Rolling Stone cover story was Stained. It's been a while.

• 1:36:54Yasi Salek?

  It's been a while.

• 1:36:56Speaker 03

  That was

• 1:36:56Yasi Salek?

  Great song. I'm sorry, it's a good song.

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  That was, I mean, I feel like that was 2000 or 2001. So then after that, it's that start, then you're getting shit like Three Doors Down.

• 1:37:06Yasi Salek?

  I think that guy died.

• 1:37:08Speaker 03

  Ooh, sorry.

• 1:37:08Yasi Salek?

  I'm so sorry, may he rest in peace.

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  But you know, it's like Nickelback, Three Doors Down, like some, some, you know, some crappity crap is happening.

• 1:37:16Yasi Salek?

  I, I think

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  Maybe you're getting the early like

• 1:37:18Yasi Salek?

  I think This Is How You Remind Me is one of the best songs of all time. And I will die on that.

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  No, that's, that's a fact.

• 1:37:24Yasi Salek?

  Do you know that it's the most played song on, on the radio for the entire decade of 2000 to 2010? The number one most played song on terrestrial radio was This Is How You Remind Me by Nickelback.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:37:38Yasi Salek?

  We got facts here. Um, yes, but to, to make it, to go back to our point, rock is a little bit dead. And, and it has been supplanted by, it's been supplanted by hip hop. And that's great, you know? And it's a little bit also by pop, right? Like we, by the end of the 90s, early 2000s, a lot of boy band stuff is happening and Britney Spears. And, um, we start to have the sort of rise of the female pop star again, in like a more major way with the Britneys and the Christinas and stuff. Um, okay, Fever to Tell. This album has no business being as fucking good as it is. I'll say it right here.

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's perfect.

• 1:38:23Yasi Salek?

  It's perfect.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  It is, yeah.

• 1:38:24Yasi Salek?

  It's, it's so crazy how fully formed it is, considering it's like, basically their first real collection of songs after like a four-song EP and a two-song EP. It sounds incredible. Um, they produced it along with Dave Salek. Man, we used to be a proper, I don't know what else to say about it. It's phenomenal.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  Well, also just like that thing of like, short songs that you're like, it doesn't need, I mean, doesn't need to be longer than that, you know?

• 1:38:57Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  Sometimes you just need two minutes, get in, get out. And you're like, yep, that was, that was it. And it just keeps moving. And the whole album is like 38 minutes or something.

• 1:39:04Yasi Salek?

  It's a real brevity is the Soul of Wit situation. Also, it has, we said earlier, the Inside You, there's two wolves. Side A, Side B is like, it really, there's one kind of Yaya's and it goes into a different kind of Yaya's. And they're both awesome.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Yasi Salek?

  But it's interesting how it just completely kind of shifts when you get to that. I don't know if it's exactly Side A, Inside B. I don't have the, um, the vinyl in front of me. Um, but

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  It's really sort of, I feel like it's sort of just like, only at the very end, you get to like, I forget what track number Maps is, it's

• 1:39:37Yasi Salek?

  It's like the fourth to last.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Fourth to last, right. So yeah, I guess maybe that is, right? Like

• 1:39:42Yasi Salek?

  Because Maps, Why Control, Modern Romance, poor song.

• 1:39:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, Modern Romance, like you're just like, as if Maps didn't fucking demolish you.

• 1:39:49Yasi Salek?

  Why Control. Okay, well, let's, you know what? Hold on. Let's take it from the top. Let's take it from the top with, with some of the making of this, um, album. So here's what Karen O said about Fever to Tell later on in 2005. She said, when we were all living in New York and we started the Yaya's, I was 21. I was the peak of being completely absorbed in the New York night scene and the New York music and social scene, although there wasn't much of a music scene at that point. But the whole hedonistic side of me was kind of trumping everything else. We were feeding off that manic street energy. It really did feel much dirtier and more antagonistic. And as the years have gone by, I think we're more removed from just being there. So we had to rely on other things that were inside of us. I think that's where the second half of Fever to Tell comes

• 1:40:31Yasi Salek?

  from. Why Control and Maps was this other side of us that started to get nurtured. We were relying more on our emotions and what was going on inside the inner turmoil rather than the outer turmoil. And I love that, like, description. Like, the first half of the album is like manic New York wildness, inks. And the second half is like, oh, we had to slow down and actually like, write songs from another place. And this is our interiority.

• 1:40:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I always, I still always wish I could hear some of like the songs that Karen was writing, like in that unitard, pre, like, you know, sad songs and like, how much of that, you know, kind of carries through to what you hear when that's sort of like, oh, maybe Yaya's isn't just fun time, good time Charlie kind of vibe. And like, it can, it can be, it can be both things at once. I feel like back when they were doing those earlier shows and you would hear them do Maps, like, it still, it didn't, you know, it tracks sort of sadder, like it's more of a melancholy moment on the album than it felt when they played it. But it was like, that same thing that they do

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  now when they play it, where Karen would give the long intro and just be like, this is for my love Angus at the time, you know, and Nick's love. And, you know, would say this, would do this thing as they were doing this sort of vamp into the song. And so it was such an important part of their set, you know? And as I was saying, like this thing of like Karen and Angus being this kind of like John and Christina-esque New York power couple thing. It just felt like it was part of like their brand.

• 1:42:08Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:42:09Speaker 03

  You know, that song felt, and almost in a way that it wasn't until we got more music from them to see that there's always going to be with Yaya's, that two wolves thing you're talking about, where it's like, oh yeah, we're always going to get some of the like devastating, I mean, when you think about the songs like that on fucking It's Blitz, like, not to skip over Show Your Bones, but there's so much of that on It's Blitz that you're just like, I can't, I had to take a break when I was re-listening to it because I was just like, this is too much.

• 1:42:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And I guess, I guess it goes back to like, everything Karen has said about herself as well. It's like, I know that they all write the songs together, but like, at least as the lyricist, you know, sort of setting the tone, like Karen contains within her, at least definitely in the beginning of this band, like this very outward persona, and then this very shy inward person that like comes out in some of these other songs. Yeah, it's, it's great. And I think maybe that's part of the reason that the Yaya's became what they became, that they became a sort of major force in rock music, because they weren't just one thing, you know? I don't know, I don't, I think the frenetic,

• 1:43:17Yasi Salek?

  amazing songs need the, the lower end of this like emotionally resonant stuff to ground it so that you can reach people on so many different levels. And so when you throw that album on, you're not just getting like a jolt and a kick in the pants. You're also like really feeling your fucking feelings. And for a teenager, that's all you need.

• 1:43:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's like you can, you can even more so get away with Boy, you're such a stupid bitch and girl, you're just no good dick. You know, if you also have

• 1:43:48Yasi Salek?

  Wait, they don't love you.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  A Maps or a Modern Romance or something.

• 1:43:52Yasi Salek?

  So they felt a lot of pressure, apparently. I read this, that like, you know, their EP had gotten all this hype. It had been floating around for two years. Karen said, you know, our first EP had done so well, we had changed so much from who and what we were back then, that I was nervous on how we were going to top it. But then Angus said, I don't think your EP is that good at all. I'm certain you can top it. And I was pissed, but then I felt relieved. It's a good tough love there. He's like, no, that was not good at all. They were kind of going the fuck through it because famously they canceled their reading show while they're making this album. Cause Karen was like, absolutely the fuck not. I'm not getting on an airplane. Like I'm tired and I think it's really cool. Like I heard her talking to Michelle Zoner about it and that Rolling Stone thing. And she was like, yeah, the best thing I ever did was start saying no.

• 1:44:37Yasi Salek?

  I I'm struck like many times by Karen O's like self preservation, but also like right sizing of things, you know, it's like, she was like, yeah, like, I don't care. Like I, there's more, there's, there's enough, there's no scarcity or like, I don't care about going to the Grammys. You know, like, I think it would be easy for me at 22, I would be probably seduced by that. Like, don't you think you might be seduced by that? And she was just like, I don't care.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think some of it, and I feel like maybe even in that Michelle's honor thing, she talks about this or alludes to it. It's like, it's also just the social battery. I mean, if you're an introvert, like you may be able to get up on stage in the olive oil and do the thing. But you're still an introvert who's social battery needs the power downtime and you, and it, and it needs it to the extent that it, it becomes life or death, you know?

• 1:45:30Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Especially when you're in that position and everyone wants a piece of you at every show. We've doled the press at the Gram. It's like, that's so much.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's, you know, in that conversation with Michelle's honor, she talks about this, like, even now it's hard for public people to be able to assert their need for recharge time for their mental health. But the idea that you're, everyone wants you to do stuff and you're gonna, I mean, I don't even think anyone used the phrase mental health back then. You know what I'm saying? They like YouTube used to be like, well, your mental health, for our mental health, you'd be like, uh, get the fuck out there.

• 1:46:04Yasi Salek?

  Right, like.

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  So she was, she was definitely

• 1:46:07Yasi Salek?

  She was a pioneer.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  Pioneer of just being like, no, as you're, as you say, being like, A, I don't care. I don't need to do that.

• 1:46:14Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  For my ego and B, if I don't do it, I'm going to be sick.

• 1:46:18Yasi Salek?

  Right. And I won't be able to give you what you need going forward. Let's talk about the art. I love this album art. I think a lot's been made about the album art and like people have said, like, I don't know. So as I said earlier, Cody Kritchlow did this. Um, he's incredible. Also a musical artist in his own right, goes under the name Sean. Um, I asked him, I was like, how did this happen? Cause I was like, I didn't even know. I was just like in my Wikipedia and I was like, aren't they Cody Kritchlow? And he was like, I literally got into an arts program at Parsons for a year. They put 30 students in these private art studios and I was going out every night. And I guess he was friends with the liars and Angus introduced him to Karen and he was like, I had a backpack

• 1:47:02Yasi Salek?

  of VHS tapes with my stop motion animation on it and gave her one. We used to be a proper country. And she was like, hey, you should just do all the art for our album. He was like, I was 19 and I didn't know how to use Photoshop. He's like, that's why all the art looks kind of bad. Cause I didn't know how to use Photoshop. But I don't think it looks bad. When I look at the cover of Feebre to Tell, I'm like, that's what it was like back then.

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:26Yasi Salek?

  That looks like what it felt like back then. Like, that's what everything looked like. There was neon and it was messy and it was kind of cartoonish. And like, it reminds me so much of like a rap mixtape cover. And Cody told me Karen was really into rap and wild style and stuff. And I was like, that makes so much sense. Like, I mean, don't you feel like that, when I look at that, I'm like at CineSpace. Like, that's what the inside of CineSpace looked like to me is like those colors, this kind of cartoonish, like the indie sleaze of it all. That was, that was the kind of tone and tenor of the time.

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I feel like to me, it's, it's not an iconic album cover, which is to say, I don't necessarily instantly picture it when I think of the album, the way you do with, with, with the cover of Abbey Road or something like that.

• 1:48:13Yasi Salek?

  It splits even with the Urs Fisher.

• 1:48:14Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. And so.

• 1:48:17Yasi Salek?

  It's true.

• 1:48:18Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 1:48:18Yasi Salek?

  But I love how on, I love how of its time and honest it is as like a kind of portrait, a snapshot of that time. Like even though it's like, I love that, the strokes, like hand on the butt, but that, that album cover could have come out in 1976. That album cover could have come out in 1991. Like there, it's not really of a time, right? It's just a cool image. This is fucking 2003. This is literally what 2003 looked like. This is a Scion commercial. You know, like, this is like, like it's all of that stuff that I remember of that time. Like it gives it to me in that visual.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's cool, the Cody Kritchlow of it all and the fact that, you know, the longevity of these artists and the fact that you're a 19 year old, like art school student and you meet this band and you do their art and then you're developing and to years later, you're like, oh, now you're Cody Kritchlow who makes all these, and still does work for Yea Yea's, but makes all these amazing visuals and videos and stuff.

• 1:49:13Yasi Salek?

  Grammy nominated for his perfume genius album art.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so it's like, okay, well, it's, some of what's so cool about it is just that it was this nascent kind of thing.

• 1:49:26Yasi Salek?

  They were all babies.

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:49:27Yasi Salek?

  I think, and hats off to Karen O for, you know, being like, this is cool. I want you to do it. Even though it was like, again, kind of high stakes, this is your first album on a major label. But it was great. Um, this album obviously did really well. People liked it. It hit 55 on the Billboard 200, which for, you know, an album that is coming kind of out of nowhere on a, on a major. Um, we'll get into it, but that really happened after Maps was released as a single, which was the third single.

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it actually did get played on like alternative radio, which felt kind of mind blowing at the time.

• 1:50:03Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

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• 1:51:39Yasi Salek?

  Okay, let's go through the tracks.

• 1:51:42Yasi Salek?

  Really starts off strong. I'm rich like a hot noise. It's fucking perfect. Also, I love, I love this, again, the persona game, right? Like Karen O was not rich when she wrote this song. They didn't have any money.

• 1:52:06Yasi Salek?

  There's something like that plays with like power dynamics in that song. I, I love it.

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's one of those songs. I mean, I guess maybe true of so many of the songs on that album where if you saw Yea Yea's perform at that time, you can picture Karen moving, you can picture her jumping and kicking. And it's like, it's, it's like in the code of the song, when you listen to it, that you can, it feels like it has movement.

• 1:52:32Yasi Salek?

  It's such a, also like a great album starter, cause it just starts with this bang. Like even the song is just like, gets right into it. Um, Day with the Night is just a fucking, to me, are a perfect song.

• 1:52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And also feels very like.

• 1:52:48Speaker 03

  Meta indie sleaze, you know, where it's just like, that's that's the theme song for what everyone's life was.

• 1:52:55Yasi Salek?

  You're doing it. You're using the term. I'm happy.

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  All right, listen, it's too late.

• 1:53:08Yasi Salek?

  Also, to me, this is a very PJ Harvey-esque song in the sense that it's like a song about personal sexuality that's like not super overt, but like it's definitely there.

• 1:53:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:53:21Yasi Salek?

  I love that.

• 1:53:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funny to imagine if you slowed down Date With The Night to Down By The Water pace.

• 1:53:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  It could be a PJ Harvey song.

• 1:53:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And it kind of pummels you, right? This album, like we were talking about, like the first, like, man, tic, black tongue.

• 1:53:37Speaker 03

  Black tongue is underrated as hell.

• 1:53:39Yasi Salek?

  It's really good. It's really, you can keep your black tongue. I found it at the mortuary. Ugh.

• 1:53:45Speaker 03

  And it also has, yeah, yeah, yeah, is.

• 1:53:48Yasi Salek?

  Just let it be. Yeah.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  But also so much of that stuff that was just like vocalizations that Karen would do, like in Black Tongue, like, uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. Ooh!

• 1:54:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, you don't need to write, you know, other artists may maybe try and make syllables of words to go with that. But it's like, no, this is, you know, it sort of reminds me of like Flat Duo Jets or something like previous generation thing, but yeah.

• 1:54:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she was like a naturally gifted, for lack of a better word, scatter or whatever. But this is like, this is like a thing in some really good rock music and kind of does go back to like the Little Richard and stuff that we were talking about. Like, this is like, if you can do that well, it's like its own instrument. And then you called earlier, but this is the song that ends, boy, you're just a stupid bitch and girl, you're just a no good dick.

• 1:54:48Yasi Salek?

  It's so good. It's wonderful.

• 1:54:57Yasi Salek?

  Okay, Maps. We gotta, we really should. Let's talk, let's just speak about, let's speak about Maps. What do you think it is about Maps that makes it such a classic, timeless song?

• 1:55:12Speaker 03

  I think it's, I mean, at the risk of oversimplifying, it's the combination of the words and the melody, but you know, definitely the, there's no underestimating the just, the actual melody is so that thing where you're like, it's, it feels familiar even though they made it and even though it was new and they invented it, you know? And I don't know if there's something psychological, let's get Malcolm Gladwell on the horn, to starting a thought with wait. It's really a hook, you know? Because you're, you really are gonna listen after this, wait, what's gonna come next?

• 1:55:50Speaker 03

  Brilliant, you know, I'd be curious to hear from Karen too, just like in the, in the evolution of that lyric where the wait came into it because if you just had almost any other words there before, they don't love you like I love you, it wouldn't. And I think that's what ultimately the Ezra Koenig tweet that led to the Beyonce song, it's so much of it is in the wait.

• 1:56:10Yasi Salek?

  It would be saccharine.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:56:14Yasi Salek?

  Without the wait. The wait makes it human. And I know she's

• 1:56:19Speaker 03

  I'm getting chills just thinking that.

• 1:56:20Yasi Salek?

  Right? And she said she took it from an email, like an actual email that she wrote Angus. And you can hear that. For me also, again, as a woman, often flagellated online for my, the way I speak. I, I felt very seen by this song because I say wait before I start sentences so often. It's just like, wait, is this? No, no, no. Like, it's, it's, I'm not saying men don't say wait before they think, there's like a kind of a vocal tic that a lot of like valley girl type girls have. And I, I was like, I don't know if that's what had Karen put it in there, but we've already heard from Nick Zinner that that was kind of, she was a valley girl, uh, speaking type person.

• 1:57:02Yasi Salek?

  But yeah, you're right. The wait is doing so much heavy lifting in this song to give it that, just it's unique.

• 1:57:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there's also, I feel like at the time, even though it, this scene was so small, when I first saw them playing that song, this scene where it was so insular and it's like the Karen and Angus of it, and you knew that this song was about what their life was like, which was they're in indie bands going on tour, but they're getting, but it's so tiny, but they are getting a lot of smoke blown up their asses. And the they don't love you like I love you, like, most people in their relationships with someone where you might have some jealousy or you might have, there's not this they. I think the they is also a part of it. It's like, who it for, for just civilians who are just

• 1:57:53Speaker 03

  who's the they that don't love you like I love you? But if you're a person with an audience, it's, oh, the, the fans don't love you like I love you. You're out on tour.

• 1:58:00Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:58:01Speaker 03

  We're looking at the maps of where you are.

• 1:58:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  The audience might think you're awesome, but they don't love you like I love you. It felt like it was, again, like, a song for us, the folks in the, in the audience who knew that these bands had fans in the first place. So I don't, it extends beyond that and it's a song for everyone and everyone loves it. But I'm intrigued about the context of it for everyone else, you know?

• 1:58:26Yasi Salek?

  Right. I think that's why it's so genius, right? Because it works on both levels. Like, it absolutely works on the level of like, they, your fans, they don't love you like I love you, you're adoring fans, you know? But also for, I think a normal person is just like everyone, like, I love you more than anyone else ever will, you know? Like, and I think people really can relate to that because that's like, that, that sort of like very young adolescent love is so intense and so like, it's like, no. Like, I love you more than anyone ever will, you know?

• 1:58:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's got, it's got some high stakes in it too. It's implied, it's implied that you're trying to persuade someone to stay. The, between the wait and the, you know what I mean? It's sort of like something that's maybe slipping away.

• 1:59:17Yasi Salek?

  I think this is where you, for me, I really hear Karen's like love of Leslie Gore and of of girl groups and the Shangri-Las and torch songs. Like, this is a torch song, you know, like, it's, it's like a, yeah, it's just so beautiful and sad. And the video, man, fucking gutting, you know? Watch this like close up of Karen and the, like, tears that, the other thing is like, you believe, you really believe her, you know? It feels so real and authentic, which is interesting in contrast to with this whole other persona that she's doing half the time. So maybe that's what made it so much more powerful, right?

• 1:59:56Yasi Salek?

  You have this sort of badass, silly, who gives a fuck persona, and then you're presented with this other side, which is like so vulnerable and so honest.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:07Yasi Salek?

  I don't care what anyone says, this is a perfect song. I think this song has done the same thing that Don't Speak has done, which is it's like, because it is so embedded in the culture and because it became such like a VH1 song that my mom loves, you know? People have like started to diminish its value by being like, oh, that's just this like corny, and it's like, I will fucking stop you right there. No, it's not. It's a masterpiece.

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:33Yasi Salek?

  You might have heard it too many times, that doesn't make it not a masterpiece.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  It's also like, yeah, it's the, and similar to Don't Speak, it's like that category of like, it's not a breakup, it's, it's a pre-breakup. It's almost a pre-breakup song. It's almost like you're like, we're, we might break up.

• 2:00:49Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  It's a love song when you're, when you might be breaking up. It's so, feels like so, your feelings are so at the surface.

• 2:00:55Yasi Salek?

  Which is almost what makes it more heightened, right? Because it's like, at least with the breakup song, it's like, okay, the conclusion has foregone, you know? Here, it's like, there's so much anxiety.

• 2:01:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07Yasi Salek?

  Ugh, it's a jam. But I'm gonna say something. My favorite yeah, yeah, yeah song is Why Control. It's my number one. I cannot hear the lyric, I wish I could buy back the woman you stole, without having every ounce of feminism on God's good earth flow right back into my body. It is, what a brilliant lyric. What a gut punch. And again, it can apply to anything, you know, any experience that you've had as a woman where you've been demeaned or assaulted or misjudged or, you know, insert fuck shit here. I wish I could buy back the woman you stole.

• 2:02:02Yasi Salek?

  I wanted to give props to this, this beautiful Kafkaesque Twitter person that I, I read the other day. Um, I think this person was, was joking, but of course, like, you know, in every humor, there's large grains of truth. And I was like, wow, Angel, Angelila dash YG, you captured most of the entirety of the female experience in one tweet. Here's what it says. Top five female experiences. One, realizing you're kinda chopped. Two, getting called fat for the first time. Three, realizing it was SA. Four, developing an ED. Five, crashing

• 2:02:43Yasi Salek?

  out over a guy you never even dated. And I was like, I know we joking, but you fucking nailed it. You knocked it out of the park. If a man ever asked me what it's like to be a woman, I'm just gonna send this tweet. I'll be like, it's like this.

• 2:02:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:59Yasi Salek?

  Fuck. Dragged my ass to hell over here with, and amazing. Anyways, I've digressed. That's how Y Control makes me feel. That, I think, and it, and it's also like, there's something really melancholy about it, but also like, it's a jam.

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17Yasi Salek?

  You know? I used to play it all the time when I DJed. I think it's a really good song to DJ, like, cause people get really into it, but also they get into it the same way. Like, I used to love playing Laid by James when I would DJ, because like, you're like, I'm sad, but I'm sad and I'm dancing. Like, it's like, really that kinda song. It's embarrassing that I did that on camera, but, okay.

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  It was beautiful.

• 2:03:39Yasi Salek?

  Thank you so much. And then, you're, you're a big modern romance girlie. It's beautiful.

• 2:03:43Speaker 03

  Well, I feel like modern romance gets overlooked because of Maps, because it comes after Maps, and because Maps is so the song of that kind, like, in that pocket on that album. And, yeah, I feel like modern romance has been sort of lost history, and the precursor of

• 2:04:02Yasi Salek?

  The Modern Love.

• 2:04:03Speaker 03

  Of, um, right, yeah, but also

• 2:04:06Yasi Salek?

  That's what I kept thinking of when I was like

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  But also, like, the tracks on its blits, like, you know, Soft Shock and Skeletons and stuff like that.

• 2:04:13Yasi Salek?

  I love Skeletons so much.

• 2:04:25Yasi Salek?

  She really, they really, all three of them, really fucking snapped with this shit. One of the, also, the, the last song goes back, it's like, a pure doo-wop song. Baby, I'm scared of a lot, but I ain't scared of loving you. It's like, really, really lovely. Uh, that's right. Fever to Tell, 10 out of 10. That's what we say.

• 2:04:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:04:43Yasi Salek?

  For me personally. It got an 85 out of 100 on Metacritic, if we're aggregating. Um, but I think in time, it was pretty, I mean, you'll remember better than me, but I think it was pretty lauded, right?

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  I think so. I think so. I mean, there was so much buildup to it, cause as you pointed out, it came out in 2003, and this is a couple of years of, you know, the buildup of Yay as Buzz. Kind of took a while for the album to come out, in, you know, relatively speaking, to when the buzz started, you know, and then, and so it felt like, it, in my memory, it didn't feel like there needed to be as much of a push for that album, because it had its own momentum. And so, it was a success even before it came out. I felt like, it wasn't like, it didn't feel like, what's gonna happen with the album? It felt like, oh yeah, this

• 2:05:39Speaker 03

  is, they're off to the races. This band is off to the races. As compared to Show Your Bones, where, in the cliche way, that that kind of sophomore

• 2:05:51Yasi Salek?

  slump, as they say. Although, I don't, we'll get into, I mean, I don't, I don't think it's as strong of an album as Fever to Tell, but I don't think it's, in any sense, like, a disappointment or letdown.

• 2:06:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the, it's, the phrase sophomore slump, it's like, I wish there was a phrase, hey, whoever invented indie sleaze, give us a new phrase.

• 2:06:10Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  It's not about, the slump is the result, is the implied result, that it, the fact that it's a cliche, is like, as if that's what always happens. It's not about whether that happens or not. In a similar way, you say, like, there are those of us who stand really hard for Room on Fire, as being the better Strokes album than is this it? But, it's, the slump is the result, it's to the pressure, what it's, I'm talking about the pressure, that the lead up to the album coming out is so, feels so high stakes. There's the, there's the line about, like, you have your whole life to write your first album, and then only a year to write your second album. It's this, it's all of the voices outside.

• 2:06:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. No, yeah, the slump is actually the perception. It's not, it's not the actual quality of the work. It's the, it's kind of the overcorrection, especially when you had a huge first album. It is almost like clockwork, cause I obviously do this for a living, so I see it every time. It's almost like, the critics are embarrassed that they were so laudatory of an album, and they have to be like, well, this one is not, like, it's a strange psychological thing, and it happens all the time when someone has a, like, knock out of the park first album. Sometimes, sure, it's correct. Sometimes the second album is like, not very strong. But sometimes, like, Room on Fire is a great example, and

• 2:07:33Yasi Salek?

  difficult to say it was Show Your Bones, cause I think it has some really strong, strong songs, but it, it's true. It's not as good as Fever to Tell, but it's, it's not a bad album by any stretch. They didn't like, you know, blow it.

• 2:07:45Speaker 03

  No, not at all. I mean, I think, yeah, it's interesting. I agree. I think there's, there's an overcorrection. There's also a, like, you know, it's sort of like demoitis, where, when you hear the demos too much, and then you hear the final version, you, initially, you're not sure if you like it as much, because you got so attached to the demo. And if you got really attached to an artist's first album, you hear the second one, and you're, and you have, and you, you're confused. You've confused yourself. Do I like this as much?

• 2:08:13Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:08:13Speaker 03

  Oh, no. You're worried. What if I don't like this as much? Maybe I don't like this as much. And it's just, it's, it's like a mirage, you know, that you create for yourself. And, you know, I think now, in critical circles, there's a little bit less of that tendency, because I feel like nowadays, media reinforces their own opinions to prove that they were right, you know? So they'll always, or the Grammys will give Grammys to the same people over and over again, to be, they're like, we, no, we got it right. We got it right last time, but

• 2:08:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:46Speaker 03

  It seemed to me, what I was thinking of earlier, I just remember, when it was leading up to Show Your Bones, that Interscope did these events to play the album for media, which had not happened for Fever to Tell.

• 2:09:01Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:09:01Speaker 03

  And I loved it the first time I heard it, but significantly, because they weren't Interscope, and because the publicist for Yay as at Interscope at that time, was the legendary and wonderful Jenny Body, who would come up with these really fun, she was the perfect publicist for them, so this is not a slight to her. She would come up with these fun, kooky ways of taking, like, Rolling Stone journalists to hear an album, an exciting new album. And we rode around Manhattan in a limo, me and some other Rolling Stone folks, listening to Show Your Bones, and the album sounded great, and it was fun.

• 2:09:36Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:09:36Speaker 03

  But I, that album to me, and is attached in my mind, to this memory of, like, a major label taking me on a limo ride, to listen to, you know, an art punk album.

• 2:09:47Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Yeah, it's really, also, of all their albums, it's like, the least limo ride album of all.

• 2:09:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It was fun, it was fun, and I loved the album, but I still think, like, oh yeah, that's the pressure cooker, kind of, that was going on, was that Interscope were like, oh, the Yay as new album, let's go on a limo ride. It'll be fun, it'll be kooky, and people will love it.

• 2:10:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, well, then that didn't happen. Um, well, before, before Show Your Bones comes out, it, there's a little while. It's three years. Karen now falls offstage in Australia. This is one major biographical point. Uh, the fall after Fever to Tell comes out. I mean, they're obviously touring pretty heavily. Um, Karen said, during the song Rich, I was on the edge of the stage, sort of draped over the monitor with my legs in the air, and I was really drunk. I flipped off headfirst, hit the guardrail, and landed on my back. Then the monitor fell on my head.

• 2:10:38Speaker 03

  Ugh.

• 2:10:39Yasi Salek?

  Security pulled me back up. I was limp, but I was still singing the fucking song. After I finished, I asked our tour manager to feel the bump on my head. Someone brought over a big bag of ice and a red cloth. I was wearing a red ensemble, so people in the audience thought it was all an act. I sang Maps, and then I said, I'm sorry, we have to end the show early. I have to go to the emergency room. She sang Maps, though. She made sure that they got their big song. It was at Liquid Fest, Livid Festival in Sydney. Um, so this was bad. Also, like, you know, there's a lot of talk about, like, again, they were going too hard, you know, even though Karen was starting to say no, like, there was not maybe enough no. They were all partying. They were 25 years old, of course, you know? They're probably not feeling as healthy. Karen was, her stage persona

• 2:11:21Yasi Salek?

  was really wild and crazy, and causing these situations. And Christian Joy said in Meet Me in the Bathroom, after she fell off the stage in Australia, she started to slow it down. They turned down, they did really turn down so much stuff. Like, I guess they got off for saying it live off of Fever to Tell, and they said no.

• 2:11:37Yasi Salek?

  Karen was supposed to be on the cover of Vanity Fair. But she amazingly had a rule that if they're not all three of them on a cover, she's not doing any of them. Which is actually really interesting, because again, they're on the same label as No Doubt. And there was some interesting talk where Karen, I think, saw what happened. I don't want to say happened to, but what Gwen Stefani experienced and then what her arc was. And she was like, I don't want that. Like, I don't want to be a solo, like, I don't want to be separated from my band and be made into this, like, sort of token, you know, pop star or whatever.

• 2:12:18Speaker 03

  Shirley Manson, too. They would always blur out the other guys.

• 2:12:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and you're like, hmm, please.

• 2:12:24Speaker 03

  It's a band.

• 2:12:24Yasi Salek?

  Excuse me, that is Butch Vig. Put some respect on his name. They got nominated for, I think, a couple of Grammys. Does that sound right to you? And the major one being Best Alternative Music Album. They lost to White Stripes, who won for Elephant. Interestingly, setting off like a very, kind of makes sense for their careers, right? Like, Jack White really became more of, like, establishment rock, you know?

• 2:12:51Speaker 03

  But again, this is exactly what I'm saying. Yay, yes, after that, we're nominated for that same award three more times and have never won. And the White Stripes and Jack White have won repeatedly since then.

• 2:13:02Yasi Salek?

  He was like minted then.

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  Either you fall into a black hole where it's like, oopsies, or you're, or you're, not to say over-recognized, because I'm glad St. Vincent wins Grammys. You know, but, you know what I mean? It's like, either they sleep, they're just sleeping on you forever. Or they're just like, oh, yeah, we love Beck, you know?

• 2:13:20Yasi Salek?

  Right, totally. It's also like a chicken or the egg, right? Like, once you get one, it's like, then you start participating in different things in your career. Then you start doing things because you're a Grammy Award-winning artist, like, you know?

• 2:13:30Speaker 03

  You can get, right, you can get morning show appearances that they're like, oh, they won a Grammy, cool.

• 2:13:34Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Nick Zinner did say that, Weird Al Yankovic came up to them and said he voted for them, though, so. I think that was cool. Right around after the Grammys, Karen O. moves to LA. Osip said in the book, "It turned, it turned when Karen moved to LA." I mean, it's no secret that definitely had an impact on her approach. Everyone changed. Karen said, "I was just looking for a change, you know? I just felt if I didn't leave New York at that point, I probably never would. I came back pretty regularly to see my family and friends. But when I moved there, were definitely large periods of time when the band didn't see each other. We kind of got on with the business of our own lives." She also said in the spin, I think it's this one. Oh, no, the one before, the 2006.

• 2:14:17Yasi Salek?

  She said, "Moving to LA was like moving to the desert, and the desert is a mirror. It's brutal. You see a lot of things that you don't like, so you're forced to build confidence. And you get out of that knowing that you can do a million things, and you can do them on your own." This is around the time she started dating Spike Jonze. And getting colonics, is what I read.

• 2:14:36Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:14:36Yasi Salek?

  It's so LA.

• 2:14:37Speaker 03

  Coincidence, coincidence that those things happen.

• 2:14:39Yasi Salek?

  2006 LA, or 2004 colonics? Popping out here.

• 2:14:45Speaker 03

  But yeah, I mean, dating, going from dating Angus from Liars, your scene mate, you know, like, to dating someone as older and as famous and as Hollywood.

• 2:14:58Yasi Salek?

  Which is interesting, because Spike Jonze occupies both places, right? Because he was also like this, like, very cool, like, skate world director of pavement videos.

• 2:15:09Speaker 03

  But that's so many years prior.

• 2:15:10Yasi Salek?

  That's true, yeah. And then at this point, he had done, being John Malkovich, probably at this, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, it's a change. And listen, these changes do have some impact on the band, which we're gonna get into. They tour a bunch, and then it's time to go into the next record. This was a bad vibe, is what I read. Okay, so what I read was, I guess in September 2004, Karen had started to work on a solo project with Sam Spiegel, who is Spike Jonze's brother, who went under the name Squeaky Clean.

• 2:15:52Yasi Salek?

  He had produced a song she had done called "Hello Tomorrow." I don't know if that's a song. It's like some music for Spike Jonze's Adidas commercial. This, this solo project, I don't, I couldn't figure it out. This never came out. She does put out a solo album in 2014. I don't know if it's these songs. Couldn't make heads or tails. But whatever this is, as it was intended to be, never came out. But that's kind of how she got involved with Sam Spiegel. And again, it's interesting that she was working on her own music, given the quote about the desert being a mirror that shows you you can do things on your own or whatever. But it was a big deal. She told Spin in 2006, "It was a huge revelation for me.

• 2:16:35Yasi Salek?

  I suddenly knew that all the suffering and conflict and frustration I'd been through with the Yay, Yes was not necessary to make art. Most artists just can't let go of the idea that you have to be sad to create something beautiful, where the word is out. You don't." Meanwhile, Nick Zinner is touring with Bright Eyes. He had that Headwound City, is that the name of the band? So he's doing stuff as well. He played guitar on the soundtrack for the Fantastic Four movie. Didn't know about that. I don't think that song actually ever made it into the movie. And then they're like, okay, we need to actually make a Yay, Yes album. This was not, this is not a happy time in the Yay, Yes. I can go ahead and say, because they said it, they didn't like each other. Well, Nick and Karen didn't like each other. It sounds like Brian was a bit of Switzerland. Here's what Osip said.

• 2:17:20Yasi Salek?

  "There were creative differences on how to get the next record off the ground, following her move and the Spike thing. All of a sudden, Spike's little brother, Squeaky Clean, became producer extraordinaire. When I had Flood lined up, I had Steve Lillywhite, I had Stephen Street, the Smiths producer, did blur. Steve Albini, people that would make better sense sonically. In the end, I will say the album sounds great. It was his first big record and he did it. And I don't think Karen had ever written and recorded at the same time, so God bless her for taking that on, but it took a toll on the band." Okay, so you can, no one really said anything. You can already imagine, like, there might be a little tension where someone's bringing their boyfriend's brother in, who has not produced an album, to produce her album.

• 2:17:59Speaker 03

  And you're also, like, trying to write the album and record simultaneously, yeah.

• 2:18:04Yasi Salek?

  I can't stop thinking about what a Steve Albini Show Your Bones would have sounded like.

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, or Flood, fuck.

• 2:18:09Yasi Salek?

  Flood, man. Also, I'm a Steve Lillywhite truther, so.

• 2:18:13Speaker 03

  Of course, the DMV of it all.

• 2:18:14Yasi Salek?

  Of course. Brian said, "I think Sam wanted to make a more computer-oriented LA DJ culture record." That's so exactly the 2004 of it all, man, that's sinister. That is, we are Steve Aoki Town. "You know, funky, weird keyboard sounds, processing the vocals, there's a bunch of delay, but Nick and I didn't want that. I mean, we're still a gritty rock band from New York." Sam Spiegel said, "I wanted Show Your Bones to have a timeless feeling to it. You can't place it anywhere. You can't say it sounds like downtown New York 2005 dance punk hipster music. I think Nick wanted to do a record that was like walking around on Ludlow Street at 4:00 in the morning, and your friends are drunk and jumping on some car." Hell, yeah, brother.

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  I mean, I feel like they did, it, he achieved that, I think. It does sound timeless. It doesn't sound fashionable, or it doesn't sound... I mean, to me, the album is more of a zooming out, and it is, works perfectly as a transitional album.

• 2:19:10Yasi Salek?

  They did stand off a little of the, of the sharp edges.

• 2:19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:16Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 2:19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, but, like, what works about it to me is that it refocuses on the songwriting itself, and it's less about, some of the energy is tamped down in a way that is not as instantly appealing as, like, Fever to Tell, but the focus on, like, the song craft itself ends up being like, oh, yeah, this, they're, these are not, this is not just like, jumping around and pouring beer and going, uh-huh. It's like the melody and the lyrics and everything.

• 2:19:49Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Listen, in fairness, Karen O. has said multiple times, and I respect her for not, like, trying to fake it. Like, she was like, I'm not a angsty 21-year-old anymore. I like, I'm not gonna make the same music. I'm a different person. It's been five years, you know? And I think you hear that, right? This is like the album of a person, people, but specifically a front person that's matured into like a sort of way mellower, different person. And so, yeah, she's not gonna be, you know, screaming about fucking and pouring beer on her head or whatever. That same spin profile is so fu... It's crazy that we'll never get this kind of stuff anymore, because no one does press like this.

• 2:20:34Yasi Salek?

  It's all just like hot chicken torture and here's my subway take. But it's so awkward, because it's so obvious they don't like each other. And they, they're like, there's a part where the interviewer's like, "So is it fair to say that you and Nick aren't getting along?" And Karen goes, "I think that's obvious."

• 2:20:54Yasi Salek?

  It's just rough.

• 2:20:55Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 2:20:56Yasi Salek?

  They're just not being friends here. Later, in an interview with an Australian magazine called Rip It Up, Nick Zinnor was like, that was, like, right, like, he was like, that was, you know, over sensationalized, very Hollywoodized. Those quotes, you know, they make us sound, that's not, it was just a turbulent writing process. And I was like, I think probably both could be true.

• 2:21:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:21:17Yasi Salek?

  Like, that day, you could have really hated each other, and it came off, you know,

• 2:21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:20Yasi Salek?

  in the thing. But I wonder, what I want to ask you is like, do you hear in the album that this is like something forged in the fires of, like, two people who are not agreeing on what they want to do and what they want the album to sound like?

• 2:21:37Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I mean, Show Your Bones and Mosquito are my least listened to Yaya Yaya's albums in their catalog. And so, you know, listening for this was the first time I had in years that I'd listened to Show Your Bones all the way through.

• 2:21:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:54Speaker 03

  And yet, in addition to the fact that they play a lot of those songs still live, and so I've heard them since then, I remembered it way better than I thought I did.

• 2:22:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:03Speaker 03

  Which I was like, as a testament to how good the songs are.

• 2:22:07Yasi Salek?

  It's got some absolute fucking banging.

• 2:22:09Speaker 03

  Because some of them I hadn't heard in years, you know? And I remembered that limo ride and thinking like, that as someone who desperately wanted to like that album, because I loved the band so much, that I did really love it the first time I heard it. And I felt like, oh, thank God, it is, it's really good. And I think it, I think it's, I think it's underrated more so, A, because it came in the shadow of such an impactful, phenomenal debut, and because, yeah, the production is less dynamic, you know, the production is a little more demo-y sounding than maybe if one of those other producers had made it, or if they had taken more time, or it doesn't, it wasn't until I was reading a little bit about it, too, that I was like, oh, was there

• 2:22:52Speaker 03

  tension? Like, I don't, didn't remember that, or...

• 2:22:55Yasi Salek?

  It doesn't sound fraught by any means.

• 2:22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:58Yasi Salek?

  Um, but then, I guess, like, I guess, reading about it, you kind of understand why it maybe, like, is neither here nor there in terms of sound, you know, like, it's got some of the similar, like, qualities of Fever to Tell, but there's a little something, I don't want to say missing, that's not exactly the right word, but like, it still, it didn't commit to a new direction.

• 2:23:26Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:23:27Yasi Salek?

  But it didn't leave, it didn't do the old thing either. Like, it kind of, it's like, exists in this, like, and again, I really like a lot of these songs, like, I think it's cool, but it isn't interesting, like, you said it earlier, it's a perfect word, it's a transitional record, like, it kind of lives in this, like, nether region between Fever to Tell and then what comes with, um, is it, it splits the next one? Yeah, which is like, obviously, like, then it's like, they really figured out, oh, we want to do this now.

• 2:23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, to me, yeah, it feels more like, Show Your Bones is the album where this song crap, the songwriting thing, a little bit more of serious songwriting, and less of, like, kind of personality, and it's just the, the Fever to Tell thing of where, yeah, they, minimal ingredients with maximal impact, but then this sort of zooming out and just being like, okay, what about working harder on the song craft itself? And having that be the thing that carries, you know, like, it, it was an important thing they needed to do to get to, and so maybe they strip away some of their personality

• 2:24:35Speaker 03

  a little bit, or some of the signature sound and personality, but you get, but then you can get to the albums that follow where it brings both of those things together, you know?

• 2:24:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I can, I can just imagine, like, again, like Nick said, why was it so bad? I don't know, Karen and I hated each other, we didn't trust each other. I can imagine in that scenario, it's much easier to say, I don't want to do, it's much easier to say no than it is to say yes to something new, right? So like, when there's not trust, you're sort of gonna like negate some stuff and then carve out what you can from what's left.

• 2:25:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:25:11Yasi Salek?

  And I, and I think that's kind of what you hear. Um, that being said, I think some, okay, well, first of all, my second favorite Yaya song, which is not even on this album, it's a fucking B-side to Gold Lion, is Let Me Know. I lo, why was that, why was that song on this album?

• 2:25:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:29Yasi Salek?

  I am a deep lover. If there's only one person in a, what, what is that, you know, if there's 100 people in a room, you know, I am the one who loves...

• 2:25:38Speaker 03

  Are you Giga? Are you getting me, Giga?

• 2:25:39Yasi Salek?

  Giga, exactly. I just, I think it's one of the best love songs ever, and I love how abruptly it ends. I love the lyrics, like, I couldn't see, I couldn't hear, it shut me off when you were near, like, really captures that sort of, like, I'm gonna mess it up again, that, like, dizzy, like, high fucked up feeling you feel when you're like really into someone, you know, like, you're almost like, I'm gonna fall off a cliff. And, and I love songs that, um, feature the words, I'm calling, or I'm calling out your name, or I'm calling out, and it has that, too. I just love that, I think it's a perfect song, and I don't understand why it didn't make it on the record.

• 2:26:24Yasi Salek?

  But, again, it's the B-side to Gold Lion, which is also a classic Yaya song.

• 2:26:29Speaker 03

  And I mean, Cheated Hearts is one of their greatest songs.

• 2:26:32Yasi Salek?

  Sometimes I think I'm bigger than the sound? Bruv. It's, again, Karen was really good at writing this kind of song. It's amazing. It's, I mean, I don't know exactly what it's about, but like, the lyrics, take these rings and stow them safe away, it's like, a little bit of, like, ambivalence, what about commitment, about marriage, like, it's a really good song.

• 2:26:57Speaker 03

  And it's this thing that she has the ability to do of having a melody that is like a nursery rhyme.

• 2:27:05Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:27:07Speaker 03

  But, but it's also really original. It's like this, you know, obviously, a lot of great pop music does this, but where you're like, this is so primordial, this is so elemental, but it's also new.

• 2:27:21Yasi Salek?

  It's, and also what she does is she like buries the razor blade in the candy, you know, like, it is this, these, like, really familiar sounding melodies, and then you'll hear the lyrics, and you're like, what?

• 2:27:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:27:32Yasi Salek?

  Like, I wouldn't expect that, that was, that's what you're gonna say.

• 2:27:44Yasi Salek?

  I also fucking love Mysteries.

• 2:27:46Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27:46Yasi Salek?

  She brought the screaming out on that one. She had a little, she was like, fuck you, Nick Zinnor, no, I don't know if that was, but I'm just imagining where she got in that booth, she was like, oh, let it out. I just, I love how it starts as one thing and then devolves into this whole other, like, screaming freak out.

• 2:28:08Yasi Salek?

  I like Warrior a lot. I think this album actually has really good songs.

• 2:28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Obviously, Phenomena is a great tune, a great entry in the Yaya's catalog, and you've got to love a song that is like three layers deep of reheated nachos, you know, in a, in a good way.

• 2:28:25Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:28:35Yasi Salek?

  Honestly, it was pretty, not that poorly received critically. Pitchfork maybe gave the lowest, 6.8, but, you know, Entertainment Weekly gave it an A-, Los Angeles Time gave it three and a half stars, The Guardian didn't like it, two stars, um, Rolling Stone, four stars, did okay.

• 2:28:54Speaker 03

  Grammy nominated?

• 2:28:55Yasi Salek?

  Grammy nominated once again, um, hit a higher spot on the Billboard 200, which this always happens, right, when you, your first album just doesn't, it's like...

• 2:29:03Speaker 03

  They didn't know yet.

• 2:29:03Yasi Salek?

  They didn't know yet, and then people are anticipating this one. Um, didn't win the Grammy. Um, and then, I guess they were like, bye, fuck you, never see you again. I don't know, that's, I have no idea, but I would imagine, once you're done with that, you're like, I would love to not see your face. Um, they do have a song in 2007, um, the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack, I don't know if you remember this.

• 2:29:27Speaker 03

  As you would at that time.

• 2:29:28Yasi Salek?

  Ceilings is what it's called. And then they put out an EP, so this is what gets really interesting, right? They put out an EP in July of 2007, which is clearly what Show Me Your Bones might have sounded like if they had continued in the direction of Fever to Tell and not decided to leave that direction, right? Would you agree?

• 2:29:53Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:29:53Yasi Salek?

  Is Is?

• 2:29:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, with Down Boy, yeah.

• 2:29:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Down Boy, uh, Rockers to Swallow, Kiss Kiss, which I love, and then Isis? Is it Isis or Is Is? How do you pronounce the song?

• 2:30:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I think, I thought, I think it's Is Is, but...

• 2:30:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. That's one of the greatest Yaya songs. It's amazing. But yeah, this, this is like, more in conversation with Fever to Tell. It's like, almost like, they went kind of back, and they did. It was like, these were songs that were written prior to, um, prior to Show Your Bones, so...

• 2:30:26Speaker 03

  It's almost like they took these rings and stowed them safe away, so they could wear them on another rainy day.

• 2:30:31Yasi Salek?

  Another rainy day!

• 2:30:42Yasi Salek?

  What is notable about this EP, besides the fact that it's awesome, is that it's produced by Nick Lonnie, who worked with Kate Bush on The Dreaming. He produced Inexcess, Gang of Four, The Posey's, Silver Chair, and, most importantly, Public Image Limited's Flowers of Romance, which Karen said was one of their favorite albums. And he is who produced It's Blitz.

• 2:31:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:31:05Yasi Salek?

  That's how he gets in.

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• 2:32:42Yasi Salek?

  They do a Q&A, and this is, it gets really funny in the mid-2000s, as you know, since you were a working journalist. It starts to get real, like, I have to go in the Wayback Machine and pull up a blog, because that's what the press was back then. So this is a Q&A in drowned-in-sound. Just one question from a, from a fan that I wanted to read in their answer. I would like to know, along with a lot of other people, I suppose, why you're releasing older material as new, rather than using some of the songs on Show Your Bones? I'd also like to know if your third album, proper, is going to be more of the same, but even mellower, or the complete freak-out, cat-related concept album you threatened last time? Oh, I forgot, there was like a joke going around that Show Your Bones is gonna be

• 2:33:25Yasi Salek?

  a concept album about Karen O's cat, whose name was like Coco something? Remember this at all?

• 2:33:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:33:31Yasi Salek?

  That was a joke. It didn't happen. Okay, so this is from a man named Duncan. Nick Sinner said, "Hi Duncan, it's not necessarily releasing older material as much as it is recording songs that have never been recorded. We've been playing some of these songs live for a while, and our fans have been asking us to record them, so we did. And they didn't really fit in with the last record." And Brian said, "The songs on the EP were indeed written in between Fever to Tell and Show Your Bones, but for this project, they felt fresh as ever." And then Karen said, "Before we record," they don't say the name, but it's Blitz, "we wrote at this little bunker practice space in the city. We just went there in spurts, so it never felt like we were there for an extended period of time. Nick and I were just jamming and doing our thing and playing really unself-consciously, just being in the moment. That's how we did Fever to Tell."

• 2:34:15Yasi Salek?

  So just talking about how they write It's Blitz. And that's what comes out in 2009.

• 2:34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:23Yasi Salek?

  It's a long time away from, it's a long time away from 9/11.

• 2:34:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:28Yasi Salek?

  If, to, to use a sort of marker of like, when this band sort of emerged, really more 2000, but like, were really like hyped. So now we're like eight years in.

• 2:34:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, Obama's president.

• 2:34:42Yasi Salek?

  Obama's president, um, Susan Boyle has a big album.

• 2:34:49Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:34:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:50Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:34:51Yasi Salek?

  You know, just trying to place this in time. The Fame Monster you mentioned, Gagah, earlier, comes out. What do you remember about 2009? Shit got weird. Is, this is like where, not that this is how I'm placing myself, but like, when did hipster runoff start?

• 2:35:07Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, it was around that time. I mean, to your earlier point about sophomore albums doing better on the charts, in 2008, Vampire Weekend's Contra debuts at number one on the Billboard,

• 2:35:18Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:35:18Speaker 03

  which is their sophomore album.

• 2:35:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:20Speaker 03

  And, you know, similar to any of these other artists, you, you know, you, the definitive album would be the self-titled debut album. Contra's a great album as well, but that was a, that wasn't major. That was the most commercially successful and also debut moment from, and, and they were on XL. They were truly an indie artist. This is the phase you're talking about, where not everyone's going to a major as quickly. They're saying, what kind of, what can we do staying in the indie world? And that, that was huge. I mean, none of these other artists had ever achieved that commercial, like mainstream commercial success. So that's the era when you start to get this new sort of zone of blog rock.

• 2:36:04Yasi Salek?

  Blog rock.

• 2:36:04Speaker 03

  Merryweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective comes out in 2009.

• 2:36:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. In case you guys were wondering, hipster runoff started in 2007.

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  So this chapter of indie is in full swing, and it's like, very like, and now even the fact that, you know, it's like, if TV on the radio or The Walkman had started a couple of years later, you know, they would have done better commercially, probably, but they were just like a little bit too ahead of that curve, in the same way that Sonic Youth, you know, TV on the radio being the Sonic Youth of blog rock or something. But obviously, you have all of the Vampire Weekend, post-Vampire Weekend, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective, who, Animal Collective, you know, had been around for a minute, but were really on the ascent.

• 2:36:50Yasi Salek?

  This is like, I picture this time, it's like such a bizarre time, right? Because it's like the last gasps of the monoculture, maybe even? And I'm just, I just picture like, you would see a magazine cover with like, or maybe not a cover, but like whatever, a magazine spread where it's like Kanye West, Bethany Cosentino, you know, like, a guy from Animal Collective. It was just such a strange landscape. We love Best Coast on this program, as you guys know, did the theme song. But it's just like, you, like, Best Coast is a great example. You could still become kind of famous as like, an indie rock band and, and have great success, which, you know, deserved, but like, a little, a few more years after, that kind of gets taken off the table, right?

• 2:37:34Yasi Salek?

  Because the monoculture starts to really die. It's just such a, such a strange era for music, in my humble opinion. Also Pitchfork is really king of the castle.

• 2:37:48Speaker 03

  Peak, peak Pitchfork, yeah. Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, yeah. I think for a lot of indie artists, a frustrating time if you're a newer indie artist in there, because there's this illusion that any, it's like, if Vampire Weekend could have a number one debut for their weird album that was not commercial, then, then maybe that's just all for the grabbing, and it's like, well, it's not, it's not that easy.

• 2:38:12Yasi Salek?

  I mean, really, the only, I guess the big, big, big one was Phoenix.

• 2:38:17Speaker 03

  Hmm. Yeah, that's, oh, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is that same year, yeah?

• 2:38:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, 2009. I just had to Google it, because I didn't remember off the top of my head. But like, other than that, it was like Paramore, who had already kind of, you know, laid some groundwork, but like, there were huge muses still fucking dominating, which, could I tell you?

• 2:38:36Speaker 03

  Who won the, who won the alternative Grammy for, in, in 2010 for '09?

• 2:38:41Yasi Salek?

  Let's see.

• 2:38:42Speaker 03

  I'm gonna guess it's some Bjork album I forgot, like Volta or some.

• 2:38:45Yasi Salek?

  Volnir Kira or whatever. No, it was Phoenix.

• 2:38:47Speaker 03

  Oh, it was Phoenix, okay.

• 2:38:48Yasi Salek?

  They won Wolfgang, Amadeus Phoenix. The Open Door EP by Death Cab for Cutie was nominated? That seems crazy.

• 2:38:55Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:38:57Yasi Salek?

  Not that it's not a good album.

• 2:38:58Speaker 03

  No, that's like trying to play cleanup because they hadn't nominated like, plans or transatlanticism.

• 2:39:03Yasi Salek?

  Sounds of the Universe, Depeche Mode. It's an interesting one to put. Anyways, yeah, Phoenix. Whatever, I just wanted to, I just love to, I just love to reminisce. I love to walk down memory lane.

• 2:39:13Speaker 03

  Hmm, same.

• 2:39:14Yasi Salek?

  Even though I famously hate this time, and I think it was very ugly and disgusting.

• 2:39:20Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:39:21Yasi Salek?

  Just my take. All of that, sort of, just ugly, ugly clothes, myself included, just bad clothes, bad haircuts.

• 2:39:26Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:39:27Yasi Salek?

  Just rough, rough stuff. Let's talk about It's Blitz. It's a dance album.

• 2:39:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was surprised. I wasn't expecting them to make that kind of album. I was so delighted by it, and to me, Zero is, yeah, one of my top three all-time favorite, yeah, yeah, songs. The video, that's, it's so, it's so anthemic, it's so triumphant, it's so, it's, ah, muah, perfect.

• 2:40:03Yasi Salek?

  Again, what a great album opener. They're really good albumers. I mean, when you think about it, it's like Rich.

• 2:40:09Speaker 03

  Rich.

• 2:40:09Yasi Salek?

  Yes, Rich and then Gold Lion, they really do a good job opening. But yes, Zero is incredible.

• 2:40:16Speaker 03

  Get your leather on. I mean, come on.

• 2:40:19Yasi Salek?

  Come on. Nick Zinner said that they deliberately wanted to change the sound of the band, which again, I think you can kind of hear the growing pains of that on Show Me Your Bones, but now it's like we've committed. He actually said in an article, "It just seemed like there were too many mopey, whiny indie bands out there."

• 2:40:37Yasi Salek?

  What do you think he was talking about?

• 2:40:38Speaker 03

  I don't know. It's hard to say in that time what that could have been.

• 2:40:43Yasi Salek?

  Shots fired is all I'm saying. We won't.

• 2:40:45Speaker 03

  Do not come for Sufian.

• 2:40:46Yasi Salek?

  Do not come for Benjamin Gibbard on my program.

• 2:40:52Yasi Salek?

  I'm just kidding. I'm creating false indie rock if it didn't exist. I think more notably, Nick Zinner had gotten really into vintage synthesizers.

• 2:41:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:41:03Yasi Salek?

  And he, they recorded this in Texas.

• 2:41:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, Sonic Ranch?

• 2:41:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Sonic Ranch. And he brought this vintage ARP synthesizer. And I guess I read something that Karen was like, "Why don't you just not play the guitar for a couple of days and see what happens? Like, you're so into these synths or whatever." And this is what happened.

• 2:41:24Speaker 03

  Ta-da.

• 2:41:25Yasi Salek?

  Ta-da. And we love it. And again, it sounds like they had healed, you know, they had healed their rift. So we're back on the same team. It's just fucking phenomenal, man. And Dave Salek is involved too. So they have two producers on this, which I also think does something cool because

• 2:41:42Yasi Salek?

  Dave Salek is obviously a genius and particularly a studio genius. But I am so enamored by the old school producer vibe, like that we're like, I do vibes. Nick Lani is like, I come in and I'm like, what if you? Like, I picture them all just being like, "I'm pouring some red wine on the piano. How does that make you feel? Play from that space." And I don't know if that's what Nick Lani did, but whatever they did, they snapped, bitch, because this album is amazing. Do you think, where do you hold this next to Fever to Tell?

• 2:42:12Speaker 03

  I mean, that's the thing. It's just like, it's always, there's always that like iconic, like Fever to Tell is iconic and definitive and all that stuff and perfect.

• 2:42:23Speaker 03

  But then you have to ask, is It's Blitz actually a better album? You know, is It's Blitz the best Yea Yea's album? Case, case could be made. You can have your emotional attachment to Fever to Tell, but if you were to play the whole catalog for a new ear.

• 2:42:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:44Speaker 03

  Or just on some sort of, you know what I mean? Like on the box, if you're like taking all of the boxes, It's Blitz might be the one.

• 2:42:52Yasi Salek?

  I think what's interesting is the, back to the Inside Them, There's Two Wolves situation. I think the emotional wolf on Fever to Tell is stronger than the emotional wolf on It's Blitz.

• 2:43:05Speaker 03

  Get out.

• 2:43:06Yasi Salek?

  Maps, Why Control and Modern Romance.

• 2:43:09Speaker 03

  No, but you're talking about Softshock, Skeletons.

• 2:43:12Yasi Salek?

  I love Skeletons. I love Softshock. I actually really like Dragon Queen, featuring Tune Day from TV on the Radio. I love Hysterics.

• 2:43:21Speaker 03

  Hysterics? Come on.

• 2:43:22Yasi Salek?

  These are great songs, but Maps? Why Control?

• 2:43:26Speaker 03

  I know, but.

• 2:43:27Yasi Salek?

  Modern Romance. Yeah. Maybe that's just a personal preference thing. I just got so troll.

• 2:43:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not, I, I don't know. I truly like, I don't know. It's, and maybe they're equal, maybe they're equally great. Right. Maybe they're equally great, but I just think like for them to come back from Show Your Bones having some dark cloud around it, or some doubts, or some feeling of a little wobble, or

• 2:43:55Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:43:55Speaker 03

  It is such a great, I love that for Yea Yea's. I love.

• 2:43:59Yasi Salek?

  Such a fuck you. Yeah.

• 2:44:00Speaker 03

  It's just so good.

• 2:44:01Yasi Salek?

  Is their most streamed song.

• 2:44:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:03Yasi Salek?

  It's their most popular song.

• 2:44:04Speaker 03

  Well, cause all the remixes and shit.

• 2:44:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Well, even, yeah, the 8-track remix obviously really, but like their number one most streamed song is the regular Heads Will Roll. 410, almost 411 million streams.

• 2:44:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 2:44:18Yasi Salek?

  Let's go. I would have thought it would be Maps, but it's Heads Will Roll.

• 2:44:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:22Yasi Salek?

  That's a god tier song. That's why. It is an absolute god tier song. My, my king, Richard Ayade. Do you know him? The British comedian? He directed the, the video for it.

• 2:44:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:44:36Yasi Salek?

  I learned that yesterday. Made me really happy because I love him. It's the one where there's like a werewolf dancing in front of, they're like, they're kind of doing a lounge.

• 2:44:46Speaker 03

  I can't picture that video.

• 2:44:46Yasi Salek?

  They're doing like a lounge act kind of thing. And then there's just like a werewolf in a suit that's giving Michael Jackson dancing in front of them. It's a really cool video.

• 2:45:02Yasi Salek?

  Zero into Heads Will Roll is like a knock you out one-two punch.

• 2:45:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:45:09Yasi Salek?

  Of a start to an album.

• 2:45:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you're right. Softshock, Skeletons. This is great. This is a wonderful album.

• 2:45:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:45:17Yasi Salek?

  Hysterics, Fall Sweetly, Hang Heavy, You Suddenly Complete Me.

• 2:45:22Speaker 03

  That's what I'm saying.

• 2:45:25Yasi Salek?

  My tears.

• 2:45:37Yasi Salek?

  It did really well. I think this might be their most highly reviewed album. So yeah, I guess to your point, like it probably is like the, the objective or like critical favorite as like, this is the best Yea Yea's album.

• 2:45:52Speaker 03

  Well, it's like, yeah, it's, it's, you know, production wise too. It's just so, it's so listenable, you know? It's so like, you could introduce someone who doesn't have like ears that are as art leaning to it and they would vibe to it without needing too much, sort of like you had to be there type.

• 2:46:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:12Speaker 03

  Vibe.

• 2:46:13Yasi Salek?

  I think what's really cool too is that like, it's not the kind of thing where like Dylan goes electric. You know what I mean? Like, it's, it's so clear that in their DNA was already dance music from day one.

• 2:46:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:27Yasi Salek?

  So it's, it's more of an evolution than it is like a departure.

• 2:46:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:32Yasi Salek?

  And I think that is a really cool thing. Again, I love a departure as well, but like, I think that it felt, I think it hit so hard because it felt so like, oh, they just enhanced this part that they had always had within themselves.

• 2:46:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's cool. Like, you know, obviously it's a classic thing for artists that start off being very like stripped down and, and elemental and that kind of thing to be, to add, to add some, to add some stuff.

• 2:46:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:58Speaker 03

  And then it's like, oh yeah, it's good to have room to add because then you can take the thing you were trying to do and make it, you know, not to say necessarily better, but like you can have it go farther into different areas or make it sound even more like what you were imagining when you had fewer tools and, and/or didn't know how to use those tools as well. You know, it's like, okay, maybe Nick Zinner just hadn't spent the hours doing the synth, if you plug that cable there, which is one of those instruments that always, whenever I see one, I'm just like,

• 2:47:34Yasi Salek?

  bloop bloop. No, no idea.

• 2:47:36Speaker 03

  How do you even do it?

• 2:47:37Yasi Salek?

  Love it.

• 2:47:37Speaker 03

  But, you know what I mean? It's just like, okay, well, it just takes those 10,000 hour or whatever, that experience to be like, oh no, the, this was always in us, but we just didn't know how to use that gear yet.

• 2:47:48Yasi Salek?

  And this is a testament also to Interscope and also to 2009 because they were given those 10,000 hours. Like actually, Nick Lani like pointed out in some interview that it was really unusual for a album to be written and created in the studio, like because production budgets were usually cut back from that. That's a lot of studio time, you know? But they were given that room to do it. And I mean, Interscope believed in them and bet on them. And also people were still buying CDs.

• 2:48:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think hopefully, you know, at that point, you're getting good reviews. You've got Grammy nominations for the two albums you've done so far. You've earned

• 2:48:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:24Speaker 03

  A bit of, you know, slack.

• 2:48:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. They hit 22 on the Billboard 200. Yeah, it did great. People love it. To this day, people love it.

• 2:48:34Speaker 03

  Definitive album cover.

• 2:48:36Yasi Salek?

  Urs Fisher photo of the egg. It's so cool. They played at Saturday Night Live finally. It is notable that they did play Maps.

• 2:48:44Speaker 03

  Got to. They were probably requested to.

• 2:48:46Yasi Salek?

  Oh, I think they were told to.

• 2:48:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48:48Yasi Salek?

  I'm just speculating, but also Zero. So very cool. And then they played Coachella. Did you go that year?

• 2:48:53Speaker 03

  I did.

• 2:48:53Yasi Salek?

  Yep. I did not go that year.

• 2:48:57Speaker 03

  They had that beautiful like sun, whilst the sun is setting moment.

• 2:49:01Yasi Salek?

  Great slot.

• 2:49:02Speaker 03

  Just pre, you know, dusky vibe.

• 2:49:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. In October of 2009, the Where the Wild Things Are movie came out. Karen Owen and Spike Jonze had broken up at this point, but she did the soundtrack. And Nick and Brian played on it too. And also Deer Hunters, Bradford Cox. Really underrated, I gotta say. I still to this day, I'm like, one of the most underrated musicians and bands of all time is Deer Hunter.

• 2:49:31Yasi Salek?

  And other people from other bands.

• 2:49:35Yasi Salek?

  And then in 2010,

• 2:49:38Yasi Salek?

  I guess Nick and Karen were like simultaneously going through a really hard time. Like Nick is going through a breakup and Karen was really depressed. And I think she was living in New York again. And they just started jamming together with no, like, you know, no intention. And as Nick said, we were just playing songs because we needed to. And it was very therapeutic and it felt really good to do. And that was about a year. And those jammings of a year is what turned into, three years later, the album Mosquito. I actually really like Mosquito. I think Mosquito, fair to say, kind of a maligned Yaya's album, right?

• 2:50:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it has some good stuff on it, for sure.

• 2:50:27Yasi Salek?

  I just love when people get weird.

• 2:50:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50:30Yasi Salek?

  Okay, do I return to it? Not that much. So that's the thing. But I think I was expecting to like, put it on and be like, ooh, what, hard to listen to. And it's not hard to listen to.

• 2:50:42Speaker 03

  No, not at all. I think it is interesting, I was, when I was refreshing my memory, I was like, oh yeah, people really hated that album cover. It was like a whole thing online.

• 2:50:50Yasi Salek?

  Cause I knew the album cover was really cool.

• 2:50:52Speaker 03

  It's cool.

• 2:50:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And also it's like a really cool artist, like, I get, like, it's this, um, artist name, I'm gonna mispronounce, I'm sorry, it's a South Korean animator named Bomsik Shimbe Shim, who goes by Shimbe. And, um, I think it's, I think it's so cool, but people thought it was like bootleg Garbage Pail Kids. Actually, I read that Karen O's favorite movie was Garbage Pail Kids movie. I think it's fucking awesome. Is it because of the slimy, what is?

• 2:51:20Speaker 03

  I don't even, I read, I clicked on some, like, not that this doesn't still exist, but it's just like, there's too much dissection on the internet of things on the internet. That were just like, is this really, there are blog posts about the reaction to the, like, I was just like, how was this? I don't remember, it didn't reach me that that was going on at the time.

• 2:51:43Yasi Salek?

  And I'm sorry, I love These Paths. I think it's a really cool and weird song.

• 2:51:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:51:47Yasi Salek?

  And you know what? You're fucking amazing for putting Dr. Octagon on a song. I love Dr. Octagonologist, the album.

• 2:51:58Speaker 03

  Dr. Octagonologist?

• 2:52:00Yasi Salek?

  If you guys don't know, Dr. Octagon is an extraterrestrial, time traveling gynecologist from Jupiter who treats chimpanzee acne and has a 208-year-old uncle with the skin of an alligator, paging Dr. Octagon.

• 2:52:13Speaker 03

  Cool Keith, obviously, the brilliant.

• 2:52:15Yasi Salek?

  Fucking best artists of my lifetime. Blue Flowers is a jam, I loved that album.

• 2:52:23Yasi Salek?

  And it's fucking sick as hell that they got Dr. Octagon on the horn on the James Murphy-produced track, Buried Alive. It's fucking weird and it's cool and I respect it.

• 2:52:43Speaker 03

  Dr. Octagonologist is one of the best album titles of all time. It's a great album, too, but also.

• 2:52:48Yasi Salek?

  Throw that shit on, you guys.

• 2:52:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:52:49Yasi Salek?

  Slap that shit on, it's so good.

• 2:52:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:52:53Yasi Salek?

  That was, my friend did that for Halloween one year and I thought it was an amazing costume.

• 2:52:56Speaker 03

  Oh, nice.

• 2:52:56Yasi Salek?

  The alien, alien gynecologist.

• 2:53:00Yasi Salek?

  That's fucking Dan the Automator produced that album.

• 2:53:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:53:02Yasi Salek?

  One of the greatest producers of all time.

• 2:53:05Speaker 03

  Don't get me started on Handsome Boy Modeling School.

• 2:53:07Yasi Salek?

  Honey, I will love to start with you on Handsome Boy Modeling School. I still listen to that album, well, the first one, all the time. The Truth, there's the one with, the song with Mike Patton, one of the hottest songs of all time.

• 2:53:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:53:22Yasi Salek?

  We Used to Be a Proper, is what I'm saying. But yes, okay, I understand why Mosquito is not the strongest point in the Yaya's discography. But I, I love that they were like, fuck it. Let's be weird, you know?

• 2:53:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:53:40Yasi Salek?

  The emotionally resonant songs are still good, but not as strong as on the other albums. Although Wedding Song is quite sweet. And I believe Karen sang that to her husband, Barnaby Clay, at their 2011 wedding reception, which is really sweet.

• 2:53:53Yasi Salek?

  Just happy we got to talk about Dr. Octagon, if I'm being honest. Um, okay, so that's, that album kind of comes and goes. Also, again, it's fucking 2013. Like, this is

• 2:54:06Yasi Salek?

  Avicii, I love that Avicii album, but like,

• 2:54:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:54:09Yasi Salek?

  Miley Cyrus' Bangers, Daft Punk, Random Access Memories. This is when AM by Arctic Monkeys comes out.

• 2:54:17Yasi Salek?

  2012, I believe, is when Spotify started. So we're, we're kind of, we're not in streaming music era yet, but we are post Napster. And we are in this sort of no man's land of like iTunes music downloads and stuff.

• 2:54:32Speaker 03

  Which unfortunately, in retrospect, was such a great time and we didn't appreciate it while it lasted, from an artist perspective.

• 2:54:38Yasi Salek?

  Right, because you actually paid money for it.

• 2:54:39Speaker 03

  People actually purchased things.

• 2:54:41Yasi Salek?

  But did they? I mean, people ripped, people just ripped shit off the internet. That's why I did.

• 2:54:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:54:44Yasi Salek?

  If I'm being, if I'm being, if I keep you a hundred with you.

• 2:54:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it worked out better than it works out now.

• 2:54:49Yasi Salek?

  That's true.

• 2:54:50Speaker 03

  And there was a reliable metric, because you could

• 2:54:53Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:54:53Speaker 03

  keep track, you couldn't game the, how many downloads a song had system, the way you can, how many streams it has.

• 2:55:00Yasi Salek?

  This whole shit's gonna fucking implode, but, um, at this point, not quite yet.

• 2:55:05Speaker 03

  But it is interesting that after Mosquito, they went away for a long time. Not, which is not to say that they're just like, ugh.

• 2:55:10Yasi Salek?

  Do you think it was because of the negative feedback?

• 2:55:13Speaker 03

  No, I think just life and Karen had a baby and, you know, just then time passes and then.

• 2:55:18Yasi Salek?

  Also 14 years into being in a band, you know?

• 2:55:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think,

• 2:55:23Speaker 03

  I love, I love when artists go away for a long time.

• 2:55:27Yasi Salek?

  Same.

• 2:55:27Speaker 03

  Oh my God, it's the best.

• 2:55:28Yasi Salek?

  Go ahead, you know, live your life. Especially when they come back and you're like, holy fucking shit, you still got it. Which, guess, guess what, spoiler alert, is what happens with the Yaya's. Small biographical notes, Karen does put out a solo album.

• 2:55:43Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 2:55:43Yasi Salek?

  Crush Songs, it's lovely, on Julian Casablanca's label, Cult Records. That's the year that she tells the enemy that the Yaya's are in a bit of a hiatus. And they were on a large hiatus. They did in 2018, cover Big Stars 13 for Spotify, which is actually one of my favorite covers of all time. It's so good, like that with Karen O's voice.

• 2:56:03Speaker 03

  And then what was the year that she and Ezra did Moon Song?

• 2:56:06Yasi Salek?

  Oh, I don't remember.

• 2:56:07Speaker 03

  They performed that on the Oscars and everything, that was lovely.

• 2:56:10Yasi Salek?

  What movie was that for?

• 2:56:11Speaker 03

  It was a Spike Jonze thing, wasn't it? It was for?

• 2:56:13Yasi Salek?

  Her?

• 2:56:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:56:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Yeah, good one. Okay, and then in 2022, a smooth eight years later, they put out Cool It Down. And guess what? This album's fucking amazing.

• 2:56:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:56:28Yasi Salek?

  Don't you love when that happens?

• 2:56:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:56:29Yasi Salek?

  It's unusual.

• 2:56:31Speaker 03

  I remember listening to an advanced album, because I wrote the bio for the, you know, the like, label bio or whatever to go with it. And I just cried instantly.

• 2:56:41Yasi Salek?

  I mean,

• 2:56:42Speaker 03

  They, they did it.

• 2:56:43Yasi Salek?

  When the single came out, spitting off the edge of the world with Perfume Genius, I lost it. I was like, this is so beautiful. Also, guess who directed the video?

• 2:56:54Speaker 03

  Kritchlow.

• 2:56:55Yasi Salek?

  Cody Kritchlow, so sweet, what a beautiful arc. I love that song. I love that Karen O took her, like, cause like, you know, I think a lot of what happens and why people make a lot of late career work not being as good is because you're not,

• 2:57:14Yasi Salek?

  something that's so great about rock music is that it taps into like, really primal emotions that you just don't have as much anymore when you're like, a mom and a wife, not, this is whatever, an adult who pays taxes and is like, you know, having a mortgage or whatever. It's just like, you know, you have perspective and you're, but I love that, like, that doesn't have to be true, because you can tap into emotions about anything and kind of take from that place. And spitting off the edge of the world is about climate, the climate crisis.

• 2:57:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, for one, Karen and like so many artists is just so sensitive, so emotional, really can take herself there, I think, at any time or place. She, in my interactions with her, often it feels like the emotions really are just below the surface.

• 2:58:03Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:58:04Speaker 03

  And I think if you're that kind of person, and also maybe in general, having a kid really brings, brings it out. I mean, there's even the song on Cool It Down that, where she talks about, you know, because there's these, a couple of spoken word moments that are really beautiful. Then she's describing asking her son, you know, to say what, what the moon looks like or something.

• 2:58:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:26Speaker 03

  And, you know, you see, you see things through your child's eyes and it gives you this just profound feeling of newness to your own way of experiencing the world. And this high stakes thing about, especially with things like the climate crisis where you're like, this is my children's world and we're ruining it, you know?

• 2:58:43Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:58:56Yasi Salek?

  It's my favorite kind of late, late, late-stage album because it's not trying to recreate the past or like the youthful version of the IAs. It's dealing with the concerns of maturity, you know? And I think that's where bands get it wrong. You know, like whenever I like, I hear a late-stage album by a band, not whenever, but often, and I don't like it, it's because I feel they're trying to like, kind of reheat their own nachos, if you will. And like, that doesn't, it doesn't feel authentic, it doesn't work. And I, I do think like, or they're trying to chase youth, you know, like, and it's okay.

• 2:59:37Yasi Salek?

  I love when artists talk about, like, the last Cure album, for example, which is like such a meditation on like mortality and like death. I know we might think The Cure is always talking about death, but this is like really talking about like, I'm in my 60s and like, what is it, how much longer do I have? I love that kind of stuff, you know? Or even like divorce, or like things that are really like, the, the meat of maturity. I think that makes much better art when you're at that life stage than trying to sort of like, put on your old tight pants and create from that place.

• 3:00:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, to me, Cool It Down feels very much like a continuation of It's Blitz. And, I mean, it's good in a lot of the same ways that It's Blitz is good. I mean, just, it, it's good for a lot of the same reasons that It's Blitz is so good. It's sort of another album like that in terms of having like, poppiness and, you know, danciness and, um, yeah, those songs that have those dynamic shifts and are really big. And then also the sort of more delicate, like spoken wordy, like moody shit that they're so good at as well.

• 3:00:51Yasi Salek?

  I really, oh, I should mention Dave Citic and, and Andrew Wyatt and Justin Raisin produced this album, but I really love Fleas because it has the sort of elements of that ESG song, Moody. And Karen was like a big ESG person also. I hear a lot of ESG in early IAs, it's like such a continuum. And I'm like, I loved that nod back to like, again, it's a difference between a nod back to your roots and back to what inspired you, as opposed to like, trying to just be that again.

• 3:01:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:01:31Yasi Salek?

  So it's a wonderful album.

• 3:01:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the thing of like, of like, if we're gonna extend the nacho reheating metaphor, it's like when you're like, I'm putting it on for 30 seconds, like you're just hard acknowledging it, you know? Like, she, she does the thing in Fleas where, um...

• 3:01:50Yasi Salek?

  Where she sings, that's where we dance like ESG.

• 3:01:53Speaker 03

  First she's, first she goes, she does the like this, and then you're like, oh wait, what is that again? And then she tells you, she actually sings the lyric of, you know, "Very moody, yeah, yeah, yeah." And you're like, oh yeah, okay, you know, no, it's a direct nod, it's an interpolation, it's not a sort of like, if you know, you know. It, in the way that Phenomena has that, where sort of like, we're, we put, the nachos are in there, we're putting it on for 30 seconds, we're not, we're not afraid to, to point, to point the shining light at the thing, our influence in this song.

• 3:02:26Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:02:27Speaker 03

  Which, you know, reminds me of like, the Vampire Weekend song Step, which is like three layers of things they interpolated that are just sort of like, we don't, we don't, we're not pretending that we didn't get something from something else that we're like messing around with.

• 3:02:41Yasi Salek?

  We're not hiding our influences, we're like actually embracing them and sort of showing them to you. Um, yeah, I mean, this is the best possible upswing of an ending. This is kind of how we felt when we did the Madonna episodes, even though, um, had it come out yet? I don't think it had for her last album, but it's like, oh, you really want, you really want, and I, the IAs are not dead, it's not, I'm not saying this is their last ever album, but as far as we're concerned for our story, it is. And it's like, I love it when we go out on a high.

• 3:03:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Also, Different Today, it really slaps from that album.

• 3:03:11Yasi Salek?

  It's great. It's really great, I love that song.

• 3:03:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:03:14Yasi Salek?

  I saw them play when they did, I'm sure you did too, when they did this like couple of underplays prior to this album coming out. It was just, it was so cool to just like, be there again and, and see Karen O again and just hear the songs again, and she had this amazing costume on, and I was like, oh yeah.

• 3:03:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:03:37Yasi Salek?

  Well, Jenny, we did it. We did it, Joe.

• 3:03:41Speaker 03

  We did it.

• 3:03:42Yasi Salek?

  We got to the end of the IAs story, or the end for now. Um, thank you so much for joining me to talk at length about the career of the IAs. And thank you for joining us. Please come back next week for a new episode of Bandplain. If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandplain. Our guest today was Jenny Ellis Q. You can hear her on Sirius XM and also on her own podcast, LS Q, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Rob Sanderman and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production by Jacob Parnett.

• 3:04:24Yasi Salek?

  Executive producers for Bandplain are Gina Dalvec and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clayton. And graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, Producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fantasy and DMB Radio on Sirius XM. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 3:04:54Yasi Salek?

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