After The Morningafter

06/22/2003 8:00 AM, LAUNCH
Lyndsey Parker

With the 2001 release of his critically acclaimed debut, Musicforthemorningafter, New Jersey-bred singer-songwriter Pete Yorn became rock 'n' roll's new It-Boy. With his rugged, all-American good looks, rich-yet-ragged voice, and straight-outta-the-heartland songs, the man was at time even compared to that other famous Jersey troubadour, the Boss himself (Yorn's even been known to cover Bruce's "Atlantic City" in concert). That's clearly a lot of pressure for a young new talent, but by the time Yorn had landed his record deal, he'd been working hard for more than four years--relocating to L.A., answering dozens of "Musician Wanted" ads, playing countless tiny coffeehouse and club gigs, and finally getting his big break when he was asked to score the Farrelly Brothers movie Me, Myself, & Irene. That led to Musicforthemorningafter--written and performed entirely by Yorn (he also co-produced with uber-producer Brad Wood), the accomplished album proved that Yorn was more than just a pretty face, and not just the product of industry hype. Clearly, this guy was the real deal.

Yorn recently returned with his sophomore effort, Day I Forgot, the product of two years of nearly nonstop touring and writing--and album cuts like the instantly catchy and anthemic "Come Back Home" and "Crystal Village" or the urgent, anxious "Burrito" indicate that for Yorn, all that hard work has paid off, and for his fans, it has been well worth the wait.

Yorn recently came by LAUNCH's studios to play some acoustic songs and chat with managing editor Lyndsey Parker about meeting Iggy Pop, recording in garages, playing cover songs, being a reluctant heartthrob, and how he almost gave up music to become a lawyer. Read on for more details...

LAUNCH: How is Day I Forgot different than your first album?

PETE: It was actually recorded in the same place. We recorded the first record, Musicforthemorningafter, in Walt Vincent's garage, and we recorded most of this record in his garage and the rest of it down the street from where he lives. So I worked with the same people on this record pretty much, except for a different mixer--Andy Wallace mixed it, not Brad Wood, although Brad worked with us too. The main thing that's different, I guess, is that it's a natural progression from the first record. When I went in to make it I had been on the road for 18 months, and I had changed and the guys I had worked with had changed--they worked on other projects and stuff--and it's just naturally different. I wasn't trying to recreate anything that I had captured on the first record; I just wanted to move forward and see where it took me. And I think it ended up being more of a rock record than Musicforthemorningafter. I think it's a lot more electric-guitar-driven, there's not so many loops on it...it's kind of more a classic-rock-style record. I remember thinking that I wanted to pair down the production and make room for the melodies and the vocals, and so that's what I was into when I was making this one.

LAUNCH: You didn't want to record in a big deluxe studio this time?

PETE: Nah, I'm keepin' it real. I just want to do what my instincts tell me to do. I'm not a believer of spending crazy amounts of money. Like, as far as working in the garage, I don't need the pressure; if I'm in a big fancy studio, it's like, 2,000 or 3,000 dollars a day. I don't want to think about that. I just want to get in there and experiment and get into my own space. And with home studios now, it's so much easier. You can get some really good-sounding stuff. So I just like to work that way; I don't need any outside pressure.

LAUNCH: Where do you feel you fit in on today's musical landscape, among all the nu-metal and teen-pop? Do you feel part of a singer-songwriter movement, along with David Gray, Norah Jones, John Mayer, et cetera?

PETE: I feel I'm definitely a singer-songwriter, but I think there's a singer-songwriter in every band, whether you're hiding behind a band name or not. Some people sometimes call me like a folkie, but I don't see that at all. See, I'm a drummer: I learned the drums first, I was into metal bands when I was little and all that stuff. I kind of like to embrace the rock side of things. But whatever people want to compare me to, that's fine.

LAUNCH: Is it true that you write your songs on the drums first, before adding the guitar parts and all the rest?

PETE: I'm very into beats, and I'm a firm believer that you can't have a great rock band without a great drummer. I think that it all starts there in some sense. The vocals and the melodies and the lyrics are super-important, but the heartbeat is the drums. So yeah, I write a lot from that, but also the guitar and piano--but it's fun to start songs from a beat and build on top of that and see how it develops.

LAUNCH: Do you miss playing the drums live?

PETE: Yeah, I do. I'll play drums any opportunity I get. Like if a friend is like, "We need a drummer," I'm like, "All right, I'll do it!" I really like to play the drums. In fact, last night a friend of mine who is making a new record needed a drummer, so I played drums all last night on his new record down in Venice. It was really fun for me. Playing drums with other people inspires me a lot. Before I had been signed with Columbia and I was playing around, I was looking for inspiration, so I answered all these "Drummer Wanted" ads in [free L.A. paper] The Recycler that were like, "Keith Moon-meets-Stone Roses band looking for drummer." Or, "If you like the Posies, we need a drummer." So I answered, like, 10 ads and went on all these drum auditions. It really gave me perspective about what was going on around town, and it was just fun to play with all these different people. In fact, that's how I met Joe Kennedy, my keyboard player: I was his drummer in his college band, and that's how I met him, from answering a "Drummer Wanted" ad. I think it said, "Posies/Big Star/Teenage Fanclub-sounding type band looking for drummer."

LAUNCH: When did you come to L.A. to pursue music?

PETE: Spring of '96. I went to school in Upstate New York and I had been writing: I had written hundreds of songs just in my room and I had never played out. I had played drums in Joe's band, but I had never played out on my own. I think I played once acoustic in a coffeehouse, but then never again. But I had all of these songs, and by the end of school, I guess it may have even been in the middle of junior year, I was like, "My major is cool, but I think I just want to try music." The main thing was I didn't want to go down a different line of work and still be writing song every day and being passionate about music, then being 30 years old and saying, "Damn, what if I went after music, what could have happened?" I didn't want that to be my life story. So I figured I'd finish school have that under my belt, go pursue music for a few years. I remember thinking things that if I went to law school, that would be another three years, and then hopefully I'd get a job after that, so this is how I rationalized things: I remember thinking that I was in "music grad school." And I had about three or four years and then I could go be a real doctor or lawyer or musician, which is what I was doing. So that's how I made sense of it. It took me four years to get a record deal. I was just playing around L.A., and I remember thinking, "Well, Pete, this is the last year you got. You better get something going!" Luckily I did. I was almost out of time on that.

LAUNCH: Would you really have been able to stop after four years?

PETE: I don't know. I remember when I first moved out, me and my friends formed a band, and we were like, "We're going to get signed the first night!" We had no idea about the music business. We had all these songs and thought we were the best...and you know, cut to four years later and we're like, "What are we doing?" And then things started to happen. I met Walt Vincent, started recording on ProTools and working out of my house and getting higher-quality recordings, and working on computers itself was inspiring to me writing-wise, 'cause it was just a whole new way of working. Everything just stared to click from there.

LAUNCH: Going back to the drumming thing...How did you get into playing the guitar, and why didn't you go that route instead of just sticking with drums?

PETE: Well, it happened when I was really young. My older brother taught me how to play drums when I was 9 years old--he had a drum set in the house, he was a drummer--but then quickly after that I learned the guitar. My mom was kind of a folkie, and she had all these old broken acoustic guitars with a couple of strings sitting around, and I'd play "Smoke On The Water" on one or two strings. And as soon as I learned some chords, I started writing songs. It just kind of happened naturally, and I just liked doing it.

LAUNCH: I know you play most of the instruments on your records. So when you're in a live setting onstage, how is it having other musicians playing what you originally played on the record?

PETE: Um, the band that I've put together, they've been with me for a while--they're all old friends of mine, and they know all of my music and they get it, so I think it takes it to another level. The studio is one thing, and I'm proud of the records and the way they turned out and I think they have the soul that they need to have--they're not sterile--but when we play it live it just rocks more. You crank up the amps, you go through a PA, and there's just this natural thing that happens. So while it's so much fun for me to play the instruments in the studio by myself, it's equally as fun, in a different way, for me to play live with the band. It just kind of rocks out more live. I remember at times in the studio thinking when we were mixing a song, "Wow, this one is going to be fun to play live!" And usually it is.

LAUNCH: Your first album got a lot of attention and acclaim. Was there any pressure to make a successful second record?

PETE: It's really weird--there was no pressure from the label at all. Even still, they seem really excited about the new record, but they don't really put any pressure on me at all. The only pressure I get really is from myself, but for me, like I said, the first record was what it was and captured a period in time, and when I went in for this one I wasn't trying to say, "Oh, that record works, so I'm going to try and recapture that." It wasn't like that at all. I wanted to capture a new experience. And you know, life's too short to worry about that stuff. I just want to play music and have fun with my band and enjoy it.

LAUNCH: Let's talk more about your songwriting. How autobiographical are your lyrics?

PETE: A lot of times they seem really autobiographical, but they're about other people, or I'm kind of talking through somebody else--like I'll have a friend who had an experience and I'll be telling the story through their eyes, then filter it through myself. There aren't that many autobiographical songs on my records, actually, 'cause I'm uncomfortable with that. I don't need to hear my drama every night when I'm playing onstage! I kind of like to interpret what some one else's drama is and then filter it through myself and spit it back out. So maybe I'm lying, trying to protect myself. But yeah, I do like to tell stories on my records.

LAUNCH: Were you surprised at how the first record was a slow build? It wasn't overnight success.

PETE: Yeah, it happened kind of slowly. It was great that the people at the label believed in me and stuck with me, which is pretty rare these days. And they're still sticking with me, which is cool. I was just surprised, because a lot of the music at the time that was popular, or on the radio, or was selling, I don't think sounded like anything that I was doing at all. I was surprised that I could go into the studio and make a record without compromising at all, just make a record that I believed in and made me feel good, and have it come out and have people respond to it. Whenever you can stay true to yourself and people to respond to it in a good way, that makes you feel good. So I was definitely surprised.

LAUNCH: I know you recently recorded a bonus-track cover of Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds"--with Lisa Marie Presley's blessing! And you always do great cover songs live. What are some of your favorite covers to sing?

PETE: I love "China Girl," that's really fun. I never really responded to that song until I heard Iggy Pop's version from The Idiot--then I was like, "Oh my God!" It just blew me away. It just had this swagger that the other version [David Bowie's version] didn't have. The other version is cool, but it's just something else. So I tried to capture Iggy's version in the way that I did it, and make it more of a rock song. Covers are just fun. Like, when I was little and I'd go to concerts and a band would go into a cool cover, I always thought that was so cool, and it's just a fun thing you can do. It usually gets the band the fired up and the crowd fired up, if it's done right. So we're working up some new covers for this tour. I know people are going to be calling for all of the old ones and I'll feel bad, but we're going to be playing new covers now. Hopefully they'll like them!

LAUNCH: Is there any one musician, living or dead, that you'd like to collaborate with if you could?

PETE: No, there's nobody I would like to collaborate with--I play all the stuff on the record myself and I just like to work by myself. No, I'm kidding! That's a really good question, and I've been asked that before, but I don't know how to answer it. I mean, the first thing that popped into my head was John Lennon. It would be pretty cool to try and write a song with John Lennon, but he's dead, so that's not a reality. Um, maybe someone living...I remember someone asking me and I said Chrissie Hynde. I'd really like to work with her, maybe sing a song or something--that would be really cool.

LAUNCH: You've gotten to meet a lot of your idols, people like Bob Dylan, since your first album started getting attention. Is there anyone you met that's really blown you away?

PETE: Iggy Pop! I played drums for Iggy at a concert. At the Shortlist Awards show, they put together a band" It was me on drums, Mike Watt on bass, Pele and Nick from the Hives, and Iggy singing. We played a bunch of old Stooges songs, and that was the highlight of anything, bigger than...anything! That was it. I'm a huge Stooges fan, so to meet Iggy was pretty cool. Also meeting and becoming friends with Johnny Ramone--I did a song on a Ramones tribute record and we became friends through that. That was pretty cool as well. But after playing drums with Iggy, I was like, "I rocked!" I felt like I had made it.

LAUNCH: Is it true that for you went to dive bars to test out your new material before completing Day I Forgot?

PETE: Yeah, when you finish a record, you have all these songs, and you're so close to it it's hard to tell. I listen in the car, and that gives you some perspective, but all of sudden you put a song on when people are around and it's a whole different thing. I think this record is really great to listen to in the car when you're by yourself and you just turn it up, put the windows down, and think about whatever it is you want to think about, but it's also really good to have on when you're in a bar--I somehow wanted to capture both. So I would just go to bars and go, "Can you throw this on?" I remember I was in New York and it was after I played a show, I went downtown to this bar where my friend was the DJ and he threw in the record and we cranked it; I remember a couple songs came on and thinking, "Hmmm, this is not for the record," not in that context: It broke up the flow. So I would cut those songs off. Like I said, it's so hard for me to cut 'em, so I needed find a way to know what to put on the record and what not to. So I just tried that.

LAUNCH: What was the overall reaction of the people at the bars?

PETE: People were generally into it. It was usually pretty late, and people were pretty drunk at that point anyway.

LAUNCH: You seem to care about what bar patrons think, but what about journalists? Do you read your own press?

PETE: I try not to pay attention to it. I think initially I did. It was all so new to me. I had friends who were just emailing me going, "Check this out!" But my sister-in-law always said, "You can't read your own press, because if you believe the good then you have to believe the bad too." So at the end of the day, I try to avoid it. Even if it's good or bad, it might not be necessarily right; it's just someone's opinion. I don't want that to dictate how I create music.

LAUNCH: You seem to be one of those rare artists that's struck a balance between being critically credible and commercially successful. How do you manage that without compromise?

PETE: I don't know. It's a fine line between credibility and commercial success. I guess all of the greatest bands ever, if you look back, a lot of the greatest bands like the Velvet Underground or the Stooges were ignored at the time by pop culture--and they're still not really pop culture, but the impact that those bands had years later is undeniable. You go back to those records and everybody knows who those bands are. But I have pop sensibilities--I don't like long intros and wanky guitar solos, I try to keep the songs tight. Whether I'm singing about really dark stuff, or it seems like I am, I try to put it in a context of a pop song, a short song. So maybe that's how.

LAUNCH: You definitely have a lot of fans. Do you feel uncomfortable being considered a heartthrob?

PETE: It always embarrasses me. I mean, it's nice to say that, but I don't know...next question!

LAUNCH: OK, just one more. Even though it took four years to get a record deal, you've had a lot of success in a relatively short period of time. Do you look back and think, "Whoa! How did all of this happen?"

PETE: Yeah--it's pretty cool that you get to be in a place where you get to play music every day. And your mom is proud of you for it! That's definitely a cool place to be, but you know, we worked really hard over the last year and a half touring nonstop. I remember all of that, and when you work really hard for something, you appreciate it. And I'm just very thankful I get to play music with my friends, and I hope to continue to keep that going, because it's a nice lifestyle, although it gets crazy at times. But you know, I'm just starting. I've got a lot of work to do, and a lot of music to make. And just trying to stay focused on that.