Pete Yorn goes back to where it all started on solo acoustic tour
The way Pete Yorn talks about his own songs doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
“I just write about weird, mundane, everyday things,” says the L.A. singer-songwriter by phone, as he prepares for a seven-date tour up the coast that will bring him to the Catalyst on April 28.
But a song can’t be about something both weird and mundane, right? Aren’t those adjectives, in this context, mutually exclusive? Theoretically, yes, but consider “Closet,” a fan favorite from Yorn’s 2001 debut album, musicforthemorningafter. It is not metaphorically about a closet; it’s literally about being inside one. “I’m walking around your closet/I want you to say my name again,” he sings, and suddenly “weird” and “mundane” don’t seem so strange together.
There are plenty of similar contradictions wrapped in compulsively catchy riffs on that record, which was one of the biggest things to hit L.A. that year. It went gold, made critics’ end-of-the-year best lists everywhere, and spawned the hit single “Strange Condition.”
Yorn had moved to L.A. from his native New Jersey and started gigging around just five years before, and though he signed to a major label, they didn’t seem too enthused by musicforthemorningafter. He never saw success coming.
“The record was in the can for over a year before they put it out. I didn’t have any big expectations,” he says. “But when it came out, things moved pretty quickly. It was a wild time.”
Part of the legend of his debut album’s success was the oft-repeated fact that Yorn not only wrote the whole record, but also played all of the instruments on it. He was spoken of as some sort of wunderkind, since almost no one realized he had done it completely out of necessity.
“I didn’t have any money to hire people,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’ll just play it and be done with it.’”
His sound evolved, though, from that album’s eccentric alt-folk—sort of a cross between Springsteen and the Smiths—to more straightforward rock on the follow-ups Day I Forgot and Nightcrawler. By 2009’s Back and Fourth, he was recording with a full band, and releasing another album that same year with Scarlett Johansson, Break Up. For 2010’s self-titled album, he recorded with Black Francis of the Pixies. Suddenly, he couldn’t play with enough people.
“At some point I was like, ‘I’d really like to collaborate,’” he says. “It was more out of curiosity.”
Most recently, he’s been playing in the Olms with longtime friend J.D. King, who he met through Johnny Ramone’s widow, Linda Ramone. They released their retro-infused debut album in 2013, and it seemed like Yorn had completed some kind of linear journey from one-man band to actual bands. But suddenly, it’s all come back around—not only because he’s playing solo and acoustic on this tour, but also because he’s switched it up in the studio yet again.
“After all that, I felt the urge to go back and make a record in my old style,” says Yorn of the upcoming album he plans to release this year—on which he once again plays all the instruments. But this isn’t a fourth chapter to the trilogy he once considered his first three albums to be. In fact, now he’s not even sure they were a trilogy, and he views his work very differently.
“It was me trying to make sense of my body of work at the time,” he says. “I’m starting to realize it’s all one big thing. They’re all one big tapestry, ’cause it’s me moving through time.”
Pete Yorn plays at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28 at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, $30/$33.
