![_The Preservation, The Dalles and SuperLiteBike at Beauty Ballroom [Show Preview]](http://austinist.com/assets_c/2012/05/the preservation-thumb-250x250-716401.jpg)
Bibles and Rhymes: An Interview with Why?'s Yoni Wolf
Despite its confoundingly inquisitive band name and general unclassifiability, the Bay Area/Cincinnati hip hop/indie act Why? has built quite the niche for themselves, satisfying those with a love for rhyme and meticulous, tightly-wound musicianship. Toss in a lyric sheet of ear-catching revelations regarding the human psyche's underbelly so disarmingly honest they'd make even your most offensive friends blush, and what you have is a cocktail for one of today's most intriguing and singular outfits. Still riding high off the breakthrough that was last year's Alopecia, Why? is now supporting its latest release, the well-received Eskimo Snow. Out of respect for this, and for the band's performance at Fun Fun Fun Fest this afternoon, we hooked up for a phone call with Why? frontman and wordsmith Yoni Wolf to talk about persona, mowing lawns, and the Bible's breeziest book.
On the spectrum between writing for your audience and ignoring them all together, where do you feel you stand as an artist?
Well, you know it’s been different over the years. Early on I didn’t think about anyone ever hearing what I was writing, you know, but as you go and as you gain more of an audience and you know you’re going to have listenership then, yeah, you become a bit more conscious of that in all of your writing. But you know, I don’t think…I don’t allow it to control me, you know what I mean? But it’s there in the back of my mind.
Yeah, I was just wondering if you find yourself injecting certain crowd-pleasing phrases into your work or whether it’s actually a reflex during the process or whether that happens during revision?
I wouldn’t say it’s about pleasing anyone as much as it’s about some of the stuff being self-aware, and aware that other people would hear it and maybe sometimes make a reference to that as to what it is. If you’re really honest about what you’re doing and you know that people are going to be listening to it, it’s going to seep into what you write, right? Because you write what you know but I think it’s exposed that for me: if it’s good or not good? I’m more critical than I would like anyone to ever be.
So, about the relationship between truth and fiction, is it really you singing or is it a character? I was even sort of wondering if you ever get confused about what, in your writing, is you and what, in your writing, is persona.
People do, yeah, people do obviously, you know…it’s natural. I say a lot of things in first person, and yeah, obviously, things tend to be a mix. Well…not obviously. Things tend to be a mix of fact and fiction. Sometimes I stretch the facts to be better or whatever. But I don’t really get confused about it, really.
It’s pretty interesting that people have sort of gone crazy on that persona or even that they sort of make you into almost a caricature.
Yeah, and I’m not that way. There are a lot of people I meet who do tend think they know me and a lot of times have got it wrong.
Yeah, or they think you’re some sort of deviant or something.
(laughs) Right, right.
And it’s like “Actually most of the stuff he’s talking about is pretty normal.” And that the only stuff that’s weird about it, in any capacity, if the fact that you say it.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I agree.
So, in a sense, do you view your more revealing or controversial lyrics as you being a sort of spokesperson for marginalized aspects of humanity?
I think it's more of a personal choice to say things that I'm scared to say or that I feel weird about saying because once you start wondering why does this feel embarrassing or why is this humiliating, the answer is never rational. At some point you can get down below the agreed upon mores. But one thing I've been working on over the years is not to hide every last thing. You hear all those things I might talk about on the record, but I still have a hundred little things I'll never tell anyone. And everyone does.
To shift gears a bit, have you been working on new material?
Yeah, I have been writing lightly, you know, but I haven’t had too much time to delve deep into anything at all. But, I have, you know, I have like a folder full of scraps of stuff that aren’t quite put together yet or anything like that. So, yeah, I have a little bit, but other than that I’ve been doing odd jobs, you know, for other people.
Mowing lawns, that type of thing?
(laughs) Yeah, mowing lawns, exactly. Yeah…no, that’s cool.
Alright, so obviously there’s been a whole shit-load made of the down-sloping presence of hip hop in your music and all that sort of stuff.
Yeah.
But then you know you made a comment in a recent interview about how you’re working on some rhyme schemes where you’re rhyming every word with a word from the following line and that may encourage more rapping. And I was sort of wondering in those notebooks, all those scraps you’ve got, if these are more or less hip hop than Eskimo Snow.
Yeah, I guess I think they lend themselves more to a rapping kind of thing just because they’re probably too complexly drawn to sit within slower melodies. Although it’s not impossible. If you look at a song like “Fatalist Palmistry” where I did that, like “pet bird caught in a jetstream, that’s me /oughta be less cream in your best dreams,” you know, that kind of stuff. You can do that in a melodic song, but my guess is that the next stuff will be more rap. Yeah, that’s a good guess but I’m not sure yet.
One last thing: there’s a hardcore birth and death thing going on in Eskimo Snow and there are a handful of, you know, apparently Biblical references. But the one I haven’t been sure about is at the end of “Berkeley by Hearseback” where you say “like someone’s father’s father left listed in the book of numbers.” Obviously, there’s the phone book, but I was wondering if that had a Biblical reference to it.
Yeah, yeah. The Book of Numbers in the Bible.
Anything specific about that book?
Yeah, it just has a bunch of names, you know, like so and so begat so and so who begat so and so who begat so and so….which is like lineage and shit like that.
Fun times. One of those classic books of the Old Testament.
(laughs) Yeah, a real breeze to read.
---
Why? will be performing at Fun Fun Fun Fest on Sunday, November 8th at 3:50 on the Orange Stage.
