Interviewing SXSW: Wye Oak On Slow Jams + Road Life

This is perfect, though. People make a lot of comparisons between Wye Oak and, say, Beach House and Yo La Tengo and the Decemberists. I think this is good, to get to some less obvious influences. I'm just always curious about what people are actually listening to rather than what people think they might sound like, or that Pandora might throw them on a playlist with.

I essentially never listen to music that sounds like music that I make. Not intentionally. It's just not something that I...I'm constantly surrounded by it, so I just really feel no need whatsoever to seek it out in my daily life. I'm pretty much always listening to the top R&B, top 40 stations in Baltimore, regularly. But yeah, lately I've been listening to, I downloaded the entire discographies of Aaliyah and Usher, for example. But also more of the contemporary stuff. I listen to a lot of The Dream, I listen to a lot of R. Kelly. Honestly, that's kind of where my brain is at. And nine times out of 10, that's what I feel like listening to on a daily basis. But I find that's true with a lot of artists: they don't necessarily want to listen to the kind of music that they themselves make. It kind of makes sense that you want some variety in your life, and personally try...it's not a conscious thing or it's not because I think it's cool. But what when I think about what I want to be hearing, I want something catchy and poppy, with a fly beat. And honestly, that's kind of what I'm navigating to nine times out of 10.

I imagine, too, that given your current life, that there's a lot of time either spent listening to an iPod or listening to radio, as you're traveling across wherever you happen to be at that point?

Yeah. And it's also one of the only things that's...I don't know. It sounds silly, but it helps me feel grounded. Across the country, you can drive east to west, and those radio stations are going to be playing the same 15 hits everywhere you go. It feels like a way to stay connected. And when you're constantly moving and going new places and seeing new people, you create constants wherever you can find them. And if those constants just happen to be a shitty song, then so be it. But there is a certain aspect of comfort in that. And it's a great equalizer, too. I don't understand why people are surprised when I talk about how much I love this kind of music, but it's just nice -- I feel the way about pop music like I feel about football. I love football, genuinely, I passionately love the game of football. But I could talk to my art music history friends about football, but I could also talk to anyone about football. You know? And it's the same way with pop music. To know something that everyone else in the world also knows, there's something really unifying about that, even if it is a trashy pop song. At this point in my life, who am I to question where that joy comes from? If I hear something and I enjoy it and it makes me happy, it makes me smile, then I'm not really necessarily trying to judge the source of where it comes from. I take it where I can get it.

We're totally with you. For the last few months around my house, the Robyn album has been on heavy rotation around here.

That shit is awesome, that was a great record.

It is absolutely ridiculous.

It is really, really good. At the same time, for some reason, some people who care about that sort of thing think it's like a little bit more legitimate to like her CD, but it's not so much necessarily to like Ke$ha, or Katy Perry. But it's the same! It's like the same dudes writing it. [Ed. note: Afterwards, we remembered that Robyn writes her own songs!] There are powerhouses probably controlling the world's sources of pop music behind the scenes. You know, the pop Illuminati! But I don't know, I think at this point if it makes you happy and it's fun and it's catchy, who am I to turn it down?

You talked about sort of having constants as you were traveling and touring, and I thought listening to the newest record there seems to be a lot about letting go, moving on, and staying in motion. Was that a conscious theme, or is that a byproduct of your environment?

No, I think it was conscious. It was kind of the mindset that I've been in for the past year, learning how to let go of certain things and be less dependent and more self-sufficient. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, as far as ways to feel at home, and the idea of home or the feeling of home is something that most people ascribe to places and things. But everyone needs to feel at home. And so for me, I have to figure out where that feeling comes from. And if it's not going to come from being in one place, or being around a certain group of people, or having certain things at my disposal, it's got to come from somewhere. And so I guess that's the only thing that I've really been able to figure out. It has to come from yourself. And if you create certain things that you can latch onto that make you feel at home, then you can feel at home anywhere, which has become a really valuable and useful and important skill for me, and is one of the only ways I've really been able to adjust and adapt to being away from my actual home, here in Baltimore, as much as I am. And like anything else, touring is a skill that you can improve upon with time and with effort. And I've gotten better at it over the years, and I feel comfortable with it, but there are certain tricks and certain things that I hold onto. But it's been a crazy year, and it has been kind of difficult letting go of a lot of things that I've been dependent on in the past. But in the long run, it's absolutely worth making that break because change is just a fact of life. [Laughs] So if you can adjust and adapt, then, you know, that's kind of the only way you can get by.

When reading your recent press, someone mentioned that on the current tour you are not playing a lot of material from the first record. Why? Is it thematic? What is prompting you to really focus on the newer stuff?

To be quite brutally honest, I wrote a lot of the songs when I was like 17-18 years old, and I don't really like them any more. I don't necessarily think that they're bad, but they're not where I'm at at this particular moment. And I think for some people, they're really into that record and I really appreciate that, but I made it when I was essentially a child. And even when we made it, we recorded, then we released it, then we waited a year and then re-released it. It's so old to us at this point. We played a song recently, "Family Girl," in London a couple weeks ago and it just felt strange. It felt somewhat rudimentary to us. And it's not that I don't stand behind those songs, but if you're up there performing and you're playing something that you're not excited to be playing I think that shows. And I'd much rather play a song that people are maybe less familiar with, that I'm actually excited to be playing, then kind of like churn my way through a bunch of shit that I've become obligated to play for some reason. Because I'm the one that has to stand up there and do it every single night of my life. And so at the very least, if I get my hour on stage, I want to be using it playing songs that I'm really excited to play. And maybe one day I'll look back and I'll be like, "Oh, we'll revisit that song, see what's up with that." But honestly it just doesn't really feel like music that we made and wrote.

We invented those before we had any sort of idea that we were going to be a band, or any focus, or anything. It was kind of like a recording project, honestly. I think of that record as a little bit of an anomaly, like a stand-alone thing. It was an introductory record, but it's not something that I feel incredibly inclined to revisit on a nightly basis if that's OK.

I don't know. I don't think anyone would really be stoked about taking what they were doing when they were in high school and standing up in front of a bunch of people and sharing it with them when they are 25 years old, so hopefully people think about it like that. It makes more sense.

We are doing this preview, in conjunction with SXSW. What did you take away from the first time you came to South By which I believe was 2008? It's been a few years, but what was your first experience? How was that for you as a band?

Well, I will say this: one thing that I learned that first time I went to SXSW is, and it's still something that I still think is remarkable, is just that SX promotes itself as a festival, but South by Southwest in my mind is not festival, it's an industry event, it's like a music convention. And there are people who I hear - music listeners - people who go to shows, who are like, I'm so excited to go to the music festival, and I think, really? It's for people in the music industry, for bands and managers, and labels and this isn't really meant for you, this is meant for them.

It just seems so glaringly obvious to me when I got there that that was the case. But I had always assumed that it was a music fan's festival. But, I think once you go into it with the right idea of what it's going to be like, and what it actually is, you know, you can find your own little piece of it. It's so big and so overwhelming and so stressful. You can't go in expecting that you are going to see everything and do everything, or even do a chunk of everything. Now that I understand a bit better what it actually is, and what it is actually like, I know how to approach it better.

I'm a little bit more of a low-key person when it comes to that sort of thing, so you know I'm kind of like get in, get out, play my shows, see my friends, and retire to South Congress and drink my ritas and eat tacos.

Its definitely something that I'm looking forward to, but I just think that what I've learned is that you have to have an accurate perception about what it actually is, you know?

Is it good for you having access to all of the industry people in one spot, or do you feel like everyone's too distracted when you play shows?

I don't know, it is pretty overwhelming and pretty distracting. I'm sure it's very valuable,
but I guess the way I think about it now, is that it is not my job to worry about that stuff. My job is to just hopefully stay aloof from all that stuff. For a while, I was trying to just understand and be as involved as I could, and it was really stressing me out and it honestly distracted me from what is my actual job - which is to make music, and write songs, and be a good band, or be as good of a band as we possibly can.

I never want to get to a point where I'm so distracted by the networking and the business aspect of things that I lose sight of what my real purpose is and what I want to be doing. We are fortunate that we have great people who work with us, and we have an amazing record label, people who I really trust who are willing to help guide us through that and take care of those things and kind of field the brunt of that stuff for us so that we can do what we are supposed to be doing and what we want to be doing which is to keep making music, and keep doing the things that we love to do the most.

Fantastic. Thanks so much for catching up with us.

Wye Oak will perform at Waterloo Records on 3/17, at the Brooklyn Vegan party at Swandive on 3/18, at the official Merge showcase at The Parish on 3/18, and at Homeslice Pizza on 3/19.

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