Words: Jon Bosworth

Photo: Dan Stack

Every band seems to have a horror story about playing in Jacksonville. Jacksonville is now calling itself “Where Florida Begins,” and for bands brave enough to tour down into our phallic peninsula, it seems performing in Jacksonville is like a tax. Andy Stack recalls the last time he and Jenn Wasner, the members of Wye Oak, stopped in Jacksonville in their desperate march toward Tampa and Orlando.

“It was a five-band bill and every single band was from out of town,” Stack says. “It was us and this band that was unabashedly Guns 'N' Roses-influenced playing back to back. It was a great night.”

If you haven't heard the blurry gothic blues of Wye Oak, a proudly GNR-inspired opener might seem like a fine appetizer, but this duo from Baltimore tends to slow it down. Although often called indie rock, there isn't much of a rock backbeat to most of their songs. Their wintery music has a dark, dirge-y, slow-paced blues foundation clouded by haunting feedback and ambient sounds. Coasting somewhat gracefully over that tortured noise is the ghostly strength of Jenn Wasner's vocals, which are reminiscent of Cowboy Junkies. Needless to say, their Florida dates this time around include Tallahassee, Orlando, and Tampa; no Jacksonville stop is scheduled.

Wye Oak signed with Merge Records after they independently released If Children in 2007. Their new album, The Knot, is rich with morose songs of tortured love and internal pain. It's actually quite depressing, which makes it all the stranger that they seem to have a thing for weddings.

REAX: Are you okay? I mean, are you guys depressed?

Andy Stack: Laughs No, we're getting by. For both of us songwriting has taken on a role of helping us work through dark feelings and dark moments. We're generally pretty upbeat people. Or at least we're not completely occupied by depressing thoughts.

REAX: Good, because depression is serious. I see in commercials that people have to take multiple anti-depressants to keep themselves from depression. This album might have been a cry for help. I just want to make sure that no one is ignoring your multi-city cry for help.

AS: Yeah, no, we've got it under control, thank you for the concern.

REAX: Where are you now?

AS: Right now we are at home. We played a few shows last week and now we are just hanging out because we have a couple of important weddings that are happening in the next few weeks. My brother is getting married right before we leave again on tour and I've been organizing this wedding band to play at his wedding, so we've been doing rehearsals for that and getting the old wedding band together. Right after his wedding we're going to Europe and doing ten days there, and then seven or eight weeks in the U.S.

REAX: Your album is called The Knot, you're forming a wedding band, and your brother is getting married. Is there an intentional wedding theme?

AS: [Laughs] I don't think we were trying to stretch any kind of a wedding or romance theme with the title of the record, but it's certainly not an inappropriate interpretation of it. I mean, for us that album title had appeal because it had a lot of different meanings and ambiguity built into the word. A lot of different definitions. Neither of us are really literalists, and we like the idea of some of that ambiguity trickling into the song lyrics and the album as a whole.

REAX: On the album you have so many layers of instrumentation, but obviously there are only two of you making the music, so when you play live, do you bring other musicians, or play to prerecorded tracks, or how do you do it?

AS: It's just the two of us live. There's a little bit of prerecorded stuff, but not in the sense of playing to backing tracks or anything like that. All the prerecorded stuff is just very subtle loops and textural stuff that you may not even be fully aware of if you're watching. By and large, the bulk of the work is being done by just the two of us. And we put out a lot of sounds, between the two of us.

REAX: The new record doesn't really have your vocals at the front of the song on any of the tracks. Were you just not feeling as up to the task of singing, or did it just happen that way?

AS: It's kinda just how it came out. There is only really one song on this record that is uniquely my song, that I wrote, which is the first one. Jenn is just generally a more prolific writer than I am. I generally go through phases of writing and not writing. I get interested in something else and my songwriting falls by the side a little bit. Once we get into the studio it is such a collaborative process with us that it gets hard to figure out who is writing what at a certain point.

REAX: So is your brother's wedding going to be a really dark wedding, or are you getting together some crazy jams?

AS: You don't think we should just play the new record? We're trying to be the ultimate wedding band. We're really trying to do the classic wedding band thing. For their first dance we're playing The Beatles, we're playing “Something” by George Harrison.

REAX: Any Cheap Trick or Foreigner?

AS: No. the best thing we are doing is some Steely Dan, which I am just thrilled about, because ... my parents were big Dan fans and my brother and I grew up listening to Royal Scam and Aja and all that. I just fucking love it, man. I'm not gonna lie or be too cool for the Dan, so we're doing some Steely Dan that sounds really great and we're doing some Clash, and some really feel-good wedding stuff. We've got an eight-piece band of all of these friends of ours from around town who play music. There are like four or five different vocalists in the band.

REAX: Will it be the Merge Records Wedding Band?

AS: I don't think they're getting involved. That would be a little overkill for the wedding band. We're starting off with just the wedding and we'll see where it goes from there. If the Wye Oak thing doesn't work out, we can make some kind of career in the wedding band business. There's a lot of money to be made at that, I understand. Probably much more than we're making now.

Wye Oak on Tour in the Southeast:

Oct. 1 – Emo's, Austin

Oct. 2 – Cavern Ale House, Dallas

Oct. 4 – One Eyed Jack's, New Orleans

Oct. 5 – Club Downunder, Tallahassee

Oct. 6 – The Social, Orlando

Oct. 7 – New World Brewery, Tampa

Oct. 8 – The Earl, Atlanta

Oct. 9 – Cat's Cradle, Carrboro

myspace.com/wyeoak