In 2007, Yeasayer’s debut album, All Hour Cymbals, was meet with critical praise, catapulting the band into the spotlight. Their second album, Odd Blood (which was released in February of this year), is nothing short of a masterpiece. Their stellar live performances, augmented by light sculptures created by Ben Phalen, (about which bassist Ira Wolf Tuton told me “It would be to our detriment to not try to attack all the senses.”) have solidified their place on the list of best new bands of the last few years.

Before hitting the road on a tour that will take them to Florida for the first time, Ira was kind enough to take some time to talk to REAX.

REAX: Over the last few years, since the debut album (All Hour Cymbals), you guys have exploded. How has life been on the road?
Ira of Yeasayer: It has been good because we’ve had a job and the band has developed over the past few years, just being on the road and seeing how different types of live music and energy translates to a crowd. But it’s always an eye opening experience. I think it’s always a trial by fire kind of thing. That seems to be the nature of the game. You can’t ever be ready for what’s around the corner, which I think is both the positive part about it or it can be the negative part about it. That can be the exciting thing or the negative thing.

I’m excited about this American tour because we’re going to the places we haven’t done yet. The irony of touring is that a lot of times you are kind of going back to the same place over and over again.

REAX: ''And you still never get to see it.
Ira: I was just talking to Anand (Wilder, Yeasayer’s Keyboardist) the other day. It was kind of ironic, I was in a coffee place and I was overhearing somebody’s conversation about how they were going on vacation to Cologne. I was talking to Anand about how I never really thought in my life I would have gone to Cologne like four times and I still really have no idea what... It’s still just a strange, strange place to be in life to know that I’ve been to Cologne four times.

That’s another reason I’m excited about this American leg in October. I’ve never been to Florida. I’ve never been to a lot of these places. A lot of the markets and towns were hitting up get skipped over in favor of big cities and fewer cities as your are trying to get out west and wrap around the whole country. It’s a big state. I’m pretty excited to come down there and check out what it’s about.

REAX: The latest album, I noticed it’s not necessarily a vast departure from All Hour Cymbals, but it seems to be pushing what you guys do in the studio a lot more.
Ira: We have a lot more tools at our disposal. That helps us work and experiment in ways we had wanted to as we educated ourselves about the recording and the studio process and different ways that other people have done it that we like. Having a lot of equipment opens your eyes to different ways you can do things as well as things that you might not have known about before or expected. We had the luxury of spending a lot more time in the mixing process.

The first record was kind of a shotgun wedding, in a way. Everybody involved was so excited. The first record was done for maybe $3000 or something. Three days in the studio, a few months in a basement. Not even a week mixing. We did like three songs a day. It was just done very expediently and we were all really excited about that. By the time we got to the time of doing the second record, we got a larger advance and we had the facility and the where-with-all to take our time a lot more. We sat back and talked about how we wanted to go about doing things. We took advantage of the opportunity we were given.

REAX: It was done really well. It’s a really great record.
Ira: Cool. Thanks.

REAX: In general terms, there are lots of effects that I think really add a depth to the production on the record. Was there anything that you really took advantage of or exploited in the studio to help bring it all together?
Ira: Where we are as a culture, and I mean that in a large sense but also in a musical writing culture and production culture… I thinks it’s changed the way that people write, approach and arrange music because it’s all computer based in the editing process. It’s totally different than what it was when everything was reliant on tape. I think it’s existed long enough that people have become a little used to it in terms of editing on a computer. I think with any kind of new technology, people tend to go crazy with it. You have Squarepusher. Some Squarepusher albums I really like but it just gets crazy and manic because the opportunities are endless. I think there’s a place for that, like I said I really like a lot of Squarepusher albums, but you have to be able to back up from that as well.

So that’s kind of the base level. Being able to edit on the computer makes everything so easy and sometimes you have a lot of happy mistakes as well where you chop up a drum loop and you slide it and you slide it a little too far and all of a sudden it’ll change where the “one” of the drum loop is and it’ll give you a pattern that you didn’t expect or weren’t looking for that was better than what than what you were trying to capture in the fist place.

Besides that, we rented a house in upstate New York that was owned by this old studio guy and he basically spent his life as a professional musician collecting whatever the new “thing” was, so he had a bunch of Profit synths and a lot of old vintage synths and tons of beautiful microphones of every kind imaginable. We rented the house as well as all of the equipment inside of it so it gave us a pretty stocked studio with a lot of different toys and weapons that we were pretty excited about.

We’re still looking for different kinds of software you can get. I think there’s a lot of computer software like synth software you can get that is really, really high quality. I really would challenge an audiophile to tell the difference, especially after you re-amp it through something.

At the base level, we’re not really purists about anything and we’re not romanticizing any of our instruments, we’re just trying to get interesting tones.

Catch Yeasayer with Washed Out Monday, October 4th at The State Theatre, 687 Central Ave, St Petersburg; for tickets and info: Aes Presents