“Arranging Time,” singer-songwriter Pete Yorn’s first album in six years, has a sound you’d be happy to get lost in. After five studio albums and a pair of collabs (with Scarlett Johansson, on 2009’s “Break Up,” and his recent work with J.D. King in the Olms), Yorn returned to the back-to-basics approach of his early albums, building up tracks alone in the studio, with R. Walt Vincent (who produced Yorn’s first two albums) at the helm. Yorn performs at the Ballroom at the Outer Space in Hamden on Dec. 2.
Q: “Arranging Time” has an expansive, wide sound. You tour as a four-piece band. Do you use electronics and triggers to make the sound bigger?
A: Yeah. When you’re in a big room and everything is bouncing back off the wall, just the natural ambiance of a venue, you get overtones that you might not have on a record. I always loved that live energy, that live sound. I’ve done projects where you interpret the song the way the band is feeling at the moment, and every single sound on the record doesn’t have to be represented. On [“Arranging Time”], I thought sonically there was a lot of fun stuff going on that I wanted to come across live. I have a great mulch-instrumentalist keyboard player [Joe Kennedy] who does a lot of that stuff, and the drummer [Scott Seiver] also uses a lot of triggers and a sampler. It’s a pretty full sound.
Q: With that sonic arsenal, is it tempting to update arrangements of older songs?
A: It’s all kind of what inspires me, but I think that the older songs are very faithfully represented. Once in a while, if anything, I’ll do a stripped down version of a song, because I’m feeling it that way. But when it’s worked up with the full band, it’s pretty true to the recording.
Q: For this record, you’ve talked about returning to an older way of doing things.
A: It’s an approach in the studio where I just kind of built things up track by track, starting with an idea, a drum beat, a bass line or a piano line. A couple records ago, I wanted to try recording live with the band, which I did. Everything was reactionary to what I felt before. I recorded live with a band, and I got that out of my system. Now I want build up track by track again and do that thing.
Q: Whatever works.
A: Both [methods] are fun. There have been projects where I’ve tried both ways. Sometimes a live thing will bring energy to the song that you didn’t realize would come. Sometimes I’ve been, like, “All right, I’m going to build these tracks up and see how they sound.” If it’s not feeling quite right yet, I can do it again, or I can bring in a band and try and play it that way, to see if that brings some interesting shifts on it. I don’t really care how I do it. I just want the final recording to be that magical thing that you want to listen to and play it again, that gives you that feeling that great recordings should do. Sometimes it’s super elusive, and sometimes it comes together. Some days you’ll be in the studio and be like, “Ehh, I don’t think it sounds good,” and then you’ll leave and throw it on in your car, and be like “Holy shit, it sounds really good!” Typically I try to have a good time in the studio and enjoy the process. It’s definitely one of my favorite things about the whole music game.
Q: You’ve also talked about how, when you hear some of your old songs, you hear a guy who was “stuck in the future.”
A: I was probably referring to a record called “The Black Album” [“Pete Yorn”], which is a record I made in 2010. There’s a song called “Future Life,” specifically. That whole era, when I was in my early 30s, I was having anxiety about all the changes that come as you grow out of your 20s. You’re supposed to become an adult, get married, have a family, settle down, get a house, whatever it’s supposed to be. I remember having a lot of anxiety about all that stuff, and I poured that into the songs. I hear those songs now, and I’m like, “Yeah that guy was really tweaking out about stuff.” The cool thing is that I can still sing those songs and I know that everybody is in a different place on their journey. There are people who relate to exactly that, today, at this point. For me, it was another chapter in my evolving into wherever the hell I’m going.
I was more present — because I was unaware — in my early 20s. And then you become a little older, and the curtain of life gets pulled back. You can’t go back. You need to figure out: we’re here, let’s keep moving forward. Or you bug out a little bit. That will get infused into my songs. But at this phase in the game, I’m aware of all of that and I celebrate it. I’ve become way more present. The title “Arranging Time” reflects figuring that out.
Q: You wrote many songs on “Arranging Time” on the piano. Did that yield some new musical ideas, chord progressions, things like that?
A: Exactly. It was precisely why I wanted. When you’re building stuff up layer by layer, where you start dictates where you end up. It was a conscious choice. I’m not a good piano player, but I can play chords and do my things. The way that I voice my chords on piano is very different from how I would voice chords on guitar. I figured: let’s just mess around with that and see where it takes us.
Q: It breaks you out of your muscle memory.
A: For sure. I’ll write a lot of songs on guitar, and the initial burst comes from that place. But then if I go in and record on the guitar, I almost know it too well. I always want it to morph and become stranger to me, so if I put myself off balance and approach it from a different place, it becomes this more mysterious thing to me. I’m more interested in it naturally.
Q: Since the birth of your daughter, you’ve been writing songs to her while just hanging around the house. Is that a new thing?
A: I always wrote around the house. I always had the acoustic guitar sitting out. I’d grab it and something happened. People always have this romantic idea, that a writer goes to this magical place to write. When I went to Hawaii, my friend asked if I was going to bring a guitar to the beach. I was like, “Nah, I don’t think so.” I don’t think I’ve ever written on the beach, or played guitar on the beach for that matter. But I’ll write in the shower.
PETE YORN plays the Ballroom at the Outer Space in Hamden on Dec. 2 at 9 p.m. Tickets are $30. manicproductions.org
