Yo La Tengo

It's really funny.

I interviewed Yola Tango, and we didn't even turn the sound.

We didn't even get audio of it.

That's how bad that went.

You can only hurt the ones you love, not the ones you're thinking of.

You were just listening to Yola Tango with a beautiful song called Little Lies.

That's from their album Summer Sun.

We're now heading into a new song from Purple Pilgrims.

But what people don't understand is that all the members of Sonic Youth, especially Lee Rinaldo and Thurston Moore were huge deadheads.

And it makes sense if you listen to these kind of long form jams, they're totally related, you know, Yola Tango, another like kind of core punk, post-punk band from, you know, late seventies, early eighties, New York, huge, you know, Ira Kaplan, huge deadhead.

And so we had those guys do cover, you know, the Grateful Dead.

And then I thought, why not connect, you know, Steve Reich went to, I think it was Mills or, you know, was he knew Phil Lesh's students, Phil Lesh, the bassist of the Grateful Dead.

So I had to write everything as if these are things the reader should already know, that these should be obvious things.

T- t- that, that, uh, that, you know, uh, uh, that Yola Tango is huge or whatever, and they, they would just know this automatically.

Um, but it, so that, I, I think that they're, like, it's, I mean, it's certainly unlike the other books I've done.

[laughs] I guess, you know?

Talking to the great podcast Life of the Record in 2025, Peter says they met at a music high school sort of thing, and they started out as two dudes with guitars and a drum machine.

They bond over g- guitar bands like The Stone Roses and slightly older, wordier, more punk and power pop-oriented stuff like the Buzzcocks and The Jam and Elvis Costello, plus lo-fi '90s American indie rock: Pavement and Yo La Tengo and Elliott Smith and Sebadoh.

All of that totally makes sense, but Elvis Costello makes extra sense.

Maximum songcraft, maximum verbiage, maximum nerdy erudite swagger, maximum velocity.

Yep, we're doing it.

Yo La Tengo comparison is very accurate.

It, it doesn't sound exactly like them, but it does feel like a punk band doing a take on them.

Yeah.

Um, kinda down to the album cover art.

This looks like emo font put on Yo La Tengo cover.

Yes, absolutely.

There are other songs ...

I

want to hear this guy's review of like a Yola Tango show where it's just like three schlubby people standing still playing Yola Tango music.

Yeah, what does he think of My Bloody Valentine or Jesus and Mary Chain or Echo the Money Man? I mean, all of those bands were just playing their songs.

They're just up there without getting too dressed up for you and they're just standing there playing their songs.