WHY?

By Katherine Hoffert
Photos by Gundi Vigfusson

“I’ll say it now on record, I have a feeling Austin is going to get us in some fights on the road,” says Josiah Wolf, drummer of the Anticon trio-turned-live-quartet about the latest addition to the band’s lineup, bassist Austin Brown.

After returning to their Midwestern roots in the dead of winter last February to record Alopecia, their new album, with Fog’s Andrew Broder and Mark Erikson, WHY? — mastermind Yoni Wolf, his older brother Josiah Wolf, and Cincinnati pal/piano man Doug McDiarmid — were faced with the puzzle of recreating the album live. Realizing it wouldn’t be feasible to bring the Fog guys along with them on the road and not about to sacrifice the full faculty of their songs, WHY? decided to recruit Brown, an old friend from their hometown of Cincinnati, into their already complicated hive of personnel.

Though a little nervous that adding a new unpredictable element (on crutches, no less) to this delicate mix might throw off their balance, WHY? is actually well-versed when it comes to adapting themselves to their creative output. WHY? places premium interest on tailoring their studio and live performances to fit their songs’ initial spark. It’s not always comfortable — it can be as easy as recording demos for reference throughout their time in the studio, as difficult as waiting until a song is absolutely ready to release it, and as vague as trying to stay true to an emotion they only really felt at a song’s inception. But it’s become a key part of the band’s creative process.

In the case of the new member, it was simply a case of wanting to remain true to the results of their studio experimentation. “With the new songs, it just felt like each part was so much more important,” says Yoni in his unmistakable paced cadence. “For our last album, Elephant Eyelash, we’d just pick out the most essential elements to play between us. But now it feels like we need everything.”

“We were working really hard before, too,” explains Josiah, “Doug was playing the Rhodes and guitar and he was playing the bass with a foot pedal, I was playing the drums and the vibraphone at the same time, Yoni was playing some drums and keyboards.” All of which the band is more or less still doing live, sans the bass foot pedal and vibraphone-adapted guitar lines.

Yet there’s a lot more to playing live and touring than figuring out the logistics of how to perform the songs each night in order to keep their stubborn little cores intact. For a band who had an international audience before a local one, the practicalities of life on the road — enduring the taxing nature of days on end without any downtime, permanency, or substantial food or sleep — are not lost on WHY?.

“Each of us has our own role on the tour and it’s different from our life here,” says Josiah. “Once we’re on tour, we’re sort of different — our relationships with each other. I would say I tend to be better on tour.”

“I turn into a messy little child on tour,” says Yoni, who at home is ultimately the band’s nucleus. “If I have eight hours a day to myself, I feel sane and on top of shit. If I don’t have any time to myself in the whole day, I feel crazy, I don’t know how to act.”

Thus, McDiarmid and Josiah take the reins once the van pulls out of Oakland, trading off manager duties and helping WHY? fall into a comfortable routine in order to keep everyone as sane as possible and the experience about performing their songs instead of cranky touring pragmatics.

Similarly, WHY? has also learned to recognize their individual personality traits and harness their assets in the studio. “I’m still a home recorder at heart,” says Yoni, “I don’t feel at home figuring things out in front of people or anything like that. My strengths lie in being very quiet about things and figuring something out over a long period of time. Whereas Doug — you mention something to him and he figures it out like [snap] right there.”

Recording live for the first time, WHY? was faced with a new set of challenges and felt a bit out of their element, though they were in the company of friends — including engineer Tom Herbers — and had already recorded vocals on Fog’s record there at Herbers’ Minneapolis studio, Third Ear. Accustomed to recording everything alone in the comfortable confines of his own home, Yoni decided to record demos of the songs the old familiar way before stepping into unnerving studio territory. The extended band then alternated studio sessions with rehearsal periods in Broder’s basement where it would arrange the songs as a five-piece to prepare them for recording, utilizing both Yoni method of meticulous planning and McDiarmid‘s on-the-spot ability to make an arrangement click into place.

“Eventually it became a matter of beating the demos, so to speak,” explains McDiarmid. “We’d arrange it in a certain way and spend all this time on it, then go back and listen to the demo, which Yoni recorded one afternoon in his bedroom, and it would have a certain charm to it that we hadn’t captured.”

It’s safe to say that WHY? beat the demos and have arrived at their most immediate and fully-realized effort to date with Alopecia. Not just a collection of songs, but a true album that plays seamlessly from beginning to end, it leads off with the sound of chains dragging, a dark bass line, and the lyrics “I’m not a ladies man / I’m away in mind / filming my own fake death” on “The Vowels Pt. 2.” Next “Good Friday” is damp and stark, with just Yoni’s intimate disclosures delivered over a simple live beat. “These Few Presidents” skips along between a buoyant bass and ominous chorus that waxes on the sweet-sounding assertion “Yours is the funeral / I’d fly to from anywhere.” Alopecia‘s single, “The Hollows” features vocals from Dose One and Nedelle Torissi and is at once tumultuous and ethereal. As the album progresses, the theme of palms representing fate and one’s connection with the world emerges, and the reoccurring line “While I’m alive / I’ll feel alive” resonates as the final commitment made to fatality.

One will notice that there are a lot more rhymes on Alopecia than on any of WHY?’s previous records. Yoni, whose poems are the chromosomes of WHY?’s songs, says about Alopecia, “Generally I’ll cheat the music a lot if the lyrics need me to do that. But I actually cheated the lyrics a bit on this record. I was just starting to figure out how to tease the words and keep the meaning. Like, I want this phrase to be four bars, let me tease these words into that.” This tailoring and extra attention to phrasing has resulted in some of WHY?’s sharpest lyricism. Songs no longer play out like diary entries but intricate rhymes, like “Sleeping late I / Hear the sad horns / Of labor trucks sigh / My neighbor walks by / High heels click dry / Like half a proud horse / Down Brook / I hear somebody’s babbling I mistook / For a cavalry whispering victory to the sparks in your kindling...” on “By Torpedo or Chrohn’s.“

What has stayed consistent is the confessional honesty of Yoni’s lyrics, as well as his stealthy ability to turn the mundane into a slap in the face of profound truth. “I do think about accessibility in the sense of people hearing it and that communication,” he says. “Not like ‘Will this be successful or make me famous?’ but ‘Will people be able to follow this thread of thought?’ Someone has to understand what you’re trying to write. That’s accessibility — your meaning. I do think about what I want to get across to people now knowing that there are people that are going to listen to it.”

With that kind of nakedness comes the inborn vulnerability of performing it over and over again, night after night. “It’s not always natural to take this kind of music and perform it every night,” says Josiah. “You’re kind of stating how you felt at one moment. It’s not like jazz or something. It’s definitely taking a snapshot. It’s a little awkward actually.”

While he admits that there are a lot of songs he no longer feels comfortable with, Yoni also affirms, “You have to turn your future self off when you’re writing something for the present.” What he is quick to caution other artists about is getting too caught up in releasing everything they do. “That’s one thing that bit me on the ass. The first shit I ever recorded I put out. Granted, it was on a tape to like 200 people. But that’s the shit that if I ever hear now, I will fucking cringe,” he says, offering Joanna Newsom as an example that should be followed. “She had totally gotten her shit together and written beautiful songs for her first record.”

Never one to worry too much about consequences, it was a series of what seemed like small impulse decisions that, in hindsight, ended up being a strong foundation for Yoni Wolf and WHY?’s career. “I started to get involved in this sort of scene of dudes that was doing this underground hip-hop,” says Yoni Wolf. “I met one guy in Cincinnati [Adam Drucker, a.k.a. Dose One], we were doing weird, underground sort of rap stuff in a lo-fi direction [cLOUDDEAD]. We all sort of started moving out here. One guy decided Oakland was the best place to start running a record label and everyone else started coming out.”

This exodus to the Bay Area was the beginning of Anticon, the avant indie hip-hop label collective (that actually just relocated to Los Angeles), and the flint that sparked WHY?’s musical fire. Though Yoni says that the move was arbitrary and could have been anywhere, Oakland was a fortunate choice. “A pop-inflected jangle-rap/folk-hop band from Ohio” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Now a co-owner of Anticon, Yoni has had to learn how to preserve the magic of music in yet another way: protecting it from product status. “It used to really stifle me artistically to start thinking about marketing ideas,” he says. “It just felt gross. But recently I’ve been like, ‘Well that stuff’s a different thing.’ That’s another part of it that doesn’t really relate to the genesis of it. You want to try and think about marketing as being artistic too, but I don’t really think about it that way. As long as I’m not torn between the two, I can still work. Even if I’m making phone calls half the day.”

Knowing when to shift roles, Yoni maintains WHY?’s commitment to their creative output and further preserves the meaningfulness and therapeutic nature of art. “That’s why I write — it’s feeling completely disconnected and feeling like I need to draw these synapses between me and the universe,” he says.

As the newly anointed foursome continues to spark new connections across the U.S. this month and the rest of the world throughout the year, things might get crazy — “I won’t start a fight,” Brown reassures. But if the band’s history and working habits are any indication, WHY? shouldn’t have any trouble adapting.

www.myspace.com/whyanticon