Pete Yorn - Interview

The sun finally sets on Pete Yorn’s album trilogy with Nightcrawler, the follow up to Day I Forgot (2003) and Musicforthemorningafter (2001). The catchy new installment features the singer-songwriter’s same tight song craft, only three years wiser and with a new sense of adventure.

“I was writing ‘For Us’ for a friend I was concerned about who was going through a hard time,” says Pete Yorn about the first single. “I was asking that person to take a look at their life and their ways and see if that was working out for them. I totally heard a certain kind of beat and just thought, man it would be perfect if Dave [Grohl] could play on it. So I asked him and he did it and nailed it.”

The record also welcomes collaborations with musicians like the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines and Martie Maguire on “The Man,” and Butch Walker on “Alive.”

“When I pick someone to work with it’s usually because I’m interested in their sensibility or I know that they’re going to bring something to the table that I can’t bring,” says Yorn. “So that’s the main thing I’m looking for, to add a little diversity to the production or the performances. I pretty much know what I’m going to get when I’m going to do a part. So when I pick another player I let them do their thing. Whether it’s Natalie [Maines] who just has that beautiful voice, Dave [Grohl], who’s a great drummer, Joe Kennedy, who’s an amazing piano player, or Butch Walker, who has great production ideas and is a great bass player…Working with Butch was cool because it was very quick. We hit it off very easily and he just brought in his band and we learned the song [“Alive”] in like ten minutes. We recorded the whole thing pretty much live…So that was a surprise and it was fun to work with him.”

While the players Yorn enlisted add a lot to Nightcrawler, the songs start and end with Yorn’s melodies.

“Sometimes I’ll be inspired by words that I’ve written down,” says Yorn, “but a lot of times I come up with melodies and the melodies will inspire images in my head and that will in turn make the lyrics come out. It’s almost like if you hear a classical piece that doesn’t have any lyrics. The music itself evokes a lot of imagery. So I create these musical pieces that draw emotion out of me and that will dictate where the song goes lyrically.”

But where a song goes after Yorn has created it is left to time to decide.

“Songs will take on different meanings for me depending on what I’m going through—as my songs have always done for me since I started writing them,” says Yorn. “I like to leave my work open-ended so that it can grow with me, as I grow, and it can evolve with me. In lots of ways songs have specific meanings, but in other ways they’re tools I use over time to relate to things that come up in my life.”

Watch Pete Yorn perform "Crystal Village."



Interview originally published in The Aquarian Weekly (March 14, 2007).