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Amnesia lyrics3/24/2023 I’ve done that for a long time-when we’re playing aimlessly or just for fun. “I will record these surveillance videos of us as much as I can in our practice space. “We made it very spontaneously,” the bassist explains. All the tunes were captured around that single microphone shortly after McNew was able to link up with his bandmates. Working with their record company, the group was able cull five top-shelf moments and quickly issue the instrumental We Have Amnesia Sometimes in July 2020. We went to Matador and were like, ‘Can we release something tomorrow on the internet?’ And they were like, ‘Well, it’s not quite that easy.’” “We were just happy to be together and be alive, so there were tons of hours of jams for us to listen back to. “You just play, and you’re not worried about what you’re doing-you’re just being,” McNew says of the process that has yielded their two most recent albums. And, eventually, they realized that they had some material to present to their longtime label, indie tastemakers Matador. McNew positioned a microphone where he knew that he could properly document the group jamming without anyone really noticing. Without a record or specific project in mind, the musicians continued improvising as the pandemic raged on. ![]() “We all drove instead of taking mass transit, and it was amazing to be seeing another human-and to be seeing him in particular.” ![]() “We figured, ‘Well, we are only three people, and two members of our party already live together so we can stay away from James within the space,” Kaplan says while checking in from his apartment in New York. In certain ways, Yo La Tengo were well suited to weather the pandemic in the studio not only are they a small combo who have long thrived in their own little creative pod, but group co-founders Kaplan and Hubley have also been married since 1987. Like everyone else, at first, the members of Yo La Tengo hunkered down in their respective living spaces but, once restrictions eased up, the three musicians started reconvening in their practice spot. Leading up to March 13, many people were trying to figure out what to do-including us.” “What I remember mostly is that we had a variety of engagements coming up, and they all started to fall by the wayside. “We weren’t working on anything specific back in early 2020, but we were generally getting together for this and that,” Hubley adds a few days later. “For a long time, that session just had that bait on it, and it was very ominous.” “That’s based on a multitrack recording of this spontaneous thing that we were playing on the day that the lockdown was announced,” McNew says, while calling from the Brooklyn, N.Y., home he shares with his wife and young son in December. “Tonight’s Episode,” in particular, dates back to March 13, 2020. As electric, fuzzy and live-sounding as studio Yo La Tengo gets, the self-produced nine-track set was recorded at the trio’s rehearsal space and built largely from the free-form jams the musicians worked up without the pressures of making a traditional record. ![]() “As we were leaving practice, we saw these signs that said, ‘Go Home and Stay Home.’ And that’s what we did for a while.”īut now, two and a half years later, the sounds that McNew was creating with singer/guitarist Ira Kaplan and singer/drummer Georgia Hubley on that fateful day are part of the DNA of This Stupid World-Yo La Tengo’s first fulllength release since their 2020 COVID-era ambient project, We Have Amnesia Sometimes and first album of “traditional” songs since 2018’s There’s a Riot Going On, which winked to Sly Stone in its title. “We were jamming in our studio in Hoboken, N.J., on that day,” the band’s longtime bassist James McNew says of the moment when the entire touring industry was put on ice for an undetermined period of time in March of 2020. Yo La Tengo were already hunkered down in their own little corner of the world when time suddenly stood still.
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