yeasayer ! stop.look.listen

When asked what he’s listening to these days, Keating said a lecture series on the history of religion. When asked where he’s been looking for inspiration, he talked about recently wandering through the Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and imaging sounds in the artwork. “I walk around a space like that, that has a nice quiet energy, and reflect on it,” he says. “I get inspiration from different things that are non-musical. Definitely also from reading books — the inspiration you gain from that is sometimes more inspiring than music, because with music it’s always going to be derivative.” .

I think that attendance at the shows is definitely reflective of our popularity on the Internet more than our record sales. I think we’re playing bigger venues than bands who have maybe sold more records than us, and that’s because of our popularity in the blogosphere.

Well, we’re definitely producing it ourselves, but we might enlist some help from some of our friends. […] Right now we’re recording in a little practice space in Brooklyn and then we’re moving down the street to a studio in Greenpoint where we’ll be for the whole month of September.

We’re trying a new way of working on songs. We’ve been doing a lot of recordings with a stereo recorder that you’d use to interview someone. We’ve just been setting it up in the middle of our practice space and hitting record, and it’s a sound that all of us think sounds so good. It’s so hard to achieve that with all of our contemporary recording capabilities where there is a mic that’s right up next to everything, and you’re constantly wondering, where’s the soul? Where’s the depth? And you can never find it. So, all these recordings that we’ve been doing, I think they’re going to inspire the way that we actually record the album once we are in the studio.

It’s been really important to us to have a new show for this time around the highway. We have some new songs that we’re bringing to the set and have worked to revamp the visual component into something that both the folks and we can be excited about. We have to keep it moving forward always in as many ways as possible.

In the past we’ve created things in the computer, and augmented it. Then we had to learn complicated stuff that we did mostly with computer technology, so you have to learn something that when you’re playing it on instruments is kind of counter-intuitive […] A lot of great sounds are still going to come out of the computer, layering effects and things like that, but now we’re in a really early phase of bringing it to a full band and working it out live.