Stephen Yerkey's Wandering Songs

Conversations with songwriter Stephen Yerkey, like the songs on his latest album, Metaneonatureboy, tend to wander a bit. You might start out casually discussing the weather, then find yourself somehow engaged in a story about Jack Nicholson buying a farm from Saul Bellow in southern Vermont. You might ask him why it's been 12 years since his debut, Confidence, Man, and become entangled in a tale about a woman who lived in the mountains northeast of San Francisco. It's not that he's evading the issue — far from it — but Stephen Yerkey has a circuitous way of connecting the most disparate of ideas, a talent that makes his songs continually surprising and interesting. Consider, for instance, the wonderful "Link Wray's Girlfriend," which ties unexpected ligatures between the lately-deceased guitarist, the artist Man Ray and 1950s pop singer Johnnie Ray.

"I wanted to get Nicholas Ray, who directed Rebel Without a Cause, into that song, too, but the song was going down the lower 40," remarked Yerkey in a recent phone interview, using a term he employs whenever a song starts to take on a wandering life of its own. This might take the form of side-winding, far-roaming, story-telling lyrics, or it might involve mixing blues, jazz, country, rock and folk in the space of a single song. Whatever happens, though, you can be sure of one thing: it won't be ordinary.

Yerkey's songs connect Golden Gate Park's wildlife to teenage hookers to homeless drifters' battered corpses ("Cadillacs of that Color"). They are grounded in traditional forms of music, but wheel wildly away from the moorings. They are good enough that Kurt Wolff, in The Rough Guide to Country Music, called Stephen Yerkey "one of the greatest little-known songwriters and singers west of the Mississippi."

But, to tell the truth, Yerkey wishes his songs were not quite so complicated. "I don't write the kind of songs that I like," he admitted. "The kind of songs that I like are ... about relationships and about the heart, and they're very short and passionate.

"My songs kind of traipse along all over," he continued. "They're not that much about women. I don't know why I write those kinds of songs, because I don't like to write wordy songs. I want to write the other kind," he said.

Beginnings

Yerkey was born in West Virginia and moved throughout the Midwest during his youth, living for a time in Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati and "all the hillbilly capitals." His first guitar, an acoustic, arrived when he was 14, about the same time he discovered the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.

"[Dylan's music] was absolutely mind-blowing. It was mind-blowing that somebody could... like in 'It's All Right, Ma.' That you could lash back at your parents in that way," he remembered. "And the other thing, too, that was really shocking, and I guess it still is, but it was the end of 'Masters of War,' 'And I hope that you die and your death will come soon.' Apparently ... somebody told me that he did that on some rock and roll hall of fame on TV three or four years ago, and he dedicated it to Dick Cheney or something, and there was this huge brouhaha."

Yerkey's musical tastes were broad, something that, he says, wasn't unusual at the time. "The thing that I remember as a teenager in the 1960s is that you tried to be into all kinds of music, rock and jazz and blues," he said. "They weren't into country. I remember country was very, very unhip. That was another thing that Dylan did, when he recorded in Nashville, which was just absolutely unspeakable."

Progress came slowly as Yerkey taught himself to play and sing and write songs. "I wasn't any good for a long time," he said. "My mom and I went to see the new Neil Young movie and I was thinking how good he was when he was 18 and 19, and I was no good until I was like 30 or something."

He knocked around San Francisco as a young man, joining a band called Nonfiction, and finally, at the age of 44, releasing his solo debut, Confidence, Man, in 1994. The album, produced by Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu veteran Eric Drew Feldman, drew glowing reviews and seemed to set Yerkey on the path to eccentric success, à la Tom Waits. But life intervened, specifically that lady in the mountains, and it was 12 long years before the follow-up, this year's Metaneonatureboy, came out on Echo Records.

Lyrics From a Parked Car

Yerkey says he'd written many of the melodies on Metaneonatureboy in the late 1990s, but didn't get around to the lyrics until 2004, when, back in San Francisco, he found himself with time to kill in a parked car. At the time, Yerkey was sleeping in a friend's photography studio, but had to vacate the premises during working hours. "So I'd get up and get my guitar and get in the car and go down, since I lived there for so long I knew where you could go and sit around, and I'd just play my guitar," he said, adding that it was an unusually productive period. "If you're playing guitar at home, you'll goof off. You'll get on the computer or something," he said.

"I don't like writing lyrics," Yerkey admitted. "So what I'll do is I'll sit there with a guitar and I'll have chords and I'll hum something or other. That's the part that really lags behind," he said. "That's the part that I wish I did better."

Yerkey said he envies writers like Neil Young who seem to conceive of the melody and the lyrics together, banging out a cohesive song in a single sitting. "Like in the Neil Young movie, for instance, he does 'I Am a Child' and 'The Needle and the Damage Done'," he said. "You can hear these little short songs and you can tell that he probably wrote them in 10 or 15 minutes, and I thought, man, that must be where it's at."

Yerkey's best songs are far from simple, though, either in conception or execution. "My Baby Loves the Western Violence," for instance, is a litany of violent images in jaunty couplets like "My baby love the Unabomber/ Greatest dude since Jeffrey Dahmer/ My baby love the vivisection/ Of the Valley housewives and the death injection." It is also a sly tribute to an obscure Coasters wannabe band called The Robins, who wrote a little-known song called "My Baby Loves the Western Movies," complete with cheesy gunshot sound effects. "It was just like a Coasters song," Yerkey said. "It was old record-making business in action. They literally wanted to make you think they were somebody else, which was the Coasters." And, to add yet another layer, it's a commentary on the current governor of California, the "governator" so beloved of the title character.

Musically the songs are complicated, too, with contrasting genres placed in very close proximity. For instance, on the lovely "Translated From Love," a country pedal-steel guitar intertwines with a jazz clarinet solo as if there were no boundaries between the two musical styles — and for the space of this single song at least, there aren't. Ben Goldberg, the clarinetist who also arranged the big-band opening at the beginning of "Mood Swing Era," gets an old-fashioned sound on the solo that Yerkey particularly likes. "If you listen, he's playing with a little bit of vibrato, but the original people who did the big vibrato were Sidney Bechet," he said. "I love how woody it is and how much grain it has, this vibrato. It's kind of soulful and at the same time, it's kind of outrageous. But that style went out of style."

As on his debut record, Yerkey worked with Eric Drew Feldman. "He's gotten really, really good at getting performances," Yerkey said of his producer. "You know, he was in Beefheart's band and he was in Polly Harvey's band, I think he was in the Pixies for a tiny little while. He was in one of my favorite bands, called Pere Ubu... these really pretty far-out, pretty hard-edged rock 'n' roll bands. Pretty uncompromising. And of course the way life is, you'd think he'd be some sort of hard-assed punk guy and he's not that way at all. He's very low-key and easy to work with.

"The other thing with working with somebody who is that hip is that you don't worry about being unhip," he added. "Like with 'Cadillacs of That Color,' I said, 'Hey, can we make it like Huey Lewis at the end?' And he says, 'Sure.' He doesn't worry that his name's on it."

Yerkey's band includes long-time collaborators like jazz drummer Scott Amendola and electric-turned-stand-up bass player Chris Key, who is also a public defender for the city of Oakland, California. Will Bernard, one of Yerkey's many former band members, plays guitar and banjo and David Phillips plays pedal Steel. Goldberg kicks in clarinet on a couple of tracks, and also did the jazz arrangements.

That's the core band, though for several tracks, especially the 10-minute-plus "Stinson Beach Road" the cast of characters expanded considerably. This closing track was intended as the final 1960s freak-out, the long Quicksilver Messenger Service-referencing cut that existed solely to "blow people's minds."

"That was really terrifying to record," Yerkey recalled. "It was so complicated and there were so many changes, and you had all these people walking around with sheet music, which intimidates me because I don't read and write music. There were all these people walking around with sheet music saying, 'Have you got the 48 through the 52nd bar?' And I thought, 'Oh boy, this sounds like the Ford Motor Company.'" Yet the piece hangs together psychedelically throughout its lengthy duration, showing none of the strain and all of the wandering brilliance that went into its making.

Yerkey has a few shows coming up in the Midwest this spring. For an updated list of performances, check his Web site. — Jennifer Kelly [Thursday, April 13, 2006]