Alex Schaaf (Yellow Ostrich) – The AudioSuede Interview
By: Chris Bosman
Earlier this year, I reviewed The Mistress, an under-the-radar release from Wisconsin native Alex Schaaf’s Yellow Ostrich project. Over the last few months of the year, The Mistress has been gaining press– and steam– including appearances on preeminent Seattle indie station KEXP and France’s La Blogotheque’s The Take-Away Show. Not only that, but earlier next year, The Mistress will be breaking out of Bandcamp and into record stores, with a physical release courtesy of Afternoon Records. He took time out this past week to talk to me about Wisconsin and New York, the choral influences on his music, and songwriting in general. Check out the interview below. You can stream The Mistress in its entirety here, and pre-order it from Afternoon Records here.
You’re from Wisconsin, right?
Yeah. I’m originally from Wisconsin, and now I’m living in New York.
So, being from Wisconsin, and there being a few other indie solo acts from the state, like Bon Iver and Zola Jesus, do you find a kinship with them, even though you’re not necessarily musically inspired by them?
Definitely. Bon Iver is one of my favorite bands right now. Actually, one of my friends is in Bon Iver right now. Not Justin. One of the guitarists. I went to school with Mike [Noyce]. One day I asked him if he had heard of Bon Iver and he’s like, “Yeah! I’m going on tour with him and playing guitar!” I’ve not heard much of Zola Jesus, but definitely Bon Iver. He’s made being from Wisconsin a little cooler. [laughing] As far as the press. At least there’s someone else from Wisconsin now.
Where are you in New York currently?
I live on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, currently. I’m moving to Brooklyn next month, actually.
“Brooklyn Indie” is kind of its own thing. Are you feeling like you might become influenced by that?
Even before I moved here a lot of the current bands that I really liked were from Brooklyn. There are definitely a lot of awesome bands here. It’s nice to be able to see a good show, basically every night.
Do you think being in New York has added a different dynamic to your songwriting?
It’s kind of hard to tell. It’s nothing direct or conscious. I’m sure any major life change or environment change will impact future songs. It’s a little different environment than small-town Wisconsin. [laughing] So, yeah, it’s got to have some impact at some point.
When I listen to The Mistress, what I immediately notice are the vocal harmonies. Do you have choral or compositional experience that contributes to that?
Oh, yeah. When I grew up, I was in choir. I was in middle school and high school. And I was in vocal jazz and a cappella stuff in high school. Then I was studying composition at the the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, [laughing] which sounds very fancy. I studied theory and composition while I was there. So, definitely, a lot of choir and choral experience. I think that’s where a lot of The Mistress came from.
That really shines through and adds an interesting element to those songs.
Yeah. Just the voice as an instrument, as opposed to what you hear making the words over the rest of the music.
Another thing I liked about The Mistress is its reductive quality; what’s not there is as important as what’s there. Was that intentional?
Yeah, I think so. With a lot of the previous stuff I’d recorded, it was more full band. I was trying to use everything I could to make the fullest sound possible. But I started wanting to strip things down, to get to the essence of the song. I wanted to see what you could do with only a few tools. I basically tried to see what I could arrange if I only had vocals, guitar and a floor tom. The basics. Most of the songs started with just those three things. I think that having a limit on things helps you to be more creative. It’s a tool to being creative, rather than having every instrument at your disposal and you could do anything, which can be more overwhelming. I tried to keep it to what I could do live, because I knew I would want to be playing these songs live. A string quartet or something would have been great at certain points, but would be hard to duplicate every time. I also wanted to see if I could do these songs without the obvious stuff there.
Yeah. You don’t always go for the obvious thing. On “Slow Paddle”, for example, it sounds like there could be strings in there, but you hold back and I think that makes it more powerful.
Definitely. Some of my favorite songs are the simplest elements, because that way, as a listener you create the emotion in your head as you listen to it. Where, if you have a big string section, you’re trying to force that emotion into the listener and it’s just redundant and doesn’t work as well.
How do you build your vocal harmonies?
It’s different for each song. For a lot I started with the lower vocals, or on “Libraries” or “Campaign” I started with the vocal riff that starts them off. Then I came up with the main vocal melody after that, then I add everything in around in. For many of them, it was the main vocal riff, then maybe the first line of the melody or the chorus that I came up with first. Then I would build it around that.
I also think that the rhythm section is really song. What did [Mistress drummer] Alex Bunke bring to your songs that you may not have had before?
Alex was a good friend of mine from school, and we had played with bands together in the past. He played on maybe four or five songs. Mostly because, though I started with just floor tom, just that for all of the songs was getting kind of old, and they needed different sounds. So he came in with a full set. I can kind of play a full set. I can play the drums, but I’m not a drummer. [laughing] I just had him because he’s a real drummer. I played him the stuff and he made it more moving and gave it a fuller sound.
I know you’ve teamed up with a drummer in New York. Is that Alex, or is that someone else?
It’s someone else. Michael Tapper. He used to play drums in We Are Scientists. Now he plays with Bishop Allen. Bishop Allen came to my school to play a show this past January and I opened for them, as Yellow Ostrich solo. It was my first Yellow Ostrich there. I met Michael there, then kept in touch with him over e-mail for a few months. When I moved to New York in August I asked him if he knew any drummers, and he’s like, “Yeah! I’ll play!” It’s been really great. He’s really good, and it’s been so much easier to get Yellow Ostrich going than if I had to go through a couple drummers to find a good one.
You played at KEXP recently. Was that with Michael?
Yeah. All of our stuff has been both of us since I got here. The KEXP thing was basically a full band set, because we had a whole system and everything. The other day we did an acoustic video thing [for Big Ugly Yellow Couch], and that was with both of us and he did some quieter drum stuff. It’s a lot bigger sound than when it was just me.
Did you go to Seattle to record that?
No, they came to New York actually. John Richards did, for his morning show. He comes to New York occasionally, I guess? He did the show from a studio here in New York, so we came in and it was remote from New York.
Have you been touring, or has it mainly been local shows?
So far it’s mainly been around New York. We tend to play every couple of weeks just getting around here as much as we can. Our shows now are mostly to figure out our live show, so we’ve been working on and fine tuning that. We’re planning on touring a lot in 2011. We’ll hopefully be on the road as much as possible, so we’re just fine turning things around here before we kick them around. [laughing]
How challenging is it to do those vocal harmonies during live shows?
It’s not that challenging, actually, just singing them. Because these songs I’ve been doing for a long time, and I’ve been singing in choir for a long time, so it’s easy to harmonize from all that. But I do a lot of looping live, to get a bigger sound and to get the songs more like they are on the record, and to actually loop everything live can be an interesting problem. That’s definitely coming together, though. That’s the challenge with the live show right now, trying to get everything we want, but that’s definitely getting pretty good.
During your KEXP sessions, you debuted a new song called “Daughters.” Any idea on when we might be seeing more material?
I’m not sure. I’ve been in the writing stage of the next album. We’re definitely focusing on The Mistress for awhile, since that’s what’s out now. Generally I write pretty quickly. I’ve had a few albums the last couple of years, since I was trying to things out, and I wasn’t in school, so I had plenty of time to stay home in record. So we have some new songs and we’ve been cycling them into the new shows, just trying them out live. But I’m not sure when we’ll record. Hopefully early next year we’ll release a 7″. But we’ll be focusing on The Mistress awhile. We’re lucky if people have heard those songs if they come to a show. [laughing] So we’re trying not to get too far ahead of them.
Do you think the crowd reaction to the new songs will influence which new songs you record?
Yeah, sort of. It’s more a thing of playing them and seeing how they feel to us live, seeing if they flow well. We’ll be seeing which sections of those songs need work. It’s fun playing them live first, because I haven’t played a lot of songs as Yellow Ostrich before now. Usually I’d just record them, and then play them live and adapt them. But now we can play them live first and give them a long time to adapt and build before we actually record them. So hopefully the recordings will be more thought out, since we have more time to work on them.
You’ve got a bunch of covers on your official site. How did you manage to make the National’s “Fake Empire” even sadder?
[laughing] Yeah, that’s a pretty sad song. With all those covers, those were practice to just work on arrangements, playing guitar and stuff. They’re a fun way to work on arrangements, vocal-only stuff. Since you don’t have to work on the songwriting, you can just work on your arrangement. I like to just try to reinterpret things, which is what those were.
In February is when The Mistress will be seeing physical release through Afternoon Records. Will everything seem more real once the vinyl comes out?
Yeah! It’ll be interesting. Obviously I’ve never done anything before on record. In my bands before, we just pressed CDs. It’ll be nice, because right now it’s like, “Yeah, we have a record… It’s on the Internet.” [laughing] Which is cool. Obviously it works, but I think the whole experience… I just picture someone clicking on their laptop and the music coming out of these tiny laptop speakers. It’s kind of unsettling. But, I get it. People are busy, they don’t necessarily have time to sit down with a record. But it’ll be nice to make it more official and feel like its more substantial. I put a few months, most of this year, into it.
What’s the actual quantity of the pressing going to be?
I’m not exactly sure. As far as I know, they’re pressing 500. But we’re also doing distribution, because they do distribution through Warner, so we’ll have them at shows and they’ll be online. And [laughing] if they sell out, we’ll just make more. But I think the first pressing will be 500.
It’s the end of the year. Do you have a list of your favorite records of 2010?
Yeah, I definitely do. It always changes, but the ones that I like this year are Sufjan’s Age of Adz. The Kanye, actually, is really good. It’s only been out a relatively short time, but that’s up there. Joanna Newsom’s mega-album [Have One On Me]. The National. Titus Andronicus. Not really anything surprising. But there’s been a lot of good stuff there year.