Musical Polymath Conner Youngblood's Dreamy Bedroom-Pop

Listener Supported, WNYC Studios.

From NewSounds.org and the studios of WNYC in New York,

this is Soundcheck, our series of live performances and interviews.

I'm John Schaefer.

Conor Youngblood is a singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer.

His new record, Out Tomorrow, is called Cascades, Cascading, Cascadingly,

and it is full of richly textured songs in multiple languages

that employ a wide array of effects without ever losing their organic, intimate feel.

Conor joins us today to play some of those songs

from the new record.

This first one is called From an Ocean to a Lake.

If I fall before I break

Please send my love from an ocean to a lake

Rip down the mountain

Standing in my way

Portage my love from an ocean to a lake

Forces while water mershened through

Open up my heart to you

Open up my heart

Cause one, two, one, two

If you look up

You see it ain't there still

Worth it

Everything from you

Keep turning left

Like it was turning loose

While these oceans

Is herom Stockwater

Are sad for you

Don't you see the

Change down for the last

Trace of the love

Of a talk

Oh wouldn't you break

Ah-ah, ah-ah, ahh, ah-ah

Yes, I'm a little lonely, a little high, a little high

No time, no, no, no, no

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

We'll be right back.

Along with the rest of the new album called Cascades, Cascading, Cascadingly.

Conor, welcome to the studio.

Good to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

So you're kind of a one-man band, literally, over there.

The guitar, singing, all these different effects, pedals, and stuff,

one of which is clearly autotune or something that sounds like autotune.

It's a grab bag.

It's this vocal processor pedal.

And depending on the song, sometimes autotune.

Sometimes vocoder.

Sometimes, I don't know, they have all sorts of fun stuff in there.

Yeah, and on the record, this song, it's pretty clearly autotuned.

The back half of it, yeah.

And one of the things that does is to kind of obscure the meaning of the lyrics.

Oh, it's gibberish, that part.

Okay.

No, that part is, there are no, it happened kind of by happenstance,

where, by chance, where I was originally just kind of,

I had the first bit written, which I sang, nice and clear.

And then I wanted this idea when the drums came in,

where I had a different melody and ending.

And I was just playing around with the autotune to create some melodies

and help me with that end of it.

And I thought I'd listen back to the autotune.

I'd somehow be able to interpret what I'm saying in autotune gibberish

into real words.

And I actually wrote plenty of lyrics to that part.

And every time when working on the song,

I kept going back to the reference track of the gibberish and liking it more.

So your relationship with the lyrics seems to be a kind of complex one

because not all of the album is in English.

You know, you'll be doing a Spanish language song for us next.

There's at least one song in at least one Scandinavian language.

Two in Danish.

And then one in Japanese.

Yeah.

How many languages do you speak?

Including English.

I'm working on five.

But Danish and English, I feel very comfortable.

And Spanish, decent.

Then Russian and Japanese, average.

I'm working on it.

Okay.

But enough to mess around in.

So first of all, how does Danish become your second language?

I was very, very committed to the idea

that I wanted to speak two languages.

This was from childhood, probably on.

And I took Japanese in school.

I took Spanish.

I took Czech.

I took sign language.

But nothing was really clicking.

I liked them all.

But it was also just school in general.

I was too unfocused or just distracted by school life.

I don't know.

And then after college, I chose one based on a place I had been.

Some friends that I had who actually were Norwegian.

But they thought it'd be funny to speak with me in Danish and Norwegian,

which ended up, it works.

I understand Norwegian pretty well.

But yeah, they're pretty close.

And yeah, it was kind of just a joke that turned into a...

But I was, I'm very committed to these things when I start them.

So it was maybe 10-ish years ago.

I just started learning Danish on my own

and probably work on it every day.

And now I teach it in the summers.

Okay.

I mean, that whole part of Europe,

has, you know, the idea of a person of color

wandering around the Danish or Norwegian countryside,

not as unusual now as it would have been,

you know, even just like a generation ago.

Yeah.

And I mean, even with the unusualness of someone

foreign walking around Denmark now,

they're so used to it that it's almost impossible

to speak Danish in Denmark.

But I think I've finally reached that point

this past year.

Every single interaction I had was only Danish.

From the airport and the passport lady,

I spoke to her in Danish and she smiled and was like,

all right.

Okay.

All of which is simply to say that

I don't always know what's going on in your songs.

I was about to say that's probably the point of,

I don't know, I want people to understand the song.

I'll have their own interpretation of it.

Yeah, yeah.

People definitely speak Spanish and Japanese and Danish.

But I mean, I speak English, of course.

And when I see...

When I see a title like From an Ocean to a Lake,

my thought was, oh, he's talking about climate change

and what happened to the Aral Sea

in the middle of the old Soviet Union,

which used to be one of the biggest inland seas on Earth

and by the 1990s was literally a tenth of its former size.

But it's not about that at all.

It was kind of about a trip to the Faroe Islands

with a friend.

And there's this...

This lake that sits above the ocean on this hanging cliff

that's the coolest looking thing ever.

And the whole trip, my friend and I had told ourselves

that'll be the last thing we see

because it's near the airport.

And we ended up doing other things the whole trip

and never saw it.

And so it's just kind of a longing song

that I reinterpreted those emotions

into some other emotions into my own life,

relationships,

and the next thing you know,

I'm talking about water and cascades

and it leads to an album.

That was the first song on the album

and the first one I wrote in my room for it, yeah.

So the idea of water and cascades,

that comes up pretty early in the process of making the record.

The final track on the record is kind of a title track,

but it's also instrumental.

It's almost just an excuse to use that word again.

But I did play the piano intentionally

in a cascading way.

And there's even two layers of piano.

And I just like the way...

Yeah.

Certain notes were a second off

or cascaded into the...

Yeah.

So instead of calling it heterophony,

the fancy term for that sort of thing

where you have the same line going twice

but kind of different,

yeah, you chose cascade,

which is a more poetic title.

So well done.

Next album, what was the word again?

Heterophony.

So homophony is everybody singing in unison together.

Heterophony is like you begin to separate a little.

You're all singing the same thing.

And that can be a really amazing thing.

Yeah.

All right.

So the next song is Solo Yo y Tú.

So just me and you, basically.

What determines the language that you're going...

When does that happen in the songwriting process?

This one was right from the get-go.

I had the goal set of wanting to write a song in Spanish.

The Japanese one was kind of the same way too

where I'm taking lessons throughout the week online

and they always bring up,

like, who should write a song in Spanish?

Who should write a song in Japanese?

Because we know each other pretty well.

Some of these tutors I've talked with for years now

and I find, like, I'm going to write a song in Spanish.

And honestly, it was just something I worked on

just to send them, I felt like, this little thing,

like, I've made a song in Spanish.

Like, hopefully you're proud of me.

And there's something so nice about writing a song,

like, in a language I had never written a song in before

where it felt like the entire bank of vocab

was free to use for the first time.

Like, I can say anything.

Nothing sounded...

Especially as a second speaker of this language,

Spanish as a second language,

I didn't feel anything was oversaid or corny.

I had no bias on anything.

And it was all just like, ah, that sounds good.

That sounds cool.

Like, why not?

Every word was like, ah, yeah, why not?

And I didn't feel embarrassed about it.

In English, I'm second-guessing.

Everything, like, does this work?

Does this sound good?

Have I heard this before?

I don't know.

There's always a lot of second-guessing.

You know, what you're saying,

it's almost exactly what native Spanish singers

who have come in here

and started writing in English have said,

that, you know, it kind of helps

not to be totally expert in the language.

And you find yourself creating little phrases

that a native speaker

would never think of.

And in their inaccuracy or idiosyncrasy,

they're also quite beautiful and poetic.

I had a great time doing it.

The same with the Danish ones, Japanese.

It felt the same way.

Like, maybe this sounds like a two-year-old.

I don't know.

But it sounds good to me.

There you go.

I enjoyed writing it.

All right, well, let's hear this song

sung in Spanish by Conor Youngblood.

Solo yo y tú, just you and me.

It's on the new record.

Good cascades, cascading cascadingly,

but here is a live performance in our studio.

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I love you.

Like the track Otter.

By the end of that track,

it's an almost orchestral sound.

Is that all you?

That's all me.

Yeah, just kind of a wall of sound approach.

The more, the merrier.

And it just started...

It was a guitar riff that I liked,

that I started coming up with,

and then I think I stacked it 20 times on top of each other.

And then I just started out.

There's a drum beat that starts doing kind of a jungle-type

type breakbeat thing,

and then it just ended up being a lot of ideas

piling into one and starting to just wash it out.

I don't know.

I'm trying to do probably too much at once,

but I feel like it meshed in a way that I liked.

I mean, it was...

So you produce your own stuff.

And there are a couple of other tracks on the record

where we hear what sound like sampled or found voices,

voices that are not...

Yours, at least that's...

Yes, yes.

There's one on the song Reveille,

however you want to pronounce it.

There's a poem by A.E. Hausman

that I used as the verses for the lyric.

The poem is called Reveille, and that is what I'm singing.

And I just, I made up a melody.

I started reading the poem while playing the song I was writing.

I was like, this actually works really nicely.

Ooh.

And the song has this pick-me-up vibe to it.

And then...

I also, from just being into Scandinavia, I guess,

every now and then listen to Finnish Joikin.

And there's a sample of someone who is Joikin

that I added in there.

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I wanted this yodeling type sound.

I emailed him personally, like, could I use this thing?

And he was cool with it.

And I heard him once on the radio while I was in Finland,

and I just had him saved in my artist playlist.

And it's a...

Kind of a ritual thing.

A lot of those joiks are...

are about nature, right?

Mm-hmm.

And...

But I don't think there are actual lyrics to them.

No.

I think they're just emotion.

And...

But they have joiks for certain things.

People come up with their own joiks.

Well, they kind of have a shamanic feel to them,

but there are joiks for different birds and reindeer and animals.

And you're active in WWF, right?

Yes.

Which is not the Worldwide Wrestling Federation,

but the World Wildlife Fund.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then with them for the last maybe four years,

they have a thing called the National Council,

which is a type of board.

They present to us the initiatives of the year.

We have a few board meetings a year, calls,

and we just find our own personal ways to contribute.

I've done songs.

I will...

I've done lobbying.

A non-paid thing, and it's just for...

It's just for fun and trying to contribute the best way I can.

Right.

Well, it's more...

More than fun.

I mean, I hope it's fun, but it's also important.

Yeah.

So, yeah, there are these other voices that come and go.

Running Through the Toyin Arboretum is another one.

Oh, yeah, that one has the kids doing karate in it.

Is that what that is?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And that was just a random karate class.

I found on YouTube where I just...

I liked some of these yelling...

Once again, I don't know why I was...

I was specifically searching for the sound of people yelling in karate class.

That was just my gut feeling.

That's what the song needed.

I don't know.

And then from there, I probably scrolled through 20, 30 options,

and I couldn't tell you which one it was,

but there were a couple of kids that were going crazy that fit perfectly.

Nice.

It helps to be your own producer, right?

You can spend that kind of time.

It was just a whole day of going through YouTube kids' karate classes.

Maybe some judo was in there, but I definitely think I ended up with karate.

Now, what about do you do your own videos as well?

On this album, I've been kind of confused on how to do them completely on my own,

and so the last video for Blue Gatorade was one that was a mixture

of a lot of footage from videos that I didn't use

that I'd filmed with a Danish friend, Anna,

and then I started editing the video while recording myself edit the video.

Yes, it's kind of a dizzying thing to watch.

It's like, what is happening now?

And your hair is not always, it seems, going to the left side of your head as it is now.

Now, I don't know if they're flopped or...

I think the last couple of years, it's dedicated itself to my left.

There's been times where it was this piece kind of splits.

It's kind of solidified, and I don't know, but this piece used to go that way.

Again, you've got to watch the videos.

Of Conor's performances on the New Sounds YouTube channel

to see what he's talking about, but...

But the crazy thing about that, it used to go this way,

and then I wanted, I was on a long flight.

This is, it sounds crazy, but this is actually what happened.

I took a shower before the flight.

I washed my hair.

When I wash my hair, it takes a while to dry,

and I put on over-the-ear headphones like this,

and by the end of this flight, a long-distance flight,

my hair, I also, I swooped it to the side intentionally

just to fit the headphones on, and it dried like that.

And I remember getting off the flight like,

oh, that's kind of funny, and it hasn't changed since.

It sat like that.

Hair started interweaving and interlocking,

and that was that.

It wasn't intentional.

I was like, oh, whatever.

It's the look.

It is a very distinctive look that Conor Youngblood has,

and you can check out the video for this song, Blue Gatorade,

but right now you're going to play it for us live, right?

Yep.

All right.

Here's another track from the upcoming record, Out Tomorrow,

called Cascades, Cascading, Cascadingly.

This is Blue Gatorade.

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I'm so alive, I'm so alive

I'm so alive

© BF-WATCH TV 2021

Blue Gatorade

So that's a pretty big song

Both on the record and even here

Where it's just you and all the effects and the pedals and stuff

Were you going for a kind of a bigger sound on this record?

Yeah, yeah

That song definitely, specifically

I was trying to push a lot of things, vocals included

That's definitely one of the hardest ones for me to sing

But yeah

I think I had just gotten a lot of new guitar pedals

To be honest

And first I had all these things stolen out of my car

All my old guitar pedals and guitars

That was four years ago maybe

It was after the show in Colorado

And I brought them to my car

All this stuff's gone

So I bought all these new guitar pedals

Got some new guitars

And I feel like this was the song

Where I had all this new stuff

And I was like, what happens if I turn on every pedal?

What happens if I try out everything at once?

And I was like, what happens if I try out everything at once?

And so yeah, big was what I was going for

And what you end up with is kind of like a sad Phil Spector

Yeah

I was probably listening to a lot of Shoegaze music

I still am

But trying my best to sing my little heart out

And that's what we got

Well, the album is called Cascades, Cascading, Cascadingly

It is out tomorrow

Conor Youngblood, thank you so much for coming in and playing for us

Thank you very much for having me

It's been a pleasure

And do watch the videos of Conor's performances here in the studio

Our producer Karen Havlick down in the video control room

Those are coming soon to the New Sounds YouTube channel

And in the control room, our technical director Irene Trudell

I'm John Schaefer

You can keep up with everything we're doing on New Sounds

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I'm quieting myself again