It’s not often that a “breakout” indie band is critically lauded, commercially viable, and expected to endure for many albums to come. With the October release of Yeasayer’s All Hour Cymbals and its swirling, enveloping single “2080,” just those sorts of expectations were unleashed by the music community. The Brooklyn foursome built its mystique around a penchant for mixing the organic and the electronic in its sweeping, almost spiritual soundscapes and then somehow managing to wrap it all up with catchy choruses and experimental rhythms. I caught up with guitarist Anand Wilder last week, just as Yeasayer prepared to run gauntlet of the major summer festival circuit.

No Dessert For You: You recently played Central Park Summerstage and you’ll play Lollapalooza, Roskilde, Oya, Reading and a host of other this outdoor festivals this summer. How do you feel about the massive festival setting versus more intimate clubs?

Anand Wilder: Pretty much the first outdoor festival we did was ATP in London, and it was just amazing. We just got to hang out with so many different musicians and nerd out, like talk about guitar pedals. Being in a club is the same thing every single night, and so much driving…at a festival, you just go to one place, play outdoors and it’s a lot of music for one show.

NDFY: Your club tour with MGMT earlier this year had outgrown many of the venues before the tour even started. What was it like to have the dual successes of both bands create such high expectations for the tour, and how well do you think Yeasayer delivered?

AW: What happened was that Yeasayer’s booking agent booked the tour before we knew it was going to be with MGMT, so we booked it at 200-300 person venues. Then MGMT came on board and it sold out so quickly, that it probably would have made more sense if it was just us and a smaller opening band, but at the time that we booked the tour, we didn’t know what kind of draw we would have so we were just playing it safe. I think that we delivered – we had to add an extra show in Chicago. I always love a Chicago crowd – they get into it and the get it, so it was a rousing success.

NDFY: Your live show, as I’ve seen it, is more of an encompassing experience than most independent bands deliver these days. Yeasayer’s music is part spiritual celebration, part sort of depressing reminder about how “progression” is driving us into the ground. How important is it to you for people to walk away from a Yeasayer experience having heard a message?

AN: I like to make the music very open-ended, so if someone wants to take something that’s deep and resonant from it then they can, but if they want to just enjoy some very poppy music and sing along with the chorus, they can do that too. Number one, we’re about the music and making catchy songs, experimenting with new sounds and new tools and new rhythms, but we do like to put little messages in there and sometimes completely contradict ourselves.

NDFY: It’s a big-sounding album that borders on anthemic. As organic as many of the themes and harmonies on the record are, electronic production has a lot to do with the sound that’s brought Yeasayer so much attention. Is that dichotomy something you guys considered in the recording process?

AW: We always set out to have a nice, healthy mixture of the organic and the synthetic. I think that if you take something in a direction that’s too synthetic, there’s no soul and no human element at all. On the other hand, if it’s too organic, it’s too retro and too much of a throwback. I think there will always be that urge to be in a band and play sort of a Neil Young-style music, or to be in a straight ahead synth band, but I think it’s the push and pull that makes music interesting and sounding fresh.

NDFY: How do you think it’s going to go over in the Lollapalooza setting?

AW: We’ve done the club thing and we’ve sort of made our mark in the indie rock, Pitchfork world, and I think the challenge of a festival is that you’re starting from zero again and playing for a bunch of people who probably don’t know who you are. You’re the opening band for the people waiting to hear the Cure or the Flaming Lips, so you want to make a good impression on them and maybe make a new fan. We just played the Sasquatch Festival outside of Seattle, and it was such a new experience for us, playing outdoors and seeing people hacky sacking out in the crowd. It was a totally new scene, and it’s not like I’m against making those kinds of fans – it’s all about reaching new people. It’s funny, playing in front of a festival crowd – there’s no pretense, they don’t try to be ‘too cool,” they clap along or dance. They’re very pliable and you can mold them to be exactly what you want.

NDFY: So what are you trying to mold them to be?

AW: We just want them to be involved. We start clapping during one song in a really weird way, and they clapped along better than any crowd had on the club tour. It’s just one glob of human mass.

NDFY: You read about people having an experience with All Hour Cymbals, but how do you guys continue to interact with that music now that the record has been out for a while?

AW: We’re always trying to re-work it, but honestly the songs don’t sound very fresh to me right now because we’ve been touring on them for 4, 5, 6 months and we haven’t had any time to practice. Now we have our first time off in a long time, and we’re going to rearrange songs and write some new ones. We obviously have to play the songs form our album because we want people to walk away having had a good time, but if we can add a few new songs, thehope is that they go over just as well.

MP3: Yeasayer - 2080

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