The duo of Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, known as YACHT, returned last month with their fifth album, I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler, promoting their multifaceted artistic experience through fax machines, billboards, and an innovative mash-up of tech, transportation, and media. Here, the duo gives us the lowdown on what sounds inspired the making of their album.
Words by Claire L. Evans.
Family Fodder, “F*ck You Till I’m Dead”
Family Fodder, a cluster of musicians revolving around the brilliant Alig Fodder, is one of the great underappreciated British post-punk bands. We feel lots of kinship with them—they were always reinventing themselves, and have lived a long musical life of experimentation. Many of their lyrics from this era are performed by a non-native English speaker, the French singer Dominique Levillain, which is why they’re so charmingly wonky; we love lyrics that are nonsensical in this specific way, because we always think of ourselves as being imperfect, broken, upside-down. We cover this song on our new album.
Will Powers, “Adventures in Success”
Will Powers was a musical alias created in the 80s by the rock photographer Lynn Herschfield for a single conceptual joke album called Dancing for Mental Health. “Will Powers” was supposed to be a self-help guru, and all the songs feature Herschfield, her voice artificially pitched down, blabbering all kinds of dumb new age affirmations. She made the record with a bunch of her friends, people like Nile Rogers and Sting and Carly Simon, none of whom are actually credited on the record. The way this song satirizes a prevailing pop-culture trend while just becoming it completely—you can’t help but feel pumped up by the lyrics—is really interesting.
The Moody Blues, “Your Wildest Dreams”
The intro to this song is the inspiration for the intro to our song “Don’t Be Rude.” It’s dreamy and meandering and unnecessary in the best way. Jona heard this song for the first time on a planetarium field trip when he was a kid, and has been irrationally attached to it ever since; we recreated the mood with a once-expensive 90s KORG workstation keyboard. “Don’t Be Rude” is a naive melody compared to the rest of I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler, and the intro serves as a palate-cleanser.
Robert Wyatt, “The Age of Self”
This song was originally recorded in the early 80s in support of the UK Miner’s Strike. It’s a really cutting, really sad song about worker’s rights intended for a particular moment in time, but the lyrics still resonate strongly with us: “They say the working class is dead/we’re all consumers now/They say that we have moved ahead/we’re all just people now.” It says the things we’re trying to say on I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler with infinitely more grace.
Sheila E., “A Love Bizarre”
The album cut of this song is 12 minutes long. It’s so airy and repetitive that the first time we heard it, we thought we were stuck in a time loop. We literally went to check to see if the record we were playing was locked in a groove. It wasn’t. It’s just that surreal. We really appreciate music that takes you there—to a place of disbelief—and try to do the same with our longer songs, pushing them way past “radio” length, although we have a hard time staying locked into a single groove like this.
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