Yo La Tengo Covers Anything You Want

Yo La Tengois an indie rock band that has been around as long as the genre itself. For more than 30 years, the married duo of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley (with, for the past two decades, bassist James McNew) have been releasing critically acclaimed albums of gentle pop, fuzzy rock, and covers. The band’s latest release is Stuff Like That There, an eclectic collection of everything they do best: covers of The Cure, Hank Williams, and Sun Ra; new versions of older songs in their catalog, and a few mostly acoustic originals. Kurt Andersen talks with the band about why they still love playing covers.

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Kurt Andersen: Is part of playing covers getting into somebody else’s skin and somebody else’s head?

Ira Kaplan: I think there’s an aspect of getting into somebody else’s head when you do a cover, but I don’t feel that way on this record. I think it’s all our skin.

What made you decide to release your first album of covers, Fakebook, in 1990?

Ira Kaplan: We used to go to college radio stations on tour and it just didn’t go well. So we got into the habit of bringing a guitar and singing some songs as a way of keeping things moving along. At the time, Georgia didn’t sing live very much, but we weren’t going to lug around a drum set, so we just worked out this alternate repertoire of songs that we could do on the radio, and a lot of them were covers.

Are some songs just unapproachable or is anything fair game?

James McNew: Annually we participate in the WFMUfundraiser playing cover songs. People call in and request the song. It can be any song, and we have to play it. That’s just how it goes. And we will customarily just destroy it — we will ruin that song. I remember a particularly harrowing version of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by The Eurythmics.

Bonus Track:Yo La Tengo perform “Awhileaway,” a new original song from Stuff Like That There