Simple Pleasures

Singer-songwriter Pete Yorn takes a "pure" approach on his new album, Day I Forgot.

"Stop being lazy and go plug in the acoustic!" yell the members of Pete Yorn's band, exhorting the tousle-haired 29-year-old to tune up his Gibson J-45 and start strumming. Yorn, rehearsing in Los Angeles for the upcoming tour in support of his sophomore release, Day I Forgot (Columbia), has been chunking away on his Epiphone Casino electric guitar while practicing a track from the new album called "Pass Me By." On the record, the song's rhythm--as on many of Yorn's tunes--is doggedly driven by fleshy stereo acoustics, and his band notices that the electric just isn't cutting it. "All right," he surrenders, "I'll go get it."

"As soon as I picked up the acoustic," he says later, "the song began to sound right." Yorn is wise to the way that acoustics can add texture while leaving room in a track; in the case of the studio version of "Pass Me By," for instance, that space is filled by Pete's own keening slide guitar work. 

Sonic elbow room will be especially important--and difficult to come by--when Yorn launches his upcoming tour with his band, which features two other guitarists. "There's no question that I'm going to be playing a lot more acoustic guitar on the tour," says Yorn, who plans to use two Gibsons, his J-45 and a Southern Jumbo, onstage. "I think it'll help mare room for us in realizing all the other guitar textures that are on this record."

Yorn's debut, 2000's musicforthemorningafter, was positively drenched in acoustic guitars, most dramatically on the songs "June," "Sense" and the melodic "Strange Condition." Those steel-strings did much to warm Yorn's sound on the album, the product of a brooding marriage of American roots rock, British post-punk, and cut-and-paste production so warm sounding.

"For all that," says Yorn, "on the first tour I was kind of lazy about the acoustics. I thought, I've got my electric, man, I want to rock out. I don't want to deal with the hassle of switching guitars, and I don't want to break up the set."

Working with both acoustics and electrics comes naturally to Yorn, who grew up in Montville, New Jersey, admiring R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and the Smith's Johnny Marr, both of whom were heavily influenced by the Byrds and other folk rock bands whose sound was largely based on acoustic/electric interplay. Among the guitars Yorn used on Day I Forgot his J-45 and Southern Jumbo, various Fender Strats and Teles, a Sixties-era Les Paul Junior, a baritone Guitar and a 1966 Gibson F-25 acoustic that he's particularly fond of.

"It's almost a hybrid of a steel-string and a classical guitar," says Yorn, "with a very wide neck and wide string spacing. It's great for intricate picking, when you really want to get in between the strings. I also like it because it's got these two cool long rectangular white pickguards on either side of the soundhole."

Yorn doesn't experiment with alternate tunings much, although he does tune his E string down to a B on the song "Turn of the Century." This produces a chimey drone which, he reports, "just sounds amazing when I move from one chord to the other." He also says he sometimes tune down a half step in concert when his voice is fatigued, and that he often uses a capo to change not only the pitch but also the character of his acoustic. "I like to use the capo on the seventh fret; that way I've got a B on the bottom, which is where it is on my baritone guitar. This allows me to double all those capoed chords from the acoustic simply by playing in first postition on the baritone."

While strummy acoustics often sound glassy and a little thin within a rock mix, Yorn's guitars retain a punchy, slightly dark tone that can be heard through the din of distorted electrics. Yorn credits Manley Labs, a California-based firm which specializes in microphones, preamps and compressors, to achieve his warm, present sound. "We use the Manley condenser mikes on nearly everything--vocals, acoustic guitars, even the room mike for the drums," he says. "We also like the Manley Slam compressor, and the Manley Vox Box preamp is amazing--it's great for so many things."

While Yorn certainly pulled out all the stops to achieve great acoustic tones on Day I Forgot, his overall approach was less tech-heavy than in the past. "On the last record I had a lot of fun with loops and beats," he notes, "but I really wanted this one to be more about the vocals and the melodies. My old formula had become too much of a 'thing'--take some folk music, add a little electronica and presto! I wanted to get away from that in favor of something more pure, more classic."

The presence of the illustrious Buck on the album indicates just how far Yorn has come in a relatively short period of time. A few short years ago, he was just another L.A. songsmith doing the rounds at small venues like Club Largo and Genghis Cohen. Now he has a Gold debut record, contributed songs to a host of movie soundtracks including Me, Myself, and Irene and Spider-Man and recorded a cover of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" for We're a Happy Family, the recently released tribute album to the punk legends. Given his incredible spate of success, it's not surprising that Day I Forgot is, in part, a meditation on the ramifications of getting exactly what you've always wanted.

"The album is about getting back to a simpler time, to the things you really and truly love," says Yorn. "Some people get very caught up with their careers, their relationships, how their lives are progressing in general, and it's very easy to forget about the simple things that attracted you to something in the first place. Music was my first love. Now, all of a sudden I've got a record out, I toured for 18 months--everything's changed. I got caught up in that for a while, and all caught up in the business side of music. And I forgot about how much fun I have playing with my band and writing songs, and what that used to mean to me when I was 18."

So what rock icon inspired the love that drove the young Yorn to pursue his career? "I wanted to be Morrissey!" he says with a laugh. "I'm serious; I had the haircut, the glasses--everything. I remember seeing the video for 'Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before,' where all the Morrissey look-alikes are riding their bikes around Manchester. I was all of 14 at the time, and I just thought, 'now that's cool.'"