Yo La Tengo
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Yo La Tengo is the musical love-child of two folks who live in Hoboken, dig the Mets, eat red meat, sleep late, and whose lives were saved by rock and roll. Ira Kaplan used to write about the latter topic for various renowned New York publications before he met drummer Georgia Hubley who used her rhythmic charms to lure his guitar out of the closet. The band has been a quartet, a trio, or just the two of 'em. They've recorded a 10-minute guitar feedback freakout and they've covered Pete Seeger. Collaborators have included Dave Rick (Bongwater, Phantom Tollbooth), Chris Stamey, and some Swiss guy named Stephan. Their last album, President Yo La Tengo, approached nirvana from the guitar-loop dirge of "Barnaby, Hardly Working" (re-tooled here on Fakebook) to the garage-lifting glory of Antietam's "Orange Song" (whose brand new album, Burgoo, was produced by Georgia and Ira).
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The album in question is Fakebook, Yo La Tengo's fourth, and it was made right here in Hoboken this past spring. It's also their Bar/None debut and we couldn't be more pleased. Why? Because over the past half-decade, Yo La Tengo has been creating music that has the ability to stir you up deep down inside, giving voice to the magic and the rage of everyday living.
Using their occasional acoustic concerts as a jumping-off point, and exploiting Georgia's newfound willingness to sing, Fakebook is made up mostly of cover songs, built on Ira's acoustic strumming, Georgia's brushwork, and the pair's harmonizing (as previously heard on Fakebook's obvious antecedent, "Alyda" from President Yo La Tengo). Dave Schramm, who left Yo La Tengo after the Ride the Tiger album to form the Schramms, returns to the lead guitar chair, and the Schramms' Al Greller contributes bass. Periodic bassist and frequent producer Gene Holder is once again at the reins, and there are animated guest vocals from Peter Stampfel and the Pussywillows.
There you have it. Fakebook is what Yo La Tengo spent the first portion of 1990 creating; now you can spend the rest of the year feeling the results.
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1985 - "The River of Water"/ "A House Is Not A Motel" (Egon 7")
1985 - "Private Doberman" from Luxury Condos Coming To Your Neighborhood Soon (Coyote compilation LP)
1986 - Ride The Tiger (Coyote LP/CS)1986 - "Heart's Expired" from For Your Ears Only (Jersey Beat compilation cassette)
1987 - "The Asparagus Song"/ "For The Turnstiles" (Coyote 7")1987 - New Wave Hot Dogs (Coyote LP/CS)1987 - "Dreams" (Chemical Imbalance Giveaway 7")
1988 - "Somebody's Baby" from Human Music (Homestead Compilation LP/CS/CD)
1989 - President Yo La Tengo (Coyote LP/CS)1989 - President Yo La Tengo/New Wave Hot Dogs (Coyote CD)
1990 - Fakebook (Bar/None LP/CS/CD)
Strange But True, by Jad Fair & Yo La Tengo
Coming out December 12th, 2025, click here to order
In the ’90s, Jad Fair had five favorite bands and songwriters: Daniel Johnston, The Pastels, Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, and Yo La Tengo. It’s a good list, sure, but what’s most remarkable about it is that, in the course of a dozen years or so, Fair made music with all of them in one form or another. In some cases, a kindred spirit recognized one of its own; in most cases, it was because the work Fair had created with his brother, David, in Half Japanese since the ’70s, or before the term indie rock really existed, had inspired a successive cohort that helped to define it. “Anyone who hears that stuff,” Yo La Tengo’s James McNew told The Wire in 2000, “it’ll change their life.” In the same interview, Ira Kaplan remembered hearing the band’s Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts upon its release and being floored. The way Yo La Tengo made music, he said, owed a lot to Jad and David Fair.
Thing is, Jad Fair has been prolific for half a century now, long before the Internet could create a simultaneous and seemingly eternal archive of everything someone with his predilections made. He’s been involved in several hundred titles, at least, many of them out-of-print on tiny labels that do not exist anymore. In fact, one of those collaborations that Fair made in the ’90s—Strange But True, with Yo La Tengo—has been hard to find, despite its stateside release on October 20th 1998, by Matador Records. For the first time, the album is being reissued on vinyl by Joyful Noise and Bar/None.
By the time Fair played a party with Yo La Tengo in the mid-’90s, they were all friends, fans, and collaborators, having worked on or released records together. When Fair suggested they all head into the studio, the trio bit. David Fair had been turning headlines from the checkout-aisle tabloid Weekly World News into short, poignant, and funny narrative poems. He intended to make an illustrated book of them until Jad read a few and suggested they’d actually be perfect songs. In their New Jersey studio and rehearsal space in 1994, Yo La Tengo—working without headphones, so they could hear one another but couldn’t necessarily hear Jad speak and sing—improvised to his visual cues as he delivered these lyrics. They replicated the stratagem two years later in New York, amassing 29 of these improvised story-songs.
The result, Strange But True, is as wonderful, varied, and wild as some enormous lawn of native grasses. Bits of jangle, hardcore, drone, post-punk, acoustic oddity, and even doo-wop frame these tales of a monkey becoming a domestic helper, of a scientist toiling to reinvent chewing gum, of an impatient millionaire fixing potholes with his own stacks of cash. These sessions were so freewheeling that there are two versions of an anecdote about an accidental Baked Alaska called “Clumsy Grandmother Serves Delicious Dessert by Mistake”—one blown-out and squealing, the other as tight as an oddball punk anthem. The drum-and-voice, start-and-stop curio “X-Ray Reveals Doctor Left Wristwatch Inside Patient” is a testament to those visual cues, while “Embarrassed Teen Accidentally Uses Valuable Rare Postage Stamp” is gorgeous and gentle, Fair and the band finding empathy in the shame.
Of the 22 tracks that make up Strange But True, none may be more affecting than “Circus Strongman Runs for PTA President.” With resignation in his voice, Fair tells the tale of “the sword-swallowing circus strongman and his snake-charming tattooed wife,” who have decided to resign from the circuit and retire into hammock-lounging, child-rearing domesticity. It’s a bummer, a pair of freaks leaving their scene. But it’s also, as we learn, a feint, since the family now consists of “his fire-eating fan-dancing daughter and their dog-faced contortionist son.” We are inseparable, turns out, from our eccentricity. “When I started as a musician, I just wanted to sound like myself,” Fair says. “You would think that would be the easiest thing to do, but, for most people, it’s difficult.” Strange But True couldn’t sound more like Jad Fair if it tried. The songs showcase his uncanny range, brilliant humor, and ultra-flexible musicality, bringing us back to a time when indie rock was still free to be as weird and unruly as its makers wanted it to be.
