“I think that we are the sum of our parts.”
As longtime fans of Deadsy, the Electro Avant Metal band fronted by Elijah Blue Allman who were a staple of the Nu-Metal scene in the late ’90’s to mid-’00’s, it was incredibly cool to find out that lead synthesist Renn Hawkey was not only back with new outfit The Yagas (Featuring Renn’s wife, actress Vera Farmiga, on vocals) but also that Hawkey’s unmistakable sound brought to albums like Phantasmagore and all iterations of Commencement (We have several different physical copies ourselves) was still very much intact and ever present throughout the recent debut from The Yagas called Midnight Minuet.
When the opportunity arose to speak with Hawkey on all things The Yagas we couldn’t resist but in the interest of not overloading y’all with too much of the killer conversation we had via phone all at once, we decided to split up our chat into two parts with the first half below touching on the genesis of the new quintet, potential touring plans, influences and more:
If you’ve been following the social media pages for The Yagas then you’d know that the band didn’t form overnight with posts beginning well over a year ago. But the roots of the band started well before that with Hawkey revealing that it was a matter of perfect timing amongst friends that resulted in what would become The Yagas:
“It started almost as a dare! Jason (Bowman, drummer of The Yagas) and Acacia (Ludwig), who is his wife, and Vera (Farmiga, vocalist for The Yagas) and I, Vera’s my wife and she’s also the singer of the band, we all went out to dinner and… The timing just happened to be right…. and Jason had suggested ‘Hey, why don’t we write some songs together?’ And the timing had been been great for me because I literally had just quit Deadsy, which was my former band for 25 years.
What started off as, like, an experiment turned into something that I sort of had to take very seriously once that first track came together, which was a song called ‘I Am’. Having worked with several different people in the past, um, some well-known, some not so well-known, I’ve just never experienced this kind of alchemy, you know, outside of Deadsy. It felt like something that we had to kind of seize like ‘Okay, okay, that’s a great song, right?’ It’s dynamic, it kind of has a fresh sound, it hearkens to other genres of music. You can hear all the influences in there from Industrial/Electro, like Nine Inch Nails, to more Nu-Metal with what Vera sprinkles on there.
She grew up singing Ukrainian songs so she brings a completely different kind of melodic sense to her singing, you know, similar to System Of A Down, right? Where did that come from? Why does that work? And it just works. It started with ‘I Am’ and just kept going and sort of unraveled from there. We brought in Mark Visconti, our guitar player, and we all met at a place called the Woodstock Rock Academy, ironically, [which] Jason Bowman (Drums) owns. But we all have kids who were in the program and you have a group of musician parents who are all sitting in the parking lot for three hours while their kids are all inside having a BLAST and you’re sitting there thinking ‘Why the fuck didn’t I have this when I was a kid? This place is amazing!’ And, of course, he’s got an adult program which took me three years to figure out but it’d probably be good for me to stay primed while I’m not playing music with Deadsy and so I did that for a couple of seasons and Jason gave us some cover songs to do and I just had a lot of fun and then Vera joined me and Mark was in it and then Mike Davis, who’s our bass player, was also in it. Acacia (Ludwig), Jason’s wife, is peripherally in the band. She helps with lyrics and has a really strong relationship with Vera. A really good songwriting relationship.”
As for the sound of the band, if you’ve already heard the debut release then you can probably tell that the quintet’s influences are diverse with our review calling Midnight Minuet a “Doom-laden Goth Rawk opus” as Hawkey elaborates:
“I think that we are the sum of our parts. I think everybody equally participates in the songwriting. I mean, that’s a band. Which is different from what I’ve experienced in the past. There’s usually one or two people out front who are doing the writing and under these circumstances I think we just support one another and allow each other to bring our different talents to the table. We all have very different influences. I’m more a Goth-y Darkwave New Wave guy, but I also just looove The Beatles and Sabbath but then, like, Roxy Music and Gary Numan are at the top of my list. Peter Murphy’s an idol and The Cure, obviously, you can hear that.
You’d have to ask everybody else what they’re bringing to it but Jason and Mark are probably a little bit more aligned having their Metal roots. Somehow I find myself playing with Heavy musicians, you know? Although I’m not a Metal guy, Deadsy was known as a Nu-Metal band, right? All that colorful, melodic stuff you hear in that band is my keyboards, right? Like I said, Vera, I think what she brings to it is kind of a freshness and a newness, which is really unexpected. I couldn’t tell you what her influences are and I don’t want to speak for her but I know she loves everything from Radiohead to The White Stripes to Missy Elliott to U2. She’s just all over the place! She has this well of knowledge of folkloric/Slavic/Ukrainian Folk Songs. Then Mike, he’s aligned with me, he’s a New Wave-ish kind of a guy [who] loves Bauhaus, Joy Division but he’s also a really well-seasoned Jazz musician. He has his masters in the tabla, he plays the Double Bass, the accordion. Like, he even plays the six-string bass! (laughs) Is that necessary? I guess it is if you can handle it! Like, why not! Why not go for seven! (laughs)”
When it comes to recording Midnight Minuet, Hawkey disclosed that what started as an idea for recording six songs over a weekend quickly escalated into an entire album being created:
“The process of recording was the songs were mostly written weekend warrior-style because we’re all scattered and everyone has lives so we’d get together on weekends usually in a living room and sitting around a piano and I have my laptops and my mics and I just kind of travel with that stuff and that’s how we demo’d everything and then we had 12 songs. Very quickly. We said ‘Let’s jump into the studio and just record six songs for two days.’ And we booked two days in Dreamland Studios which is just outside of Woodstock in a town called Hurley in a really cool old church. The irony of which is that I recorded my first record there in 1996 with Deadsy. So going back there, going back to the same board, you know, just getting the same vibes. A slightly different culture, we’re grown up now, it was a little bit less partying (laughs). So after we got the drums set up we just plowed through the six songs immediately. Bass, guitar, and drums. We ended up tracking 12 songs in the two days.
It was just unexpected. And then I do all the keyboards after the fact and vocals with Vera separately. We do everything in our home, most of which are first passes for her. That’s also a really interesting thing is that she’s not precious about her takes, you know? She’s an actress, right? She gives her performance and that’s the first one that she wants to give and then she’ll allow or wait for someone to give her direction and she just moves on. Most of the time, it’s her first take! It’s a wild thing to work with! I can tell you personally, I know when I think I played something well or right and someone wants me to redo it, like, I piss and moan. She’s not precious about it and brings kind of a different attitude to the whole thing. She’s willing to try anything. It’s really cool.
I spent the following three months just kind of doing all the comping and pre-mixing on my own and then I have a collaborator in mixing, which is Brian Virtue, who’s an amazing guy, who I’ve worked with for 25 plus years. He did everything for Deadsy. He’s done stuff for everyone from Jane’s Addiction to the Deftones to 30 Seconds To Mars. We worked remotely. He’s in California and he really just helped me bring this thing across the finish line.”
When it comes to upcoming touring plans, beyond a few one-offs in recent months, fans might have to wait a little bit longer to experience The Yagas in the wild but Hawkey said that they’re still weighing all the options:
“We have kind of a global audience. I think there’s a great appeal for our music in Europe. I mean, not that there’s not here in America, but just through social media and interacting with people online there’s a LOT of support in Mexico and Argentina and Brazil and Europe. There’s been one-off offers to like, ‘Come play in Athens! Come play Kiev! Come to Argentina!’ We don’t have a booking agent and I’ve yet to pursue that also just because everybody’s got lives here. Obviously, we’ve missed the window for getting on any festivals and those things book up so quickly, that would have been really good a way for us to come out, but we’ll see when the album comes out if there’s that demand.”
And with that, we asked Hawkey to talk to fans outside of established fans of Farmiga or Deadsy or Woodstock Rock Academy as to why they should check out the debut from The Yagas:
“That’s a tricky question. You’ve gotta be patient. Listen to the entire record. It just makes sense as an album, y’know? I want people to be patient and recognize that it’s okay to blend genres. And that’s what we’ve done here. Most people put things in a box and they’re like ‘Oh, it belongs here or over there, and I know what to do with it.’ so I would just ask for people to give us a chance and be open-minded. I would say it’s almost genre-defining. I can’t tell you what band we should go tour with. I have no idea. Could be Garbage, could be Nine Inch Nails. If Manson calls I’d be, like, ‘Hell yeah!’ but I’d also go out with Linkin Park or Evanescence. I have no idea. It’s all over the place and I think that’s okay. I’m excited! I’m excited to see how people respond to it.”
Midnight Minuet from The Yagas is out now and you can secure your very own copy by heading here. For our review of the record head here, and then here or here for all the latest from Hawkey and The Yagas.