by Taylor Ruckle (@TaylorRuckle)
In one sense, Brooklyn singer/songwriter Sam Yield’s debut solo album was a decade in the making. The former Haybaby bassist curated its track list from a catalog of original songs stretching all the way back to his earliest days as a guitarist, when he was first learning the intricate fingerpicking that now rolls throughout Terra Australis.
Like lifetimes of music and poetry before it, the record also taps into something more ancient. Yield’s lyrics give a colloquial survey of centuries of thought on the nature of the world and the human condition, drawing on ideas from Hebrew scripture, Greek philosophy, and dubious early-modern medical texts.
In puzzling over that history, though, using it to talk about loss, joy, and the uneasy relationship between beauty and truth, Terra Australis never feels so lofty. Yield’s voice is soft and friendly in your ear, unfolding over the album like the words of a passenger seat confidant on the long drive home from a show--your eyes are straining, the band is still ringing in your ears, and you’re having your first serious conversation of the night.
After the release, Yield spoke to Post-Trash about teaming up with the Plastic Miracles label in the making of Terra Australis, grappling with the limits of the album format, and the myth of the artistic value of sadness.
photo credit: Mike Busse
PT: You did an album release live stream on the Plastic Miracles Twitch channel. What was that like?
SY: That was the first streaming show I'd played, and it did catch me off guard a little bit how different it was from a live show. You know, when you're playing live, it's such an interaction with the people there, and it's a little odd--you're kind of looking in a mirror when you're playing a streaming show. But on the other hand, there are some parts of it that are really nice. It's a little bit of a surprise to me that chat rooms have become a thing again, you know? It's like this resurrection from the early days of the internet, and it seems to me--I mean, I'm sure it depends on what kind of stream you're looking at, but in the shows I've seen, the chats, there's this culture of positivity that's kind of nice.
Had you played these songs live before the pandemic shut down live shows?
Not all of them, but I guess most of them. But--right, it had been a while. I realized when the show was coming up, "Oh, jeez, I gotta actually practice some of these because it's been so long since I played them all the way through.” There was one song, “This Must Be,” that I wrote over the summer, so I hadn't played live at all. When I was practicing it, I was playing it in the wrong key sort of by accident, and I thought, "Jeez, this is how I should have recorded it from the beginning," but what can you do?
How did you get started playing guitar?
As a kid, I didn't have that much interest in playing music or really listening to music, but one thing I did listen to was, my dad had a couple Mississippi John Hurt records. He's got this very interesting way of playing the guitar where he's playing a little alternating bass line in the low register and a little melody in the high register, and I was jealous of that, so [laughs] at a certain point, I thought, "Maybe I'll try to figure out how to do that." That's kind of how I started playing the guitar.
How long did it take you to actually be able to do that?
[laughs] Yeah, I mean, probably several years. When I was in college, there was a summer I spent on campus where there was really just not much to do--in theory, I was working on the grounds crew, and so in the morning, you'd get up and drive around in one of those little golf carts, water the plants, and so on, and then there wasn't really anything to do for the rest of the day. There was no one around, so I'd just sit in my room and play the guitar. It was a turning point, maybe.
What summer was that? Do you remember?
That would have been the summer of 2007, so I would have started playing guitar a couple years earlier than that.
I know you've also released music with Haybaby--this is your first solo album, though. When did you start writing songs for yourself?
Sort of from the start. Although I did have that idea in my mind that I wanted to play like Mississippi John Hurt, I never really learned any of his songs, or other songs--I didn't really learn by learning covers, which I feel like is a more typical and maybe more efficient way to go about it. [laughs] Really, from the start, I was trying to write stuff on my own, and I think there's something to be said for trying to write a song on an instrument that you don't really know how to play yet. It forces you into strange ideas.
I think that’s common among people who are learning to play an instrument. All of a sudden, it's this open-ended thing where you're still learning how to use it, but you can intuitively make sound with it, right?
Right, and there's something about grappling with it. Having to wrestle it can be fruitful, and then the more proficient you become, the more it becomes this tool where you have to make a conscious decision every time you use it. As opposed to wrestling it, and maybe you pin it, and maybe it pins you.
At that point, were you recording yourself at all?
Not right from the start, but from pretty early on. I don't know exactly when, but early on, I had a little field recorder that I would record on. On this record, there's a couple songs that--I don't know exactly when I wrote them, but probably around 2010 or 2011. I remember trying to record one of them back then and thinking, "Oh, great, I'll have this record done in no time."
So that clearly didn't happen--how did this album come to be? What was the turning point where you decided you were going to make the record for real?
I feel like I had that turning point about 20 times. [laughs] It was sort of this cycle where I'd get optimistic about the prospect of finishing this record, or a record, and think, "Alright, I'm going to really buckle down and do it.” I'd work on a bunch of recordings, maybe write a new song or two, and then about three-quarters of the way through, either become fed up with it or have my focus dragged somewhere else, and then come back around and feel like, "Alright, scrap all that, but this time, I'm really gonna finish it."
So what was different this time?
A few things. [laughs] I mean, possibly the pandemic had something to do with it because that basically that stuck me in this room with a bunch of tools to work with. Also, I think having Elise and Plastic Miracles on board was a huge, huge help. This probably wouldn't have happened without that--in a lot of ways, but not least in terms of having a sort of external set of expectations and deadlines.
Leaving Haybaby was part of it. Haybaby's great, and they're still doing great stuff, but I'd played in a few other bands over the years too, and to me at least, when there's a competition between the project that you're doing yourself that you have only yourself to answer to versus projects that you're doing in collaboration with other people, their expectations, their time frames, and so on--in that competition, to me, it's very easy to put your own thing aside and say, "Okay, we're gonna work on this." And with a lot of those projects, especially with Haybaby, that also felt like something that was my own thing, so I don't want to make it sound like that, but yeah, having just one musical project to focus on was part of it.
How did you get involved with Plastic Miracles?
Well, I knew Elise from playing music in Brooklyn. In particular, Haybaby had shared a bunch of bills with various projects she was in, and of course, I loved Oceanator. She wound up getting signed to the same label that Haybaby was on, Tiny Engines, and late last year, that label kind of imploded because--essentially, one of the bands on the roster accused them publicly of mismanaging their money, and it became a whole thing. That label kind of disappeared, and around the same time, [Elise] actually had been slated to release a record with them, so that put her in a pretty strange place.
Around the same time, I hosted a show that she played--I used to host these house shows at my apartment in Brooklyn before the disease made that impossible. She played one of those, and we were talking after a show, and she mentioned, you know, "I've had this idea to start this tape label, and now I think I might go ahead with it." At the time, it seemed like she thought, "Well, maybe this will be a way for me to release this record" that she'd been planning on putting out through Tiny Engines, but meanwhile, she also gathered a few musicians that she knew. We got into a conversation that night, and that's how this came about.
Tell me about the album title, Terra Australis. Where did that phrase originate?
Well, the idea goes back a long time, but reached a kind of fruition in the early modern period. People thought there must be another continent on the other side of the world to balance out Europe, essentially, and they called that hypothetical place Terra Australis, which just means "the southern land." And people tried to find it; they went on these long journeys. Captain Cook tried to find it, and didn't find much other than these huge [laughs] fields of ice.
It was used in utopian literature for a while. It was this sort-of-imaginary, sort-of-potentially-real place that you could use as a location for imagined societies, so that interested me for a while. I also began to think about it as--you know, this missing place that doesn't exist is also in the south where the birds migrate in the winter. It's both this imagined utopia and also this barren iced-over nothing.
How did you encounter that idea, and how did it work its way into your songwriting?
I might have first come across the phrase in The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. I don't know if you’ve ever looked at that book, but it's a trip. It's this interminable, unreadable book written in the early modern period, and it's supposedly a sort of encyclopedia of the causes, cures for, effects of, and so on, of melancholy, but it's full of digressions and wandering ideas. I think that's where I first encountered that phrase, and around the same time is when I wrote the song "A Winter Country." I don't know if I want to say exactly what that song's about, but it was a pretty low point for me, and that constellation of ideas got worked into that feeling.
What made you want to name the album after that--draw from that track, "A Winter Country," and let that phrase speak for this collection of songs?
In a way, it’s the ambivalence of it. If this record's about something, to me, it's sort of about--I see the first song as a hypothesis that there's no consolation to be had for the fact of being a human being, and then the album is a kind of answer to that. This song, which comes in the middle, is sort of the nadir of that answer.
At the same time, I think it's a myth, for the most part, that there's something aesthetically interesting about being really down--that there's a mystique about it, and that you can't be an artist unless you are tormented in some way. I think that's basically a myth, and in some ways a dangerous one. In my experience, feeling very down is the least productive way you can be, and that song was some kind of hinge for me when I was writing it. It was an expression of that way that I'd been feeling, but probably one that I could only articulate and actually construct in virtue of being on the other side of it, or being on the other side of that hinge.
You talk about that as the nadir of this exploration, and one of the songs that stands out to me on the opposite end, while still being tangled up in it, is "Jubilee," which gets at this idea of consolation. Can you tell me about how that fits into this equation?
On a sort of literal level, it's about the experience that at least I have had that even when, on the macro scale, it doesn't seem like there's a satisfying way to configure the world in your mind to make it seem right, there are these moments that have only a present existence. I mean, I think the importance of some kinds of experiences are that you can remember them afterwards or look forward to them beforehand and use that to construct a kind of narrative to the overall plan of what's going on for you, and there are other kinds of experiences where the significance of them doesn't outlive the experience itself, you know? Those are important too, but it's hard to talk about how they're important because they're almost, by definition, not narratively significant. They don't help you have a new way of thinking about yourself or the story of what's going on with you. The word "jubilee," that's--[laughs] that's an Old Testament concept. They had this idea that every period…
Debts are forgiven and that sort of thing.
Exactly, yes. There's this little window of reprieve. There's a sort of term to things, and you know that at the end of it, there will be this little moment, this window, where people are freed, debts are forgiven, and so on.
You've talked about the way there's a question and answer to this album, and there's a fulcrum on which it turns--being an album that was written over such a long time, I'm curious about how that structure aligned for you.
It definitely wasn't the plan I had from the start. I mean, there were a lot of other songs that I wrote, recorded, and sometimes re-recorded over the years that I had originally thought would be on this album, and [laughs] for one reason or another, I'd come to some point where I felt, without quite being sure why, you know, "This one doesn't really seem to fit, or isn't right. That's for something else." And only really pretty recently, it clicked for me that that's at least in part what was going on there, is that it was this gradual process of sifting out songs that didn't fit into that sort of theme.
There's a finality to an album release, and yet this is an album that's largely concerned with things that don't have that satisfaction or summation to them. What is it like for you to have all these songs in this completed state, and to have grappled with these open-ended kinds of questions?
Well, in large part, it's a relief. [laughs] I think I began to feel haunted by this album, which has seemed to hang around forever and never quite leave me be, so it's definitely a relief in that sense. You know, if the thought occurs to me, "Oh, I really should change this or tweak that or redo this," then I get to think to myself, "No, you can't do that. It's not allowed." That side of it is nice.
Obviously, the medium in which you say things puts certain restrictions on what can actually be said, but then that becomes part of the conflict out of which something interesting can be made. In a very broad strokes kind of way, I think art that's in some way trying to deal with the intrinsic limitations of the medium has a different flavor to it than stuff that pretends those limitations don't exist.
That's interesting--what were the ways you felt yourself up against the limitations of the medium or trying to engage with them in this process?
Yeah, so one would be, like you mentioned, trying to think about, “How do you say something that's kind of trying to reject finality in this little package that has a beginning and an end?”
This is a very different kind of fighting the medium, but the guitar is kind of a funny instrument, and it's one that is so ubiquitous that a lot of what a guitar sounds like is already very familiar, you know? On the one hand, that's a resource, because it's this well you can draw on, but in another way, that can be a barrier. If you do want to make a sound with that instrument that isn't one of the sounds that is very familiar, then it's not so clear how to do that without making something that's purposely alienating, or that isn't using the strength of the instrument. That might be...not very clear, but--
No, I think I understand what you're saying, because if you're somebody who plays guitar and sings--just that very simple thing--there's associations. I'm sure you hear all the time, the same five comparisons to other people who do that. That's something to overcome.
Right, whether you like it or not, you're, from the start, working in a tradition, and obviously, you want to find a way to sound like yourself and not like a short list of associations with other people. At the same time, there's a reason why people have sounded like that for so long. It's because they're using the instrument in fruitful ways or using the combination of the voice and the guitar in fruitful ways, so you reject that at your own peril.
One thing that I tried to do in a lot of these songs is kind of split the guitar into voices and think about the higher voice and the lower voice, but that's a little bit of risky business because it very quickly just becomes mud. The guitar is not quite built to do that, you know? I mean, you could take it too far.
I am interested in the way voices function on this record, on a higher scale. The guitar is very foregrounded, your voice and sometimes some harmony voices are very foregrounded, but there are very distant instrumental parts giving it this background or middle distance. What was it like for you filling in those other parts of the sound?
Well, in earlier attempts to record some version or other of this record, I wound up with much more filled-in compositions--songs with strings and horns and so on. Actually, there's a song that came out on the Plastic Miracles compilation Vol. 2 that has more of that kind of arrangement, where there's, like, a bowed upright bass, and it's a couple of them layered, and there's all these horns playing. That was a direction I was going at a certain point, but I guess I began to feel like that was inappropriate in some way.
I have the experience a lot where if I write something and then I play it a while, I think, "Oh, this sounds cool." Then you get used to it, and then if you add something new, all of a sudden, it sounds fresh again. You think, "Oh, that's a great idea. I should add that." But in a way, you like it because it makes the thing new to you just because you've become so used to it.
It doesn't actually serve the thing.
Exactly. There's a little bit of that feeling, and also a little bit of a feeling that it somehow wasn't in alignment with the mood and the thing I wanted to say. But at the same time, I do think that it can be useful to not lock yourself into a totally spartan arrangement. I tried to use those other instruments less as a filled-out arrangement and more as a way to create a little space in the song or create movement.
On Bandcamp, the whole recording is credited to you, but there were points where it felt like I was hearing somebody else's voice singing harmony. Was there anybody else on this project?
[laughs] It's an interesting question. It was 99% me, but there's one song where there's someone singing on it, and I don't know who it is.
Is it "Hurricane"?
Yeah, and that vocal part, that harmony, I recorded years ago, and I have a suspicion, but I'm not sure exactly who it is.
That's an interesting situation to be in, putting this song out all that time later and not even knowing who it was.
That song is another one that I tried to record several times, some of them much more recently, but most of the record is stuff that I recorded in 2020. There are some of them that have tracks that I recorded earlier, and that song has the most of that, where that harmony and the guitar track, yeah, I recorded those who-knows-how-long ago.
I think a lot of the way it's arranged and composed is interesting too because it gives you something else to look for and tease out in the listening experience after the first few times you've heard it.
It's a little funny because the way people listen to music has changed so much, and--I guess that might be an overgeneralization, but the playlist has replaced the album to a pretty large degree. I remember a band I used to play in a long time ago, we had this idea [laughs] you know, that albums are going away, and what we should do is try to cook up some new kind of format that would be more appropriate, more sort of forward-thinking, and it would be this idea of writing short little suites of songs that would glom together. Shorter than an EP, but then you could string them together if you wanted to. But unfortunately for our interesting ideas, that was not a very good band, so [laughs] it didn't really work out too well.
You gotta have all the elements together. It's gotta be a good band with a good idea at a good time.
Unfortunately, yeah. But I still think albums are interesting, and that that kind of listening where you get to know something gradually is interesting. Most of the music that I have listened to the most is stuff that didn't settle in right away, and that I might have felt a little indifferent to at first, and only over a long period of time really got to know. I think that's a great experience to have, when you know a song really well and you're listening for that little cymbal hit or something that you know is coming up and that goes right past you the first however many times you hear the song.
Who are some of those artists who have made records that took a long time, but became things you really appreciated?
One good example would be the band Do Make Say Think. I listened to their record And Yet And Yet, you know--there was, like, a year when I was in college when things were set up so that you could essentially just see everyone's music library who was connected to the internet, on the same network, and you could just download stuff at will. This was before streaming services, so browsing and downloading like that was a way to come across music, and so I came across that album that way not really knowing what it was. And yeah, like I said, I was pretty indifferent to it at first, but for one reason or another, kept listening to it, and then had that experience where it became something important to me, and all these little sort of--you know, the part where the guitar hiccups and someone drops a note, those become these landmarks that you come to recognize.
What's next for you now that this album is out in the world?
Somewhat unclear. Like I said, that was my first time playing a streaming show, and I think that's something that I'm going to try to get a little bit more into the swing of. I've got some other songs floating around that either didn't make it onto this record or are only half-ideas, so there's some stuff I'm going to try to work on there. And then [laughs] I've got a young niece and nephew who I've been trying to write children's songs for. That's my other project. Turns out, tough audience.
Oh, really?
Well--[laughs] very young children, I feel like they know exactly what they want to be doing, and they're not gonna lend you their attention out of politeness.