You never know where your craft will take you. Case in point: New York-based songwriter Sam Cohen, who wasn’t sure where he was going musically after the end of his last band, Apollo Sunshine. Out of nowhere he wrote some songs that sounded nothing like what he’d been doing before, and Yellowbirds was born. The band’s second album, “Songs From the Vanished Frontier” (Royal Potato Family), was released last week, and exhibits the creative output of a musician who has managed to refine a formula that already worked, resulting in some of the most beautifully lush, folk-flavored indie rock released this year. ARTINFO’s Bryan Hood recently had a phone conversation with Cohen, who’s currently in the midst of a month-long residency at the Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan, about the value of having one’s own studio, where the band goes from here, and trying to translate life into sound.
“Songs From the Vanished Frontier” is your second album under the Yellowbirds name. What differentiates this record from the first one, “The Color”?
It’s more a continuation of what I’ve done. It’s the first time I made a record with my own studio. That was cool. Production-wise, I was able to take some new chances, and just have the overall quality of what I could do on my own be a lot stronger.
Did having your own studio space change things much?
On the first record, we went into the studio for two days and just played through all the songs. Then I spent time at home, working on it in my apartment. This time I had the chance to do everything the way I wanted to, and with plenty of time to do it. And it actually ended up happening a lot faster.
I’m not one to flop around on an idea forever or get totally bogged down by the possibilities. I usually know what I want to hear and I can get it. Or, if it’s not happening, I start to expect that it’s not a great idea and seek some other solution.
How much time did you spend on the record?
A few months. There were a couple interruptions. I mean, the way I make my living is as a musician, sometimes I have a week off to go into the studio and work on this, and there were other projects in the midst of it. It all happened over three or four months. I finished the album early last summer and have just been sitting on it for a while.
Is it strange to talk about something you completed so long ago? Have you moved on to other things?
To some extent. I’m already working on the next record. My head is in that, but some of these songs are just working their way into the live show. We haven’t been pounding this stuff out on the road yet. I’m far from worn out on it.
Now that “Songs From the Vanished Frontier” has been done for awhile, do you notice a change in yourself as a musician between the two albums?
It’s been a slow but steady build. “The Color” sort of came out of nowhere. It never had a big team, money behind any of what I’m doing. I’m lucky to have worked with a great group of people who are really dedicated, especially Kevin Calabro, from my label Royal Potato Family. We worked kind of side by side, it was really just the two of us most of the time. That one really laid a foundation in New York, it was really just about digging around town. Kind of all the cool opportunities have come from being here and doing what we do. It’s just sort of been an organic growth. And to see all the stuff that’s happened around this record is really exciting.
You said you’re working on a new album already. Where do you see Yellowbirds going from here?
I think I’m still refining what we’re doing. I think it’s going to be a more clear representation of what I want to get across with music. Generally, I know what I want to do, my tastes are pretty refined at this point — it’s just sort of making it sound like the stuff I want to listen to. Because that’s always the goal, unless my tastes take a big shift, my music’s not going to either.
At that point, would you move away from Yellowbirds then?
Yeah, it depends. If it was such a big creative shift that it felt like it would mar the body of work as a whole, I might at that point try a new moniker or something like that. But I’m wholly immersed in it; it definitely is allowing me to do everything I want to do.
What are you trying to accomplish with the music you’re making right now?
It’s not something I can put into words. It’s a very generic thing to be like, labels can’t sum it up, but neither can a couple sentences. It’s my whole experience with music, the stuff that really resonates with me. Some of my strongest influences are one bar of one song that I’ve heard once. Some shit that I heard on the radio in the Midwest that I never figured out what it was. Just remember the feeling of how it sounded. Things like that all shape the kind of music I want to make. Lyrically, I can’t go into it in words, because they already are words and they’re doing what I want them to do.
But you think you’re closer to synthesizing all of that into sound?
Always. I mean, the freedom that Yellowbirds gives me, even from the get go, I felt more in touch with myself as an artist from the moment I got to work on “The Color,” because my previous band was so collaborative. Which is great and fun, but I think I’d always been more inclined to go down that direction where I knew what I was after, rather than experiment.
“Young Men of Promise”