When I asked James Smith, lyricist and lead singer of Yard Act what kind of “mad shit happens when you do art” other than the big stuff, he said, “It’s the places it takes you and the people you meet.”
Aside from the world tours, arena shows, studio sessions with Elton John, etc, it’s the things like meeting Gustaf (who opened for them and also joined them onstage for some crowd-surfing after their set at Elsewhere last week), it’s the weird shows in Eugene, Oregon, or the time that Pizza Express gives you a free meal, or free mushrooms likely “just because we were English… maybe the big stuff is the mad stuff — the big stuff’s funny because you get the stories you can brag about. The best stuff is being with friends, which sounds really cheesy and corny. But it is a bit of a privilege being able to fuck around as a job.”
On the patio at Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Smith, guitarist Ryan Needham, bassist Sam Shipstone, and drummer George Townend all are graciously willing to fuck around and have their pictures taken for thirty minutes or so before they can go take a nap before their show that night with Bush Tetras and Gustaf. They seem a little hazed by cigarettes and late-night street tacos at the time, but during their set later you’d have no idea. Dressed in a floor-length trench coat, Smith delivered his lyrics with a tone and a pace much different than what we hear on the record, clearly keeping it interesting for himself — keeping it fun.
Yard Act writes lyrics about, among many other razor-pointed topics, becoming rich; satire about how it’s made impossible to achieve by the majority and how it makes us lose sight of what happiness is, or what’s actually important. All of the structures surrounding success in life, money, relationships — deem us lost or confused. While you could say this of any number of bands, with varying degrees of similar post-punk melodic lilting, Yard Act does it best. Listen to any of the songs and you’ll get the poetic minutia of any given moment of any given day. They dissect the tiny bits to find something bigger, and they’re all well aware that they accomplish the feat largely due to the people that surround them and help to breathe life into their vision.
“When you do click with someone it’s special, and you don’t know how you’re going to cross paths with those people,” the band says of James Slater, with who they collaborated on all of their videos from The Overload. “If it’s not broke don’t fix it.” That being said, Smith also says, “I’m always up for flinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks,” always open to collaborations.
When asked who they’d most like to collaborate with next, Smith said, “we’re angling for a Gorillaz collaboration — we’re getting close to that I think. All of the Wu Tang Clan… get them back into a room together, see if RZA would let me take control of the room,” he jokes.
The Overload has been described by Yard Act as a record recorded by “a band that wasn’t a band yet.” As we get older and see bands splitting up, members moving on, creative ideas splintering among players, we realize that it can mean so many different things to different people. Smith thought about it for a moment when pressed, and said, “as much as people love songs and sounds, I think with bands, people invest in chemistry. Everyone hates it when they feel like a band doesn’t get on. You know, the cracks are showing,” and went on to cite Radiohead as a reason “why people still believe in things like marriage and shit — you really want something to work.”
It seems like the family dynamic in Yard Act is healthy: “I think we’re still really invested in loyalty and friendship instead of in self-serving or ego. But those things do come into play because you can’t live a life egoless. Everyone has an ego. But yeah I think a band is about the individuals coming together to make something that’s greater than the sum of its parts, and I think that’s why people still want bands.”
Noting that it’s much easier to be successful as a solo act in 2022, when asked what it was like to play as the rock band that they are at a festival like Coachella, Smith said, “I think it’s important to put idiots like us in Coachella. A lot of people are still looking for new people and not just headliners. It just felt like a crowd of music lovers — whether they loved us — they were invested in listening to a band they hadn’t heard before.”
Hearing something you haven’t heard before has become such a grasping-at-straws idea. We seem to have completed the 20-year cycle back to a pop-punk rebirth (which I am not at all mad about at all), and it bends back around 360 degrees into this style of lyrics that’s full-on, heart-on-your-sleeve, no-shame songwriting showing up across all kinds of music: mainstream pop, underground electro-pop, RnB, Punk, and in the pointed and often political poetry in Yard Act’s music.
“I think there’s definitely a sense of fun and a sense of humor trickling back into music. I think probably everyone is kind of staring at the future and seeing how absurd we all are and realizing that taking ourselves seriously is kind of pointless… everything’s starting to sort of merge a bit more. Humor and performance art — to go back to Gustaf, the way they work is more of a performance act”
Gustaf is also weirdly playing loudly from somewhere nearby at this moment. “I fuckin hear Gustaf right now,” Needham chimes in, with Smith answering, “Wow, the universe man. I think that the future is definitely music that reminds us that we should have a good time.”
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