As a duo, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack have only so many hands and feet. They've made most of their albums by playing their instruments roughly as if they were performing on stage. But for the veteran indie-rock duo's new album, "The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs," they decided to smash even these limitations.
"When we started, Andy was playing drums and keys and I was playing guitar," Wasner says. "At a certain point, we felt we were doing everything we could do in that format. This time, we were just like, 'Let's just make something that's maximal …'"
So Wasner took over on bass, Stack handled the high-end synth sounds and "The Louder I Call" is more crisp and streamlined than any of Wye Oak's previous four albums. Wasner has always been the band's focal point, singing lines like "I don't need another friend / When most of them I can barely keep up with" in a rich monotone as guitars and synthesizers surround her as if she's at the center of a storm. On the new album, the layers of sound often drop out, allowing Wasner's vocals to be more commanding.
"It was almost as though we just threw out whatever idea (we had) of what it was and could be and made the record we wanted to make, as if we were starting over from complete scratch," Wasner says, by phone from a stage in Brussels, 20 minutes before sound check. "I feel like having an idea of rules in the studio, or otherwise, is not really conducive to doing something that's really creatively vital and inspired."
Wasner, 32, writes songs that are both hyperpersonal and a little vague, and they occasionally come across with a gloomy, hypnotic ambience that recalls harder-rock bands. The new album's centerpiece is "Lifer," inspired by friends and family who have had to struggle more than Wasner. "It seems to those who know me best," she sings, "my luck is wild and in excess." Feeling guilty, she cried so frequently that she had trouble laying down the vocals for the song — afterward, she considered cutting off her career.
"To be honest, I'm always considering stopping. I'm still considering stopping!" she says. "I'm 100 percent convinced that music is going to be a huge part of my life and process until the day that I die — but that is not what I'm doing right now. I'm doing the side of it that is trying to make commerce out of it. ... That's always been the part that's difficult.
"There are things about touring I really, really love," continues Wasner, who also has her own side project, Flock of Dimes. "It tortures me thinking how many more records I could make if I didn't have to spend years after every record grinding ourselves to a pulp on the road. But everybody's got to work. I don't want to sound like a whiner."
Wasner is both vague and colorful when talking about her childhood. Her parents, she says, are the kind of "working blue-collar people who have jobs, not careers — they work really, really hard and sacrifice a lot for their kids, myself included, but they never had much money, and they still don't." Her family sang and played instruments when she was little. Wasner took piano lessons, then learned guitar from her mother. She evolved quickly from learning to read sheet music to writing her own songs on piano.
"I was sort of consumed by it," she says. "I can't remember the time before it was the most important thing in my life. It was always, 'This is what I'm about.'"
Wasner met Stack in Baltimore, where they were both college students, and they soon dropped out to focus on their band, originally called Monarch. They found studio time wherever they could for their Wye Oak debut, 2008's “If Children,” and eventually signed with North Carolina's influential indie label Merge Records. It’s a great, haunted album full of swirling guitars and violins — Wasner uses studio tracking to duet with herself frequently, but her voice is so strong she sounds like an army of singers.
To cover the sounds the band stretched to make in the studio, Wye Oak added a third member on tour for the first time — bassist Will Hackney. They played their first show with him at South by Southwest in Austin in March, which Wasner calls "terrifying" due to the new configuration and the hasty, sound-check-free nature of the gig.
"It's all for the better, honestly," she says. "We are so accustomed to having to be so careful and considered, trying to make sure we're accomplishing as much as we can with the two of us. All of a sudden, having another set of arms and legs and eyes and ears opens up a world of possibilities. For a band playing as a duo for 10 years, it feels like an incredible luxury."
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