Too Pure

Young People formed when Katie and founder Young Person Jeff Rosenberg moved to Los Angeles from their home in the Bay Area, Rosenberg hooking up with Angeleno Jarrett Silberman when asking about the LA music scene on an internet message board. Silberman invited Rosenberg down to The Smell, an arts performance space co-operative located in downtown LA that Silberman co-founded, and soon the trio were collaborating on the music that would become Young People. Rosenberg and Eastburn had recently visited Berlin and started working on their first songs; Silberman joined as drummer, but soon it became evident that his talents weren’t limited to percussion, and the band began to swap instruments between songs.

“I was bringing a lot of southern music, a lot of gospel, country and blues, religious music, American traditional music,” explains Katie, of their influences. “Also musical theatre, show tunes - there’s a lot of Broadway in Young People, and that certainly resonated with Jarrett as well, he’s definitely a Hollywood baby. There’s a ‘soundtrack’ quality - a dramatic, theatrical quality - that we appreciate. I started writing music as a dancer, when I needed soundtracks. Dancers have short attention spans when it comes to music. No mercy."

Jarrett says of his musical upbringing: "My background was mostly punk rock and its offshoots, then a little later noise/sound and the like, but around the time the band started, I was listening to a lot of jazz drummers, bassists, and pianists and this had a big effect on my drumming. We would sit in my living room with whiskey, playing different kinds of records and talking about the elements we liked. I also brought my love of old Hollywood movies, especially film noir and the MGM musicals I watched as a kid."

Within a year, they released their debut album, 2002’s self-titled release on 5RC, an icy, elemental announcement of their talents, followed a year later by War Prayers on Dim Mak. Following several tours of the West Coast and a national tour, Katie moved to New York for the Summer of 2003, to star in a friend’s play (in addition to her work with Young People, Eastburn is a dancer and choreographer, working at schools in New York and producing a DVD of new dance and music for Kill Rock Stars, out in 2006). “It was the hottest Summer in history, filthy and disgusting, with thunderstorms and all manner of craziness,” she remembers. “I loved it. I also met a boy here and fell in love.” She shuttled between LA and New York that Fall, and was ready to move East by December.

Jarrett and Jeff moved with Katie to New York in February 2003, and Young People spent a year living and working together there. As they finished touring in 2004, however, the boys returned to LA, while Katie decided New York was her home now. She chalks their continued existence, as a bi-coastal duo (Rosenberg amicably left the band in July 2004 to return to his studies), up to spending their first three years living together in the same city, rehearsing regularly and playing shows and touring together.

The new album came together from demos the pair would record alone, sending tapes and CDRs cross country for the other to audition. Katie and Jarrett soon warmed to this new approach; “It was difficult to tell how a song really sounded in the rehearsal room,” explains Jarrett, “And this was a better way to make sure the songs only had what needed to be there.”

“It’s easier to collaborate this way,” agrees Katie. “If you have a song idea rejected in the practice room, it can be quite a bummer. But if I send Jarrett a tape of nine song ideas, and he’s excited about five of them, then I feel good.”

They wrote and demo’d songs throughout the early months of 2005, Jarrett working in his home studio, Katie getting up with the birds to work during the deserted hours of a nearby practice space. Katie immersed herself in the music of Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Chet Baker, Neil Young and Mary J Blige, and in the Top 40 Hip Hop and R‘n‘B she taught dance to, and lifted words from early Garland movies and re-arranged verses from hymnals, and a book of Native American Poetry for her lyrics, drawing further inspiration from the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick. Jarrett absorbed the music of Sonny Rollins, The Beach Boys, Patty Waters, Miles Davis’ 60s/70s work, Gun Club, and lots of Jeanne Lee (“possibly my favourite singer, on the basis of one record, ’The Newest Sound Around’”), and reading Hollywood biographies, the writing of Gerald Butler, and watching Nicholas Ray movies.

A mood was emerging; “The demos were recorded on my computer’s microphone, and on Katie’s hand-held tape recorder, so they sound kind of dark and muffled, which became the sound of the record,” explains Jarrett.

Lyrically, the album comes from a turbulent place, adds Katie. “My brother is a soldier, he’s back from Iraq at the moment but will probably have to return, which is the most depressing thing. The war was an influence upon the lyrics, and also I broke up with someone, so some of the material reflects that. And then I started seeing someone new. A few days a week I'm making dance and music with teenagers in public schools in Manhattan, and a few days a week I'm selling luxury goods to rich people. I'm living alone and busting my ass to do so, commuting all over the city and crashing in blessed solitude, praying my guts out for my little brother. So, there was a lot going on."

All of which explains the striking ambience of the new album, a brooding, bitterly wise thing, with a perfectly measured sense of drama, understated and utterly sublime. Not that Young People are artists to be contained by a single mood or theme.

“Our music runs the full gamut,” offers Katie. “I just as frequently find myself inspired to write and play when I’m feeling exultant and joyous, as when I’m upset or depressed or angry. Songs come when I’m bored, messing about at the piano, or from just singing while I’m driving or walking around. We know a song idea’s good if it makes us laugh; not that our songs are jokey, but there’s a lot of ‘collage-ing’ involved, juxtapositioning contrasting ideas. Jarrett says we’re a band of editors.”

“My approach is different,” adds Jarrett; “I’ll have a mood or sound in my head, but most of the time, I have to sit down with an instrument to actually write something solid. Also, for me, often the arrangement or ideas for the recording of a song come before the song is ever written.”

By way of closing, Katie offers “If there’s any overwhelming feeling behind Young People, it’s gratitude. We try not to waste people’s time.”