MORE SOUNDS,
MORE INSTRUMENTS,
MORE EVERYTHING.”
Nick Zinner
Kenzo Minami T-shirt, Armani Exchange jeans.
ing you get when you’re dancing like your life depends on it,” Karen says. During her undergraduate stint at NYU, she and her friends were habitués of a weekly soul-music party thrown at a nearby nightclub. “The dance floor would be pretty empty when we got there, and so I’d be out there doing slides on my knees,” she recalls brightly. “I think that’s where my persona was born—on Sunday nights at Bar 13.” (Another, less likely, inspiration: “I loved Grateful Dead shows,” she says. “Everyone danced their asses off.”) Ax nerds and noise junkies may hate on her for defanging their guitar hero, but after listening to any of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs discuss the past few years, you come to understand that blowing things up was the best, maybe only, way to keep things together.
“Show Your Bones was, obviously, a really painful record to make,” says Karen. The sudden ascendancy of “Maps,” compounded by her breakups with Angus Andrew of the band Liars and filmmaker Spike Jonze, led to all the usual quandaries faced by young, ambitious fringe-dwellers when confronted with mainstream success. “Sophomore records are historically really difficult. We were definitely going through an identity crisis.”
Was Show Your Bones one of those dreaded “examining our fame” albums? “Of course!” she exclaims. “We’re not immune to the rites of passage, for God’s sake!”
In September 2004, newly settled into the Silver Lake section of L.A., her bandmates back in New York, Karen started work on—rite of passage alert!—a solo project with Jonze’s younger brother, Sam Spiegel, a.k.a. Squeak E. Clean (now of N.A.S.A.), a producer and DJ with an alt-hip-hop bent. The record never transpired, but Karen brought Spiegel in to work on Show Your Bones. Nick and Brian chafed. “It felt like egos were getting in the way,” says Chase. “We weren’t sure what direction to take. We didn’t know exactly who we were or what waited on the other side.”
“With It’s Blitz,” says Zinner, “when Karen and I were working on something, and one said, ‘I don’t like that,’ the other would say, ‘Oh well, let me try something else.’ With Show Your Bones, it was more like, ‘Fuck you!’ ”
Eventually coproduced by Spiegel and Dave Sitek, Show Your Bones sold half the number of copies as the gold-certified Fever to Tell and received a lukewarm critical response. “Sometimes I think I’m bigger than the sound,” Karen sang on “Cheated Hearts,” a line that Zinner and Chase had to hear as threat. Fans continued to flock to their spellbinding live shows, where her Dadaist getups were alone worth the ticket price. But even onstage, where she had always projected a preternatural swagger and self-confidence, Karen says she was off her game, the result of a change in preshow ritual.
“I was much more self-destructive about how much I drank during the first album,” she says. Performing exacted an enormous physical toll, so to salve the wounds from the night before and gird her for the coming bruises and gashes, she’d medicate in the dressing room before gigs, sometimes with tequila, sometimes champagne, sometimes whiskey. The boozing didn’t mesh so well with her West Coast tranquility quest, and so she decided to perform stone-cold sober for the first time at a 2006 gig in Toronto, where Yeah Yeah Yeahs had always enjoyed enthusiastic crowds. “I was sooo fucking paranoid that whole show,” she recounts. “I’d be standing somewhere onstage, and the
SPIN.COM IS WH Y YOU LEARNED TO READ / MARCH 2009 47
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