“I LOVED GRATEFUL
HAIR B Y MARCO SANTINI FOR COMMUNI T Y NYC; MAKEUP B Y MIKE POT TER USING KNOCK OU T COSME TICS FOR SEE MANAGEMEN T; SE T DESIGN B Y CHELSEA MARUSKIN. THIS PAGE FROM LEF T: ANDRE W PARKS; LEAH EVANS
thought would go through my head while I was singing, ‘If I stand here too long, someone’s gonna throw something at my head.’ If I heard someone laugh in the audience, I thought they were laughing at me.” Throughout the Show Your Bones tour, she says, “I couldn’t look the audience in the eye.”
The six-hour flights just to write a song, the tiresome in-studio bickering, the disappointing second-album sales, the threatened solo album, the tequila withdrawal—anyone who’s watched a Behind the Music episode knows what comes next. But sorry, deep-voiced narrator guy, the story didn’t end with a we-wish-our-preening-dickwad-singer-the-best-of-luck breakup. Rumors did fly, given air by a 2006 cover story in this magazine in which Karen and Zinner exuded all the warmth of an unhappily married couple in a Bergman film. But they persevered, touring relentlessly behind Show Your Bones, knocking out Is Is to buy time, and finding creative outlets in assorted side projects. (Most publicly, Karen performed in nautical couture with a group named Native Korean Rock & the Fishnets.)
“I’m not a quitter,” she says. “I believe in following things through. If I had thrown in the towel after Show Your Bones, all I’d have left to show for that record would be the pain and misery that came from it, and that was unacceptable to me. I couldn’t have that be the final taste in my mouth. Giving up on those terms wasn’t an option.” The close quarters of the tour actually helped the onetime roommates resolve their drama, and in November 2007, after a few months of necessary “me time,” they rented a house in Woodstock, New York, and began writing It’s Blitz. “It’s not very exciting to hear, but we trust each other a lot more now than we ever have before,” says Karen.
They fostered this trust in isolated locales, like dysfunctional coworkers communing on a corporate retreat. “In New York and L.A., it’s impossible to find places to focus and write,” adds Zinner. “We had a really nice time in Woodstock, so we started looking for other resi-dential-type studios.” The search for secluded, Camp David–like neutral turf led to Long View, a former dairy farm in rural Massachusetts, which offered little in the way of distractions. “There’s blizzards, white horses, wood fires, that whole thing,” says Zinner. “Feeding animals, building snowmen. I didn’t leave the barn once.”
Sonic Ranch studios, outside of El Paso, where the band holed up for two separate sessions, was even more surreal, a 1,700-acre spread on the U.S.-Mexico border where they would drive for miles and see nothing but pecan trees. “It was a magical place,” Zinner marvels. “It felt like the Wild West.”
“You could throw an effects pedal and hit Mexico,” says Launay. Zinner grew close to a domesticated raccoon named Geronimo; they all learned how to shoot a gun (not to worry, vegans, they were aiming at tin cans). On the rare occasions when they did leave the ranch, they’d browse the pawnshops of El Paso, or head across the Rio Grande to the border town of Júarez, Mexico, where they toasted Chase’s 30th birthday over dinner. “We tried to go a second time,” Zinner says, “but it was too dangerous.” War had erupted between rival drug cartels. “ Decapitated heads were showing up on the highway every day. I heard later that the restaurant we ate at got burned to the ground.”
Urbanites seeking out the pastoral or exotic to tap back into some mythical creative wellspring is a cherished rock cliché (perfected,
as so many were, by Bob Dylan, who put Woodstock on the map as a hideout from New York City). For the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the cliché totally worked.
Unlike, say, Dylan and the Band’s The Basement Tapes, It’s Blitz bears no sonic trace of its backwoods settings; more tellingly, it’s also miles removed from the jittery blare of their first records. You could say it sounds like nowhere at all.
And yet despite that, and notwithstanding Karen’s westward expansion, this is still a New
York band at heart. Zinner and Chase live in town (Chase in Williamsburg), and Zinner in particular reeks of downtown cool—his publicist calls him “the mayor of the East Village,” for his omnipresence at shows, exhibit openings, and other cultural happenings. And when he and Karen end up at a Second Avenue bar late one evening, tossing back cocktails with friends and admirers, including comedian David Cross, his actress girlfriend Amber Tamblyn, and Flight of the Conchords’ Kristen Schaal, Zinner is clearly at home, holding court while Karen and Schaal huddle over an iPhone word game, pausing
Native Korean Rock’s debut in New York, July 2008; the birthday girl takes a seat, November 2008.
only to dart outside for the occasional smoke. Like every good New Yorker (and Madonna), he loves to complain about the city’s inexorable yuppifica-tion—“It’s gotten so boring now....It’s impossible to get shit done here....I think about moving out all the time....I can’t even find a practice space”— but it’s hard to picture him living anywhere else.
As for Karen, when she gets wind of the hour— 2 A.M., practically din-nertime in New York City—she puts down the dirty martini she’s been nursing, makes her apologies to the table, and starts looking for her coat. When
I’d asked earlier if she considered L.A. home yet, she shook her head. “No, no, no. It’s more a sanctuary than a home. You wake up, you get in your car, and you decide what your day is going to be. In New York, there are a million things that can happen to you between waking up and going to sleep. I used to believe that California was going to break off into the sea one day from an earthquake.” She bursts into a brash, unmistakably New Yawk laugh. “I’ve been completely repressing that thought lately.”
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