Yoni Wolf is the lead singer of the band WHY?. Previously he was part of the groups cLOUDDEAD and Reaching Quiet. He is a long-standing member of anticon. WHY?'s latest album, Alopecia, was released in March of this year. I really like this album; this is statistically represented by my every-day behavior of listening to it. I like all of WHY's albums; this is also statistically represented by my every-day behavior. I really like Yoni Wolf's lyrics. For me, they present an unpretentious reflection on life, often through the frequent use of bizarre metaphors and imagery, which I find calming and relatable, not like "I will never understand Yoni Wolf." His lyrics generate a feeling of intense interest and detachment in my brain and are sung over a relatively high number of musical genres. Sometimes I feel like he was crying when he recorded certain songs, and I like that too. After about a year of listening to WHY? all the time, I started feeling like I wanted to talk with Yoni Wolf. I exchanged some emails with his publicist and an interview was set up. I called Yoni Wolf on Labor Day. We talked for about 40 minutes. What follows is our Labor Day conversation. It doesn't really deal with WHY? as a band, because I was mainly interested Yoni Wolf as a person; it's more about Yoni Wolf's perspective on things like popularity, self-perception, the meaning of life, hipsters, and bathrooms.

ANM: How do you feel about giving interviews?

YW: I don't know, its part of the job. I'm okay with it. Sometimes I don't like it, or don't know what to say ever, I don't know. . . especially when you get the same questions a million times or something, sometimes you're just like ugh, and you have to say the same thing, just to a new person. But other times it's a way - as an artist - to think about what you're doing, because sometimes you don't sit and analyze every move you make as an artist, you just kind of do what's impulsive to you, so it forces you to actually consider why you do what you do. I guess that can be good or bad. Sometimes it makes me self-conscious or something.

ANM: Does it make you feel self-conscious to have people you never met before suddenly calling you and asking about a certain line that you wrote?

YW: I mean, you have to appreciate that someone at least gives a shit. I do appreciate that. Making art is a form of communication too. I mean, sometimes you can't explain anything further than what you did in your song or whatever kind of art you're making. Maybe you express yourself in a way that can't be explained in any sort of interview form or whatever. Or just conversation form. So, sometimes that can be tedious, to try to go further with something. But other times it's a way to open up a conversation. That's good. Art is communicative, I think.

ANM: Can you tell me about me your writing process? Do you edit a lot?

YW: I think I tend to edit quite a bit and deliberate a lot on the correct way to say something, and I tend to try to consider someone who would be hearing it for the first time. I try to make it so that you can follow the train-of-thought, and I fool around with different syntax - using different syntax to make a sentence rhyme, but still keeping the meaning in tact or something. There's heavy process behind the writing.

ANM: Do you feel more sarcastic about writing shit down, knowing that it's going to heard by a lot of people that are later going to be at your shows, singing along? Does that get into your brain and fuck with you?

YW: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if sarcastic is the word, but I'm definitely a lot more affected, in a good and bad way – good in that I care more about each word, and I want to communicate in a more clear, concise way. I think of back in the days when we were doing that early cLOUDDEAD stuff, we just kind of. . . anything went, we didn't edit so much, we just kind of fooled around and had fun, which is cool. But, I don't know, I think you can stunt yourself, too, by considering too much about the future. You have to make art for how you feel while you're making it, I guess. But yeah, it does fuck with me on stage sometimes, singing some song that I wrote awhile ago about something that's not really of concern to me now.

ANM: I think you said in an interview somewhere that you felt embarrassed or strange to sing certain songs in front of crowds, because you had a different feeling when you actually wrote the song, and it was just kind of hard to get back into that feeling.

YW: Yeah, I mean, especially older songs. I guess. . . the closer in time we are to having written something, the more it still holds water - where some of those older, sort of goofy or sentimental songs tend to be a little embarrassing or difficult to sing.

ANM: What are some songs or lines that you feel embarrassed to sing in front of crowds?

YW: I don't know, I could name certain songs that are just kind of like ugh. There's a song called 'Darla' – it was a song on an EP that we put out in 2003. It's got a catchy thing to it, so a lot of people request it, but for us, the reason why we put it on an EP was because it was kind of a joke song, you know? We get asked to play that a lot, and I would feel silly. . . we just don't indulge the audience in that. There are other songs like that, and it seems like the farther you go back. . .

ANM: The more embarrassing it gets?

YW: Yeah, and I don't just think it's about time, I think it's about my abilities too. I've gotten better at being sort of less sentimental or goofy or whatever. Maybe I've gotten a little more hardened in a way too, and yeah, maybe sarcastic. Maybe you're right. Once you're aware that you're writing something for a lot of people to listen to, it does change your approach. It's a silly thing in a way, but it's also a really amazing thing, to be able to do.

ANM: So do you think you're trying to be more professional - editing out really sappy lines for something more soft or less sentimental? Or is it just that you're trying to hone it in a way that's a little bit more acceptable? Or does that even come into play?

YW: No. I think, in a way, the new album has some of the rawest imagery that I've ever written. [In Alopecia,] I guess I try to say things - they're not arbitrary. I feel like a lot of things in the past that I tended to write were just kind of. . . not to say that I was a big pothead, but, marijuana-induced, or like when you don't quite have your wits about you and something just seems cool for a minute so you write it down, or it seems interesting, and you know you haven't quite honed it or considered it. And I think, even though some of the things are pretty raw, in Alopecia I mean, I've gone back over them a lot of times and considered whether it was something that I wanted to say. I remember on the song "Good Friday," I initially wasn't going to use those last two verses that I had - on the demo CD I had left a bunch of space blank - but then I kept considering it, and I read them to my, you know, I had a psychologist at the time, so I read them to her and said, "Is this kind of wrong? Is there something wrong about wanting to put that out there?" and she suggested that I put it out there. I don't know, I went back over it a lot and edited it and made sure it what was I was really feeling, and clear, and that I wasn't saying it for the wrong reasons or something, and I just decided to put it in there.

ANM: How does your band react to your more revealing lines? Like "Jackin' off in an art museum john till my dick hurts" in "Good Friday?" Did they give you shit for that? What's their reaction like, to those sort of lines?

YW: Well, I don't know. With that specific line, like I said, it wasn't on the original demo that I played the guys, so they didn't hear it until I recorded the actual vocal take in the studio, and I made sure I was in like a dimly lit room way in the back of the fuckin' place, so that I couldn't really see anybody else, and it actually was quite cathartic, knowing that there's fuckin' 15 people in the control room and I'm alone in this dark room in the back of the studio, just saying these things, knowing that my brother and my best friends are hearing this stuff. They're supportive. I guess they get weirded out sometimes. I don't exactly know. I think they appreciate it maybe. I think everybody feels that kind of stuff and does that kind of stuff, and I guess I just have the role of saying it.

ANM: To what extent has your popularity affected your perception of yourself? Has it changed who you feel you are? Do you feel an image surrounding you?

YW: That's a really good question. I think that's something that I struggle with. I imagine it would be really difficult for someone super famous or whatever, but even to the degree that I've achieved a certain amount of popularity, it is strange, and I think it does affect you, you just always have to be aware of it. You have to be aware of the sort of strange pedestal that our culture tends to put under. . . well, rock artists, mainly. It's weird. You have to realize the fact that you get a lot of girls and stuff like that – it's not really on your own merit, it's this false thing. . .

ANM: Yeah, that would make me feel weird.

YW: Yeah, it is strange and, I don't know, it does affect me, but I just always try to be aware of it, and keep it in check, and keep my ego in check, and just know that that's not really what it's about.

ANM: Has your popularity influenced your persona?

YW: I don't think I'll know until years later, in a way, how it affected me, because I'm right in the midst of it. I've been told by people that I trust that I do kind of get inflated or something when I'm out doing shows - always having audiences stare at you and stuff like that. And I know that I do lose a certain groundedness, especially just traveling around so much, always being the center of attention and stuff like that. . . and it takes me a little while to regain my groundedness. So yeah, I think it is something that everyone in this position struggles with or has to address, at least.

ANM: Yeah, it would be hard not to address that, otherwise you'd just be belligerent.

YW: Exactly.

ANM: In a lot of your albums, especially Alopecia, it seems like you have this focus on something like style/ fashion/ scene (lyrics about fixies in "Simeon's Dilemma," about hiding behind a moustache in "The Hollows"), and for me, that's like the stereotypical hipster thing, and I've interpreted that stuff as sort of like. . . you might be a part of that scene, but you see it with a sense of sarcasm, or that you understand that the scene exists, and you choose to be a part of it, but you're not unaware of it. Do you think that you fit into the hipster scene? Is it something that you think is funny?

YW: Yeah, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. I was just thinking about this yesterday, and the day before. I was thinking about that song ["Simeon's Dilemma"], and we sung it at the show that we did a couple of days ago, and I was thinking about the person that that song was for. She had told me that she really liked that song when I gave her the album, and she had this very anti-hipster slant—

ANM: But she has a biodiesel Benz. . .

YW: She does, exactly. But now her boyfriend's like a heavy metal guy, and they hate the hipster people, and it made me think about why I said that stuff. I think you're right. . . and in fact, I just sent her this text message yesterday, that was like "I'm at a San Francisco hipster party, I need to get out of my time and place." I think you're exactly right, but you know what – the fact that I'm able to see outside of it, and make fun of it, and be sarcastic and jaded about it, makes me even more of a part of it in some way. So it's like this cache-22, where the fact that I realize it's ridiculous makes me more of a part of it or something like that.

ANM: Yeah, it seems like that's what the hipster thing is about, being ridiculous and ironic, coupled with the awareness of it. . .

YW: Yeah, I was thinking of that - her biodiesel Benz and me on my little bike, and I'm making fun of myself and her there. But I was thinking about it, and how Bob Dylan did a lot of stuff like that in the 60's – the "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat" – I don't know if you know that song. It's a terrible song, in a way, but he's just going on about how he really wants to get with this lady because she wears a leopard-skin pillbox-hat and that was a certain hip style thing. I think that I can look back to him, and stuff that he would talk about – stuff that I don't even know about because it was his time – but he was just sort of having fun with the fact that he was alive when he was alive and just talking about the silly little things that people get involved with.

ANM: I don't know if I've gathered things correctly, just from listening to you, but it seems like you feel that the universe is this sort of unemotional place, and that culture – from a certain perspective – is basically arbitrary. Could you tell me your theory on how you can attain meaning in a system that contains only life and death in the context of an arbitrary, unemotional universe?

YW: Oh, that's a big question. Maybe you're speaking to songs like "Gnashville" or something like that?

ANM: In Oaklandazulasylum, you say on "Afterschool America" "Bones are bones my friend, but you won't find flags in a million years in the fossil record;" in "Bad Entropy," "All the while the stars are slowly separating." And other songs. "Gnashville," yeah. That too.

YW: Right, yeah. Um, I don't know man, I guess I just have these little feelings from time to time, maybe feelings of coldness or whatever. I document those. I definitely don't protest to know anything about what's going on here. But yeah, I just have those feelings of coldness sometimes. I have warm feelings sometimes too. I don't know what else to say about that.

ANM: You talk a lot about bathrooms in Alopecia. It seems like there's a reference in almost every other song on Alopecia to a bathroom. Do you have a special connection to bathrooms?

YW: I never really thought of that, but I think you're right. I guess if I was to think of every song, there probably is a reference to a bathroom. I think it has to do with solitude. . . you're always with people. You can go there, be alone, and there's a certain privacy there that I appreciate, especially if its clean.

ANM: So you like bathrooms?

YW: Yeah, I guess so, it's a little place you can get away to, you know?

ANM: Are there specific people who you strive to receive praise from?

YW: Yeah, there are definitely certain people that I really want to have approval from.

ANM: In the interview you gave Pitchfork in June, you said that you made a depressing country album with someone named Mark in Nashville. Is that ever going to be released?

YW: Yeah. We made that at the same time that we made Alopecia. We made it in Minneapolis, and then I went and mixed it in Nashville with this guy Mark. It will come out, somewhere, some time. I'm not sure exactly when. I think I might revisit the mixes and do a little more work to the songs before we release it. But it's out there. It's very slow, it's very different. I think Alopecia has a certain sarcasm and edge to it, like the mixes and sounds all sound kind of hyped and aggressive. I think that the other album is a little more subdued, a little more subtle, and some of the songs are just sad and slow.

ANM: Future collaborations with cLOUDDEAD or Reaching Quiet?

YW: We don't have any plans to do any new cLOUDDEAD stuff. I work with both of the two guys – Odd Nosdam and Doesone – on occasion. I'm going to be doing some work on the new Themselves record, which is Doseone and Jel, and I rapped on a song on Nosdam's last record, as well as did a little bit of work on one of the last Subtle Ep's. Doseone and Nosdam were both on Alopecia, doing things, so we're still involved with each other.

Brandon Scott Gorrell is the author of a poetry book, DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT, forthcoming from Muumuu House in June 2009. His blog is called MY HAIR WILL DEFEAT YOU . He lives in Seattle.