Writing music might be one of the greatest virtues and character traits of the human mind; but it can also become the friend that keeps walking while you stop to tie your shoelaces. Or the one that leads you to write a half-hour song. At a time dominated by commercial music and short life-cycle productions, it is courageous to release a self-critical compilation that evidences a process of exploration and understanding of one’s artistical desires. And also, a statement.
Jonah Yano’s innate talent has led him to put out not only three albums in the span of four years, but also to elaborate a cohesive whole wrapped in a spontaneous context that embraces jazzy rhythms, the importance of counting on a trustful team, and the significance of drinking from sources that inspire you to make risky decisions that will, most likely, immortalize you as a creator. In Jonah Yano & The Heavy Loop, out on October 4th, the artist explores finding one’s sound through improvisation, delicacy, heartbreak, and life cycles that test the management of already encountered feelings. Even when these go faster than what the human and artistic mind is able to process.
Hi Jonah, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. To break the ice, could you please tell us what movies/TV series you’re currently watching, a book you’re reading, or music you’re listening on repeat (besides your own, of course)?
Hey! I actually just discovered a really good book of poems called Riffs by Dennis Lee. The way he chooses words is so engaging and strange. As for music, I’ve been listening to the new Nala Sinephro album a lot as well as the new Okay Kaya album. Oh, and I can’t forget to mention Parannoul—their new record is unbelievably good! The music coming out of Korea over the last few years has been really amazing. I actually don’t watch too many movies, but I really love stupid TV shows. I recently re-watched the classic Canadian series Trailer Park Boys. It’s so stupid that it’s almost smart again.
Let’s start off by addressing the elephant in the room: the title—Jonah Yano & The Heavy Loop. The album is completely dominated by smooth and soothing melodies that sound nothing close to ‘heavy’. What’s the reasoning behind the name?
Good question! To me, ‘the heavy loop’ is more of an idea than it is a sound. As a title, it’s a way to express the circular feeling in life. Everything happens in loops—we wake up, we fall asleep. Our hands get dirty, we wash them. The leaves grow in the spring, they fall off in autumn. All these small, ordinary loops add up to the larger, heavier feeling that permeates my life, which is that I am bound to the necessary cycle of being nourished by the world and, eventually, my body returning to the earth to nourish something else.
For the first time in your career, you have included yourself in the title next to The Heavy Loop. Was there a metaphoric intention behind it?
Yes! So, the idea is basically that the album has two halves: the first one being the first seven songs, and the second half being ‘the Heavy Loop’. It is a sort of double album that includes a self-titled record and another one consisting of a thirty-minute improvisation. It’s a way to show the process of songwriting, which is improvisation, and then to show the songs themselves. Jonah Yano is like the dining area of a restaurant and The Heavy Loop is like the kitchen. Something like that.
Despite including songs with a clear deep songwriting, I’d say the melodies play a more important role than the lyrics. How does it feel to publish an album with these specific characteristics in a time where cultural products have a very short life cycle?
I think that the life cycle of a cultural product, specifically in music, solely depends on the artist’s willingness to make something that doesn’t necessarily prioritise commerce. It seems like music has such a short shelf life because most musicians are making music for the here-and-now, which I completely understand. But I think that the music that has, and will, endure the test of time is the music that trusts that the audience can keep up with it. I think musicians tend to underestimate the openness and curiosity of the average music listener, so they dumb down their ideas and are more risk-averse to try and appeal to more people.
I am not too concerned with the prolonged popularity of my album because I know I have made something new and interesting—I am confident that I didn’t compromise my ideas for the sake of commerce and I trust that the right people will appreciate it when they discover it, no matter how long it’s been since it came out.
I am not too concerned with the prolonged popularity of my album because I know I have made something new and interesting—I am confident that I didn’t compromise my ideas for the sake of commerce and I trust that the right people will appreciate it when they discover it, no matter how long it’s been since it came out.
Has the base and production of the album impacted the songwriting more than it has the other way around?
A hundred per cent. The songwriting for this record is so deeply affected by my bandmates. The spirit and willingness they bring to the music is what makes these songs what they are. Without my band, I don’t think these songs would have ever come to life the way they do on this record.
Your previous album, Portrait of a Dog (2023), explored many areas you hadn’t reached before, consistency and recording-wise. Have you gotten the opportunity to explore new fields with The Heavy Loop? What sets it apart from your previous work?
The thing with Portrait of a Dog was that Badbadnotgood and I already had our own separate sonic identities, and I think that album is the compound of our individual sounds. The difference with this new album is that my band and I built this musical language from scratch over the last three or four years. I think with this record, and with this band, I got to explore my more experimental interests, which is something that I think is missing from Portrait of a Dog.
Interpersonal relationships, romance and connections are some of your main lyrical themes when it comes to writing music, which are really personal yet universal experiences people can see themselves in. However, melodies and production, as you have mentioned many times before, are mostly improvised, yet somehow still make sense. Could you take us a bit through the creative process of combining these two?
I think that I got really lucky in this sense. The people I made this album with are so talented and work so well together that we didn’t really even have to think that hard to combine the two things. We wrote a majority of these songs as a band so the two things, songwriting and production, were joined together from the start.
You also participate in other artists’ projects, and there are many differences when it comes to writing for others. Which are the most noticeable contrasts from your perspective? Do you think this album would be what it is hadn’t you been the leader of the creative process?
When working with other people on their songs I just want to feel like an appendage. I want to be helpful and collaborative, but not too opinionated. I want to help the person I am working with hear what they hear in their head. Whereas when working on my music, I like to make space for and prioritise what it is I think and what it is I want. I think in some ways this album exists only because I imagined it in the first place. Without that, it would have been a very different album, I think!
Do you feel like being the leader of this project and creating music about bonds and struggles has helped you reconcile with yourself and your emotions?
I think that songwriting is such a helpful way to reflect on things that have happened in my life. It’s like fancy journaling or something.
Melodies seem super detailed and delicate, but suddenly tracks like Romance ESL come along, and a typical jazz band base appears, in which each instrument seems to follow its own track within the same melody and logic. For this album, has every melody been improvised? How do you choose which songs will be built on improvisation and which ones won’t?
The root of this whole album is the spirit of improvisation. We jammed through the songs in the studio until they felt good enough to record and then we would record them. Every take we did of each song was a little bit different, each of us deciding in the moment what felt right to play. Some things were unchanging. For example, the lead guitar line on Someone Asked Me How I’ve Been was always the same way in every take. However, the rest of the instruments were mostly making their own decisions during each attempt at recording the song. I enjoy the unpredictability of recording music this way.
Following the improvisation area, we have The Heavy Loop, which is not only a big reference to the album’s title, but a thirty-minute song. Going also back to products with a short life cycle, what do you think are the risks of putting out a half-hour song, and why are artists not taking them?
I guess one risk with putting out a thirty-minute song is that it might be confusing for people who have been listening to my music for a while. I’ve never done anything close to this so it might come as a bit of a surprise and maybe they just plain won’t like it. Which is ok! Musicians grow and change and so do their listeners, and often they don’t change in the same direction.
You know, I think about that all the time. I think if you have already established a career in music, it’s really scary to put your livelihood on the line just to see your ideas all the way through without compromise. But to go back to what I said earlier, I think a big part of artists not taking musical risks in general has a lot to do with how we perceive the curiosity and willingness of the audience to entertain those risks. I think it is also a risk in and of itself to take zero risks—if you just keep making the same sellable music over and over, people will eventually stop caring and forget about you. I think that if you only treat music like a business, it is only going to treat you like a commodity. I view experimentation and the rejection of formulaic music as one way of protesting against that disposable condition.
You know, I think about that all the time. I think if you have already established a career in music, it’s really scary to put your livelihood on the line just to see your ideas all the way through without compromise. But to go back to what I said earlier, I think a big part of artists not taking musical risks in general has a lot to do with how we perceive the curiosity and willingness of the audience to entertain those risks. I think it is also a risk in and of itself to take zero risks—if you just keep making the same sellable music over and over, people will eventually stop caring and forget about you. I think that if you only treat music like a business, it is only going to treat you like a commodity. I view experimentation and the rejection of formulaic music as one way of protesting against that disposable condition.
You also shared it was created based-off of a film you requested Nik Arthur to make in order to write music, and the melody was built purely by improvisation. How’s the creation process different when you start off based on another visual? Where did the main inspiration come from?
Well, when we are improvising, we are always looking at something. Whether it’s each other or out the window of the studio or at our shoes or the back of our eyelids. I think what we see informs our improvisational decisions no matter how ordinary. Using Nik’s movie was only an extension of that idea—it was nice to have something visual to be inspired by so everyone was on a similar page not only musically, but visually as well.
The main inspiration comes from the Miles Davis score for the movie Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. He did something similar; he watched the movie and took a few small notes and then invited four musicians to do a live recording of the movie while watching it with very little instruction outside of a few harmonic ideas.
The main inspiration comes from the Miles Davis score for the movie Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. He did something similar; he watched the movie and took a few small notes and then invited four musicians to do a live recording of the movie while watching it with very little instruction outside of a few harmonic ideas.
How do you manage to create a homogeneous and conceptual album when there’s such a high range of spontaneity in its making?
I’m glad you think that of the album! It really speaks to the cohesion of us as a band. We just have a unique sound together and it’s as simple as that!
There are several featurings on the album, including Clairo. What has it been like working with an artist who has such a different target audience? How has this genre-fluid collaboration impacted the process and the album as a whole?
The thing is, behind closed doors, most musicians have similar appreciations for music and the process of music making. The genres someone most commonly operates in doesn’t really affect that fundamental desire that most musicians have to just make a good song–which made collaboration with the artists I worked with on this album very natural and easy. As a whole, it’s hard to picture this album without collaboration. I think it’s fundamental to my practice of music making. One of the reasons I continue to make music is because I keep encountering new and interesting artists to collaborate with and learn from. It’s that cross contamination that keeps this whole thing alive!
Do you think the public is changing and is once again appreciating music’s math from a perspective other than the commercial one with pompous lyrics? Is this the other heavy loop you talk about on the album?
I think the audience that appreciates thoughtful music and lyrics has always existed. In the last ten or fifteen years though, we have gotten so many groundbreaking albums from once-in-a-lifetime artists that it would almost be impossible for the general sentiment not to sway towards thoughtful and considered musical ideas. Haha, I suppose that could be another heavy loop. The pendulum swings on!
What’s next for Jonah Yano? Are there any other realms awaiting to be explored?
It’s hard to say what’s next in terms of music. After making three albums in four years, it almost seems like I should take some time between this record and the next one. Maybe I’ve got some life to live before I understand what it is I need to say and do next. I really want to dive deeper into long-form improvisational music though. I think I’ve only scratched the surface of what is there for me. I also have been starting to write a book. I’m not sure if or when it will ever get done, but that has long been a goal of mine. I also can’t wait to tour this album in the fall and winter and into the next year or two. I also really need to get better at cooking.
