Musician Scott Yoder performs at Kirby’s Beer Store on Monday, Sept. 18, as part of his current Guttersnipe tour. Yoder will also perform at Lawrence’s Replay on Tuesday, Sept. 19.
The current run of dates sees him in part supporting his 2022 album “Wither on Hollywood and Vine,” a collection of songs steeped in the glam rock tradition of the 1970s, feeling at times as though it could have sat shoulder-to-shoulder with LPs from David Bowie, T. Rex, Mott The Hoople and many of the other British masters of the craft.
The Seattle-based musician recently explained that the record was inspired by his recovery after a bicycle accident and a detour he took into the world of Old Hollywood.
Tell me a little bit about how the material on “Wither on Hollywood and Vine” came together.
It basically [started] with me having an injury. I was riding a bike, and I had a wrist injury after falling off of it. That put me into kind of a hibernation mode where I couldn’t really compose anything the way that I would normally. I got sucked into the world of Old Hollywood as a way of escape. [Without any way to] express myself I became invested in this old world of fantasy as something to kind of absorb and let it take its time. It kind of filtered into my brain and once I was able to play instruments again, I was able to kind of let that all out at once, in one big flurry of songs.
When you talk about Old Hollywood, I think about this sense of melodrama, high drama. Big emotions. Is that what you were taking away from it?
Yeah, definitely. That’s a big part of it. I think a lot of the straight forwardness. It’s clever in its own way, and you can’t really speak to a few decades’ worth of many different varied filmmakers as a monolith but there is a kind of consistency to the attitude. It became very soothing for somebody who needed to be soothed, recovering from an accident. There’s some predictability but it also feels like a total alien world, too. But it’s the same planet, same country. Just 70 or 80 years ago.
What a better setting to drop that into than the world of glam rock, which is filled with aliens and all kinds of strange creatures.
Absolutely, yeah. It feels like you’re traveling to a different world. It’s the same one. It was a very normal world for everybody in that time. It just feels very exotic.
I’ve not seen you live, but I’ve heard and read that you have this approach to the stage that is powerful and high energy. What can you tell me about how you approach live performance?
I’ve been performing live at this point most of my life. I like to approach it with intentionality. This is something that stemmed out of me ending my previous band, which was more the stage show of a traditional rock ‘n’ roll band. I began to think about how even though you might see a band up on stage wearing jeans and looking like they aren’t really putting on a show, they’re still putting on a show. It’s just more of a meta show. They’re making the audience feel comfortable that they are just regular people.
I feel like I want to make the audience feel not so much comfortable but to escape into something else. To try to bring the things that I’m singing about to life and add drama to that. As an audience member, it would make me feel comfortable if I saw a person on stage trying to bring a new world into the room where we all were and try to alter the room for a portion of one night. I feel like that is something I want to give to people. As somebody that wants to be up on stage, I want to make it very clear that this is something is special. I don’t want to take it for granted.
When I go to a show, I definitely want to hear the songs, but I also want to feel that there’s a direct communication from the artist to all the people in the room.
I’ve definitely been at shows where the artist isn’t explicitly putting on anything in a real visual theatrical kind of way, but I’m still resonating with whatever frequency that they’re on. I just can’t help myself, and I love to put on a visual show, and I love to think about those things. That’s just part of my way of expressing myself. I just want to make it clear that if I’m going to be the one on stage, if I’m allotted this time, and if I’m going to take up all this oxygen by making a bunch of
, I want to justify that to some degree.
How do you get prepared for each performance?
I’ve got it down to a nice little system. It’s just basically just a little time in the van to change and get prepared. I feel like I’m comfortable enough on stage that I don’t really need a pep talk or anything. It’s something that I look forward to for 23 hours a day. On some level, I’m thinking, “Finally! I’m ready to be here. This is what I’m here for.”
We talked earlier about your love of Old Hollywood. Is there a figure or a film from that era that really resonated with you.
I feel like “The Blue Angel” (1930) is something I really resonated with. It’s with Marlene Dietrich and is about a nightclub singer who has a really interesting life. It wasn’t even so much about the plot [for me] but about the time and place that it occupied. It’s a specific moment in German history, what it was like to be an artist then. [Think about] where all those people ended up a decade later. Some of the actors stayed in Germany and had successful careers; people like Marlene Dietrich ended up working with the Allies, coming to America and having a successful career in Hollywood.
It's a moment of real drama for both the film and for everybody involved and for the world over that moment in time. From the ’20s to the ’40s, there was a big series of catastrophes and events that I can’t really stop thinking about.