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Ira Kaplan on Yo La Tengo’s cover love
Ira Kaplan
O
NE of Yo La Tengo’s most endearing qualities over their
almost
40-year history is their unabashed affection for and understanding of other people’s songs. From the covers of Cat Stevens and Daniel Johnston on their 1990 breakthrough
Fakebook
through to the Bob Dylan and Flying Machine songs on 2020’s “Sleepless Night” EP and the hundreds in between, the breadth of the band’s repertoire demonstrates a curiosity that can seem largely extinct. “It’s rare now, though it didn’t used to be,” says Kaplan of
the band’s enduring propensity for covers. “It’s minimising things to say Georgia and I were reluctant to write songs and certainly to write lyrics. But we liked playing. All the bands that we went to see always did covers and you looked forward to it. When it was a band that didn’t necessarily have a bottomless supply of original songs, they would do different covers when you saw them and it just became a way of distinguishing one show from another and give a reason to see somebody again and again. So it just seemed natural. It was only as time went on that we realised we were out of step with everyone else!