Anand Wilder (of Yeasayer)

PLEASE NOTE: For the safety of our customers, we will be requiring proof of full COVID vaccination (or negative rapid COVID test), to enter the venue until further notice. More details at holocene.org/vaccine Quarantine caught Anand Wilder at a crossroads. After fourteen years and five studio albums, his former band Yeasayer—art rock experimentalists whose sonic concoctions often felt like a musical lab leak—broke up in late 2019, just before COVID-19 began careening across the planet. Friends fled for rural retreats, while Wilder’s family stayed in Brooklyn so his wife could care for her patients as a midwife, and he could resume full time parenting for their two daughters. Professionally, it was an abrupt record scratch moment for Wilder, a veteran touring musician and ceaselessly collaborative bandmate. But Wilder was determined to press on creatively despite the isolation and the disintegration of his beloved former group. He had always blended his music with domestic rhythms at home in Brooklyn, where some of Yeasayer’s later records were also cut. Now, casually picking out Max Romeo’s “Uptown Babies Don’t Cry” or Lovin’Spoonful’s “Rain on the Roof” for the kids at bedtime could ignite late night writing and recording jags. He soon realized he was passing an intergenerational baton: “My mom, who was born in India, is a huge music lover. Whatever we were doing, the Beatles, Cat Stevens and Fairport Convention were playing in the house through these homemade speakers my father had wired. The lockdown brought all that back to me, and the music I began making translates that musical mood of my childhood for my family now. I wanted to go back to basics, back to songs. Light on electronics and experimentation, heavy on acoustics and vocals.” The outcome is his first solo album I Don’t Know My Words. Ten songs, in braided strands of English folk revival, Topanga Canyon jangle, and desert blues licks, offer taut documents of a gloomy hour of collective confinement, but also elegant proofs of folk rock songcraft’s inexhaustible machinery. Wilder reveals vulnerable moments of pandemic panic and addresses the challenges of love and dedication as he follows New York’s path through the worldwide emergency, and as he confronts the personal, political, and professional reckonings that spanned it. With I Don’t Know My Words, Wilder torques his multi-instrumentality away from electronica and global genre-hopping and makes it a lonely lockdown challenge. Aside from ambient documentary noise of family life and New York’s mysteriously pervasive rash of fireworks, he played every sound on the album, from a plucked cello on “Get More Than My Share” to the bowed acoustic guitars heard in “Sick Hotel,” which simulate a string section. In oscillating textures of dulcimers, twelve-strings, and tumbling, song-serving drums, he arpeggiates, beats, and blasts out moments of elevated feeling from tedium and routine.