Night Beds: What Made A Nashville Country Musician Turn To R&B

I first heard Night Beds, also known as Winston Yellen, a couple years ago on NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast. The song was “Even If We Try,” from the project’s debut album Country Sleep, and I was instantly hooked on the country-folk sounds and the song writing. With his second album, Ivywild (due out August 7)Yellen called upon his brother Abe to help craft the sounds on the album and branch out to a completely different style of music to make “sad sex jams.”

I was able to talk with Winston about the process of making the album, and more. I’ve really been enjoying the sophomore album ever since it popped up in my inbox, which, according to Yellen, was one of the first times he’s heard anyone say they really liked it. “I assumed people would either really like it or really hate it. I haven’t had anyone really tell me they like it yet!”

I guess I should get the generic question out of the way now: How did Night Beds come about?

It started in the room I’m sitting in, my parent’s house in Colorado Springs in 2008. Me and my friend Matt Wilcox, he’s a kid I grew up with in high school. He had been in other bands, I had never been in a band and we never called it a band. It’s still not really a band. It’s some weird art project (laughs). We started writing in our parents’ basements, drinking beers underage, which is great. We had a fake ID, and that fueled some good songs and some really sh*tty songs. We recorded a lot, he knew his way around the gear. He turned me onto Radiohead and Coldplay, and we started writing orchestral stuff. I wasn’t really good at anything and I kind of liked singing, so we started writing songs.

I feel like a lot of bands start off similarly, just some buddies making noise.

For us, it was sort of a last resort. I was not a very good athlete, and I was playing sports. Neither one of us had many friends. It was sort of very much out of need for friendship, and I didn’t know I liked music until I met him. He’s a year older, played in bands, and I used to hang at a DIY punk venue called The Element, which was in the basement of a church. It’s actually in the neighborhood called Ivywild (the name of the album) here in Colorado Springs. I sort of begged him to play music with me and just to hang out. Then, it became something, something transcendent and spiritual for us. We put songs on MySpace and we got 13 plays, it was like our moms and grandmas, and that was really exciting for us and it still really is!

Since the two are so different, what was the writing process like for Ivywild as compared to Country Sleep?

The writing was completely different, I guess. I feel like I’m becoming a decent writer. I don’t feel like I’m a good writer yet. With Country Sleep, I had 10 songs I had written over a four-month period that just made the record, and that was it. What it is, is what it is. With [Ivywild], it was probably a dozen Moleskines just packed with good ideas, bad ideas. Things I picked up in movies, just whatever. I always have Moleskines lying around the house, and it’s kitschy to say typewriter these days, but I do have a typewriter. I have five typewriters, and I would definitely get f*cked up and write a lot on my typewriter, sort of bang sh*t out kind of in a very romantic Bukowski type of way, just breaking up measures and getting phrases that felt good. And then I’d just carry them to the studio in my backpack, and, as we worked on the music, I’d just try things out and use different phrases, and I’d type stuff out and use pages of Moleskines. Lots of shapeshifting and kind of seeing what worked phonetically and cadence-wise, and just trying to find currents, and motifs that were fun. It’s a lot of playing and making mistakes, but on my own time. It took three years to make. I had a lot of time to play.

How much of a bigger role did your brother Abe play on this album?

On Country Sleep, he played drums onBorrowed Time” and “Lost Springs.” He’d come in and sing vocals on “Ramona” and I think a couple other ones. I saw a pic of him the other day, think he was 17, and he was like this cute kid (laughs). He started touring with us as my guitar tech, and then our drummer quit and he became our drummer, and then he became our electric guitar player. Then, it sort of transitioned and we were looking to change. One of our programmers quit, he was running the rig as the engineer and he left, and we were in Topanga Canyon at the time. I was there for 11 weeks, and Abe was there for about eight weeks, and this guy just quit around week four. We had a lot of musicians flying in and out to record, and we were just up in this bungalow in the canyon, but he just quit. I told him, “Look, you gotta teach Abe.” Abe just stepped up, and the guy taught Abe how to record in one day. Then, Abe taught himself how to use Ableton from there. It’s a miracle, really. He then became like the Dilla, he became the Madlib, he became this monster, he became Jai Paul. It was crazy to watch. I’m sort of glad he’s not on this call because I think he’d be mad I’m saying this, but he’s an alien! I think 65 percent to 70 percent of what you hear musically, I don’t know if that’s generous enough, but that’s close, ballpark, that’s him. Not to take away from what other people did or what I did. At the time, especially toward the end with the mixing, he got a lot of confidence because he was doing things that he didn’t know where it was coming from, but it all just sort of lined up for him. He was programming beats, and he was doing things as a programming producer that were very Kanye-ish, to me.

With Country Sleep, you didn’t work with too many other musicians. What was it like recording this album with 25 musicians?

Pretty much, it was the antithesis of Country Sleep, which was me and three cats in a room. It made for a very antique creaky backwoods-sounding country record, and now we’re trying to make sex music with a bunch of dudes. It’s just a different atmosphere. We recorded in I think seven or eight studios from Nashville to Colorado to Studio City. It’s a lot of places and a lot of people. It kept it very exciting, and I think to sort of create your own world and create your own excitement or energy was really fun for me. I just got to pay my friends to hang out, and to be really aggressive and intense towards art, and to have roundtable discussions about what is good and what is high aesthetic and what is taste and what’s sonic design and architecture. It was a pow wow designed by me and other smart people. It was a totally collaborative camp. At times, it was not fun because they would say I would get a little Kubrick-ian. Like, six weeks on one part of a song maybe isn’t the most ideal setup for a song for most people, but that’s how I am. I don’t think we made a perfect record, but I think we learned new things on the fly, a lot of this is new for me. You don’t just wake up one day and make songs like this. You gotta learn it. You’re just piecing things together. You could spend all day referencing and get one sound, and it’s like, “F*ck!” That’s your day. If you kind of look at it like that, then the train can quickly derail, so you gotta keep a swagger. Some call it optimism, some call it confidence, but that’s what you gotta do.

Two months ago, you tweeted out that you would produce anyone’s record for free. How many people have taken you up on that? 

(Laughs) Zero. Isn’t that amazing? That’s amazing! I knew that would happen, too! I don’t know, I got some email inquiries, and I’d respond, “YES! Just get me there, pay for my bus, you can rent me a car, you can fly me. I’ll take an Amtrak. Just tell me the date and take me to you. I’ll do your whole record for free.” I was not kidding. To me, it was that people don’t want it. If they wanted it, they would bring me there. I want it! If anybody I looked up to did that, I would literally do anything! I would castrate myself, ya know, well… not really. I want to help. That’s the whole thing, I just want to help people in whatever way I can, and I don’t think me making records on my own is necessarily going to do anything. It kind of blew my mind, to be honest. I like lost faith in humanity for a day. I turned the blinds down and turned on the Criterion Collection on Hulu, got super stoned and didn’t leave my room for a day. Then, I was fine, just back to whatever.

Any future plans to tour in support of this album?

I think we’re fully equipped and prepared to tour on our end. It’s just the matter of being one of those things where we’re not going to do the seven-week thing. We’re kind of seeing what presents itself whether it’s touring with other people or just more of the behind the scenes sh*t. I’d love to do residencies. I kinda wanna go to Warsaw or Moscow and shave my head or something (laughs).  We have a number of functional ways to tour, and we’re very much equipped to do all that, but it’s just sort of more behind the scenes stuff right now.

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