“You can call the shots”: The vital advice Karen O gives to young artists
It takes something special to define – or at least sculpt – a specific era in music, but it’s the greats that do it so subconsciously, often when they take a step back to look introspectively at themselves and the world around them, laced with such a purity in their desire to simply just understand this life a little more. While their 2022 album, Cool It Down carried much potential to resonate with a whole new generation, Yeah Yeah Yeahs didn’t enter the studio with any objective to chase a new audience.
With the record marking the alternative/indie band’s first outing since 2013’s Mosquito, lead vocalist Karen O commented: “When we start a record, especially after a decade of not writing, it’s a pretty unconscious/subconscious process. There’s so much uncertainty of what’s gonna happen and we’ve changed so much – are we even gonna be on the same page? Is what we write gonna sound corny?! You know? So I’d say luckily we were consumed more with the artistic process than being too aware of our audience.”
It was 24 years ago that Karen O, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase formed a band in New York City – a scene that also saw the rise of the likes of LCD Soundsystem and The Strokes. The Lizzy Goodman-penned book Meet Me in The Bathroom released in 2017 – since adapted into documentary – dives into this musical renaissance the city that never sleeps experienced at the time.
“The world Yeah Yeah Yeahs was born into was a pretty turbulent one (9/11, 2001),” Karen O explains. “I think at that moment in time when we were just babies too, it really felt like the world could end any day and so there’s such a high-stake steering towards the birth of the band. The songs we were writing back then didn’t have much to do with that really, but 20 years later, there’s a similar feeling of turbulence and high stakes and the world ending any day.”
Almost a decade on from the release of their previous record, Cool It Down was the band’s fifth studio album. This eight-track collection carries a cathartic energy throughout, but from the very offset of the opening track, ‘Spitting Off the Edge of the World’ cements a landmark return like no other. “There are parallels,” she continues, “and I think basically the themes that we are writing about now are more distilled from what’s happening in our lives and we wanted to be able to express that, not just for us, but for everyone who is feeling this.”
It was this same year as the indie stalwart’s return that Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast met her fellow Korean American singer and songwriter for the first time – with the two having admired each other from afar for years. Prior to meeting, they had exchanged texts with Zauner recalling in a Rolling Stone interview: “It felt very K.O. She was like, ‘If you ever want to break a table with me …’” For context – the sentiment followed K.O. seeing a photo of Zauner during her relentless tour consisting of more than 100 concerts and promotional engagements that left her a little concerned. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman relayed: “[The road] can wear you down. The best thing to do in that situation is smash some glass. For me, it was a poster of us. I put my foot through it. It takes the edge off.”
Having come to prominence as a frontwoman amidst a musical landscape led by men, Karen O paved the way for others, and her influence cannot be overstated. There’s an unapologetic nature to not just her music, but her approach to a gruelling industry. She says, “self-care is misperceived as weakness and it’s absolutely the opposite, it’s strength. Especially when you are a front person in a band or a woman among a lot of men, there’s a vital misconception that you have to push through no matter what, even if it’s demolishing you and I think that’s kind of the wrong attitude to have.”
In the book and documentary, Meet Me in The Bathroom, Karen O talks about how she cancelled a bunch of tour dates because it was all just too much at a time when the band wanted to focus on finishing their debut record – a sentiment that was deemed utterly controversial at the time and saw the vocalist be treated like a “real pariah”. Upon meeting the singer in 2022, Maggie Rogers – like Michelle Zauner – shared immense admiration for her, saying that that decision served as “one of the most important things that she had taken in and learnt about her own career and was a game-changer for her, just to know that you could prioritise and not have to be towed along by forces that are bigger than you, that you can call the shots.”
