fbpx

Interview: Yellow Whale on parental guidance, making music for children that’s really for parents, and getting Drug Rug involved


While Vanyaland and the rest of Boston are gearing up for a little bit of mind-altering fun with this weekend’s Fuzzstival — and maybe smoking a little bit of old grandpappy’s tobacky in the process — some of us rockers will be stuck home with babies and toddlers. Babies? What the flipping fuck are those? I know, I know. Scary shit.

But yes, kids do happen. And while they might be the funniest people in the world, making fun of your clothes, deleting your texts and punching you in the balls, they sometimes do drive you crazy. That’s when you pour yourself a whisky and put on some Yellow Whale.

Yellow Whale is a half-kiddie, half-witty comedic musical collaboration between duo Pat Healy and Marty Johnson on one side (parents, I might add, of an apparently tremendous tot named Artie, to which all of Yellow Whale’s songs are directed) and Sarah Cronin and Tommy Allen of pop-psych favorites Drug Rug on the other. Their album Tenderness and Terror: Songs of Survival from the First Year of Parenthood has been getting love from shows like Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child out of Austin, as well as blogs and indie media outlets like Zoo Globble, Saturday Morning Cereal Bowl and Tam’s Jams for Fams (yes these are all real). It’s really a funny delight for anyone looking for an acerbic laugh with a groovy sound to boot.

The release is also the first appearance of Drug Rug on recordings for a while. Here, the duo shine in a low pressure setting—mixing tropical folk with low-fi hip hop, Elephant 6-style psych pop and good old-fashioned lullabies. We chatted with the Yellow Whale gang this week in anticipation of Drug Rug’s show this Saturday at Fuzztival.

Here’s what they had to say about their creation.

Jonathan Donaldson: So how many babies are in this total equation? Just Artie?

Marty Johnson: Yup, that’s all it takes when you have one like Arthur. He’s larger than life. And actually gigantic for a toddler.

And how did Drug Rug get involved?

Pat Healy: Marty and I were having a difficult time getting Artie to sleep and we’d make up these sweet lullabies that would get less and less sweet as his refusal to sleep continued. So we’d record these melodies for posterity, and then I’d try to put chords underneath it. Then we joked about how fun it would be to get these down professionally. Then it went from something we joked about to something we really wanted to do, so we asked Tommy and Sarah if they’d help us. We had a few rehearsals and they came up with some really cool additional parts we hadn’t even thought of.

Sarah Cronin: Pat has always been such a big Drug Rug supporter, so we said “sure.”

The music ranges from folk to lo-fi garage bubblegum. Did this project lack a certain sense of musical boundaries since it’s not “serious art?”

Healy: Yeah! I think that’s right. And it also is a reflection of sorts of all the moods you go through. Sometimes he and I have a lo-fi garage bubblegum hang.



So the first track sounds like it uses the actual ultrasound as a drum beat. Has that been done before?

Healy: I have no idea. Is Lou Barlow a dad? He probably would have done that.

Johnson: I should get credit for “playing” on that track, actually. Womb is an instrument, right?

Did this give you guys in Drug Rug a chance to stretch out and try something new?

Thomas Allen: I had a blast! It’s fun to mess around with other people’s ideas.

Johnson: All these songs were made up off the cuff during stretches of either Pat or myself trying to calm him down, get him to sleep or entertain him — so it really is reflective of exactly what you spend your time doing in the first year of being a parent. Wild ups and downs. Feeling confident and desperate, happy, sad, insane.

Which makes it more of a Parents album.

Johnson: Yes, that was the point, but I was very nervous we’d come across like that Portlandia sketch where they try to do kids’ music for parents!

As parents, does it make you feel badly to say “my child is a little shit” from time to time? [Note: the bad language is bleeped out on the album to make it safe for young ears.]

Johnson: I don’t think we ever call him a little shit in the songs, do we? But I will say that as he has come to understand more language, I have stopped singing certain parts of the songs when I sing to him.

Healy: The part where I sing “if any motherfucking assholes mess with you I’ll waste them” is now “if anybody ever tries to mess with you I’ll waste them.” At some point you must be careful!

Cronin: I think Marty’s awesome comedic talent definitely shines through here (Johnson has comedy experience on Boston improv stages). I also like the idea of talking to kids like they’re adults, because I think they’re smarter than we give them credit for. And sometimes they’re assholes.

What are you guys going to tell Artie when he’s old enough to be like “what’s the ‘white man privilege’ song about?”

Johnson: Well, hopefully he will know his mom does comedy by that time so he will be rolling his eyes at everything we do. But also — it’s kind of true, right? That little dude has no real problems, so relax!!

Relax indeed.

Follow Jonathan Donaldson on Twitter @JR_Donaldson.