A star is Yorn

Somewhere to the right of The Replacements and left of The Jayhawks you’ll find Pete Yorn. This is what radio rock was meant to sound like – sinewy, medium-rare rhythms, chiming Big Star guitars, a rich voice, like Jakob Dylan with a better ear for melody. Yorn, the consummate songwriter, even got his label to resurrect the classic roaring red Columbia logo, synonymous with Dylan and Springsteen and Miles Davis, for his debut album musicforthemorningafter.

It’s a substantial debut, particularly the standout tunes ‘Life On A Chain’ and ‘For Nancy (’Cos It Already Is)’, the latter a sort of ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ by way of Paul Westerberg.

Yorn’s the classic scuffed-boot American rocker type: handsome in a second-hand sorta way, soft-spoken, friendly. The son of a dentist and concert pianist turned schoolteacher, the singer grew up in a New Jersey haunted by the spectre of Bruce and big hair metal bands like Bon Jovi and Skid Row. Weaning himself from Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to U2 and The Clash to The Smiths and Joy Division, his Eureka moment happened at a club called Joey’s, watching local band Blue Macabre.

“They had this sound, I guess it was kinda like Jesus And Mary Chain meets The Cure or something,” Yorn explains, “and I remember being blown away. I went home and started writing songs.”

Soon, he’d hooked up with “the only other two kids into The Replacements, they lived in the woods and were best friends, like Frick and Frack, and somehow we ended up becoming friends and I was their drummer. We’d play Replacements songs, old REM songs, covers.”

Subsequently, having moved to LA, Yorn signed to Columbia without too much trouble and began working up and recording material with producers like Brad Wood and ex-also Dim Stars/Gumball guy Don Fleming, who’d previously made some fine records with Dinosaur Jr. and Teenage Fanclub. The result was musicforthemorningafter, released in America last spring. By the end of 2001 it started cropping up in a whole slew of end of year critics’ lists. It gets its European release this month.

However, before the record was even finished, Yorn had secured yet another fairytale break, scoring and contributing songs to the Farrelly Brothers/Jim Carrey comedy Me Myself And Irene.

“I sent the unmixed tracks to a bunch of my friends,” he explains, “and one them was this guy Brad Thomas, who is the Farrelly Brothers’ producer, he used to come see me play at this Irish pub. I had no idea he had Peter Farrelly on the phone, cranking ‘Life On A Chain’ in the background, rockin’ out. And I guess it was the perfect time, they were right in the middle of picking the music for the movie, and right away they put three songs on the temp music track.

“Then a week later they called me again from a car, they were driving off to Palm Springs for a weekend or something, listening to music on the highway. I remember I was getting on a plane, and Peter Farrelly says, ‘Do you wanna score this thing?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know anything about scoring,’ and he says, ‘I know, that’s why we want you to do it!’ I didn’t realise it, but they had singer-songwriters do their movies in the past, like Freedy Johnson did Kingpin, Todd Rundgren I think did Dumb And Dumber and then they had [Jonathan] Richman on [There’s Something About] Mary.

“So I saw the movie, I loved it and did the whole thing in two weeks, made the record in my friend’s garage. The concept of spending $2000 a day to track songs, like if you don’t get the right guitar part, I’d probably lose my mind over it. So we stayed there, did the thing in two weeks, and I remember there were Fox executives in suits coming down thinking they’re gonna come to some studio to hear it, and they walk in and we’re dusting off boxes saying, ‘Here, sit on that!’.”

Pete Yorn will be lucky if that’s the last time he tells an executive to sit on it. But right now, he’s on a roll.

Musicforthemorningafter is out now on Columbia Records.