Yarn was country, when country wasn’t cool, in, of all places, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City.
The way singer-songwriter Blake Christiana tells it, the band, set to play at the Wayne Theatre in Waynesboro on Friday, Sept. 1, just sort of evolved, from a once-a-week gig at a Village music spot.
“We were playing once a week at Kenny’s Castaway, and we had kind of a rotating band, and then it settled into what it started as,” Christiana said. “We would just practice on stage on Monday nights from 10 to 1 in the morning, probably even later. New York bars close at 4, so we could go all night.
“We kind of just honed our chops right there in the Village. That street is pretty touristy, so people would come in, and they’d be like, I hate country music, but I like you guys.”
Christiana is a native of Schenectady, N.Y., itself not a hotbed for country music, but he was a fan of country from childhood because of his father.
“My dad is a big music fan, so he would always have it in the car, and he would play Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Willie Nelson, old country. That was initially my first introduction to popular music. And my dad would sit around with his buddies at a campfire and play all these tunes,” said Christiana, who was put into guitar lessons in grade school basically so that dad would have somebody to jam with.
Yarn’s latest album, “This Is the Year,” includes a look back at the first time he saw country legend Dolly Parton on TV as a kid, in addition to the title track, which recounts a time of change for the band, which was founded in 2007.
“We lost a member, we split ways. Just the attitude of the band changed. We all got energized again, got excited again. So we said, what the hell, let’s call the album, ‘This is the Year,’“ said Christiana, who has relocated from the band’s base in Brooklyn to North Carolina, another flash point in Yarn’s little run at upheaval.
“I’d written that song shortly after everything had changed. It just felt like a good time to be optimistic. A lot of my songs and writing tends to be on the more pessimistic side, a little darker. I think we had a few more positive tunes on this track.”
Good news for Yarn fans: there’s more new stuff coming. The band is on tour through the end of September, but Christiana said the plan is to get back in the studio in the fall, and they already have a head start toward getting the next record out.
“We have 30-plus songs in the can that we haven’t released yet that we recorded last October and are just starting to get mixed. We’re finishing overdub on stuff, still editing stuff. We’ve already got a dozen or so mixed already, and we’re just trying to figure out how to release them. So there’s plenty of new music on the horizon, and always will be,” Christiana said.
Story by Chris Graham
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