The name “Yvette Young” immediately conjures the sound of her quasi-pianistic fingerstyle and two-handed tapping-heavy compositions, along with the math-rock-leaning musings of her band, Covet.
However, these past few years have been all about new chapters for the lauded guitarist. The release of solo music is one of them; another is involvement in more experimental projects that allow her to test the boundaries of her creativity and approach to her craft – and, by extension, the future of her career.
Her recent link-up with Hatch, the device and bedtime audio content company, on Emo Sound Baths – an audio channel inspired by being emo in your bedroom – is one such collaboration, which, as Young explains, came at a time when she’s making a conscious decision to expand her songwriting toolkit.
“I got really excited because there's a lot of synchronicity, in a lot of ways. I'm already doing a bunch of ambient stuff for people lately,” she reveals, dialing in from her studio where the Hatch Emo Sound Baths came to life.
“I feel like including the word ‘emo’ was just funny to me, because I never thought the two could go together.”
Another moment that seemed to have been forged by kismet? Young had just gotten back from NAMM, where she demoed her signature pedal with Walrus Audio, the Qi Etherealizer. At the NAMM Show, she had even told Guitar World that she wanted a pedal that “would kind of [help you] sit down and start an idea.”
Now, faced with the task of creating 20-minute-long soundbaths, Young turned to her new pedal to serve as her idea generator.
“It's so daunting to start from nothing, right? To just be faced with the gravity of a blank canvas,” she ponders. “So, for me, the best solution is to start with a wash of color.
“[Using the] Qi, I would just play a progression, and then I'd press freeze on Granular or Phrase Sample, and then I’d just up the reverb on it so that it's really large and dense, and then I’m met with this beautiful field of color. On top of that, I found it pretty easy to be inspired and write a riff.”
Armed with the Qi – and her go-to arsenal of gear, namely, Hologram’s Chroma Console, Collision Devices’ Black Hole Symmetry, Mercury7 Reverb by Meris, DigiTech’s FreqOut, an EBow – plus a dash of inspiration from Hammock, fuzz-fueled black metal, and Jesu – Young set out to create a “microcosm” for each of these five compositions.
“I think perhaps, by default, I’m a melodically verbose person, so I always want to cram as many things as I can,” she confesses.
“But I think what happens when I'm faced with the prospect of writing something for 20 minutes is, unless I want to be here for six years, I can't cram that many details in every moment, and it's more about the overall picture and the abstraction, rather than concretely spelling out every moment.”
Adding more color to the nascent painting taking shape on her “canvas” (or in this case, a DAW) meant exploring the inextricable link between bedtime, dreams, and memories – a connection she didn’t even realize she needed to dig into until she started listening back to her recordings.
“I would listen and I’d be like, ‘Wow, this really reminds me of sitting by the lake or walking in the neighborhood in my childhood house.’ There are moments where I feel like it [the composition] would be emotionally enhanced if I went out and got some field recordings, so it places you in a setting.
“So I put some morning doves in there…the sound of cars… there are chimes that I sampled. All these little details just contribute to the world-building that I was trying to do.”
Speaking of world-building, the instruments – and tunings – she used in these recordings continue to expand the guitar Yvette-verse. There’s a sparkly pink Ibanez, equipped with P-90s, which looks suspiciously similar to her own signature Ibanez signature line (Young hints that it “may or may not be coming out”), an Ibanez bass, and a Harmony acoustic whose tone she describes as “beautifully dead.”
For keen-eared listeners, Young also delivers on her penchant for alternate tunings, employing the “American Football tuning, F, A, C, G, C, E,” a variant of that – F, A, C, G, A, E – as well as D, A, D, F#, A, E.
Listening to these recordings, I was happy to find how quintessentially Yvette they still sound – and while many may be quick to complain that such high-profile collaborations are done solely for financial gain, I was curious to ask why she decided to pivot to more soundtrack-adjacent work.
“I think the reason for me pivoting into this kind of stuff isn’t necessarily financial,” she shares. “I was on the model where it's tour, tour, tour. I had this moment last year, or the year before that, where I was just like, ‘What do I even want out of music? Am I enjoying myself?’
“I had a lot of really bad things happen to me these last couple of years. It's almost like the universe just being like, ‘You need to pump the brakes, because bad things can happen.’ I got to a point where I'm like, ‘I just want to quit. I don't know if I'm cut out for this.’”
She continues, “I took a gamble, jumping from being an art teacher to being a touring musician. I can gamble again. I'm gonna go from touring musician to investing in a lot of recording equipment, and we’ll see what happens.
“In the current industry, which I feel is oversaturated, it's really difficult to figure out how to monetize certain things, especially with streaming being so ass at paying. So part of me taking jobs like this, and why I was really excited when Hatch approached me to do this, is because it aligns so much with what I want to be doing with my career and my time.”
And to assuage the fears of those who might interpret the move as “Yvette is never going to tour again,” Young assured me that she has plenty of projects in the works – including more solo music (and a music video that involves guitar smashing), a flurry of collaborations, and yes, a tour planned with Covet – alongside Claire Puckett on bass and Jessica Burdeaux on drums.
As she sums up, “I'm a musician, and what that means to me is: I make stuff, I write things, I play with sound – and if I can get paid just making stuff that I'd already want to make, then that's just so aligned and such a huge cherry on top.”
