Bobtail Yearlings

Bennett Lin (vocals, guitar, banjo)
David Kannenstine (bass)
Tripp Dudley (tabla, percussion)

It's a maxim growing further entrenched among today's rock music vanguard: "You need to get onstage and reach an audience... You can't just hole up in your room writing songs all day... Music has returned to its populist roots, and that's exactly how it should be." For California-bred singer/songwriter Bennett Lin, trained in classical music as a youth but also active for years in the Oakland cowpunk and post-rock scenes, the romantic image of a free-spirited band on the road was never at odds with that of an ailing Mozart scribbling out rapt visions at the piano. Certainly music belongs to the masses, but its history is also awash in posthumous praise for far too many pioneers rejected in their own time. Thus, being asked to choose a side—populists versus visionaries—seemed like a strange, needless ultimatum. Surely there's room for everyone to sit together peacefully... isn't there?

In the end, life chose for him. Devastated over the breakup of a six-year relationship, Lin abandoned the rigors of band duties to create a cathartic personal album of eclectic folk rock melded with world influences, performing all the vocals and instruments himself while exploring ambitions only possible for a lone composer mapping out the songs first in notated manuscript. (The complete scores are viewable and free to download on the band website.) Fast forward to the present, and the finished album indeed presents a stark contrast. Unlike a pyramid of indefinite expanse slowly raised layer upon layer by collective effort, Yearling's Bobtail stands like a cathedral at once both supporting and resting upon its arches: irreducibly whole, as if sprung forth instantly and fully formed from the mind of its single architect. Channeling Hoagy Carmichael and other Tin Pan Alley songwriters, melodies serve not as mere afterthoughts laid atop endlessly looped four-bar templates, but define the very song structures themselves, paving uneven but scenic pathways for palm-muted guitars and mandolins to weave intricate strands of counterpoint around and across.

Raised by hard-working Taiwanese immigrant parents, Lin began his musical training early, studying piano and violin as a child, then picking up the guitar, banjo, and drums on his own. As the first release of the autobiographical two-album set, Yearling's Bobtail I details Lin's strange childhood leading up to the start of his first relationship, opening with the dynamic rhythms and fluid key changes of "Didi" (meaning "little brother" in Taiwanese), an acoustic folk number told from the perspective of his older sister. With melody firmly established as its foundation, the album ventures toward other stylistic genres. In "Ash Wednesday", wistful Arabic microtones segue into a polyphonic Renaissance motet, while the raucous "Good Night, Sita" finds a teenage Lin awkwardly dropping off his date after an unsuccessful evening, as the torrent of his unspoken thoughts—a stream of consciousness delivery in homage to modernist writer James Joyce—is jostled and mocked throughout by the syncopated thumping of a Motown beat.

Frenetic dual mandolins imitate the sound of Russian balalaikas over Lin's trademark Tuvan throatsinging in "Pchelka's Starry Journey", which uses the story of Pchelka and Mushka, twin dogs killed in the Soviet space program, as an allegory for Lin's relationship with his autistic younger brother during a bizarre and heartbreaking period of his preadolescence. Bullied at school while family life at home was disrupted by his brother's constant fits and medical needs, one day Lin received a letter by mail proclaiming him to be a "Beyonder": an alien being of higher intelligence disguised in human form. Though an obvious scam designed to cheat the gullible and discontent, its words were instantly taken to heart by the unhappy child, who began sending away his allowance money for the next two years while obeying the letter's instructions to stoically shut himself off from the world, or as he now describes it, "being brainwashed by some mail order cult." The song ends with Lin being sent to school officials on suspicion of drug use, hinting at the lasting effects of the traumatic ordeal to be manifested in the second album to come.

"Odin" showcases an innovative lyrical technique of Lin's invention known as "doublespeaker rhyme," which involves writing two different sets of lyrics that rhyme syllable for syllable throughout a song. ("...buoy bobs through sea serpents, shivering for shivs unsheathed..." // "...coin toss to be hers from shivaree towards shivah seat...") While evoking the inner discord implied by such words as "newspeak" and "doublethink" in George Orwell's novel 1984, the technique is also aptly named because the two voices, sung in harmony, are completely separated in the mix—literally, one to each speaker. Like a split screen in cinema, "doublespeaker rhyme" holds many uses as a literary device, such as blurring the line between dreams and the wakened state in "Odin".

Another album highlight is "Willy the Cocoa", which recounts the murder of a retarded homeless man who once roamed the neighborhood of Lin's youth, collecting scrap for salvage. As its seemingly childish wordplay slowly unveils layers of hidden insight ("...imp-runt age of mind..."), jerky mandolins and wailing melodicas evoke a grotesque scene of woodland trolls in secluded revelry. This nod to Germanic changeling folklore—which once held deformed and retarded children to be trolls in disguise who had secretly exchanged themselves with healthy human infants—also features prominently in the album cover art's pastiche of song references.

Of course, YB was never meant to be just a personal project of self-discovery, but also a calling card for cobbling together a new band. Upon its completion, Lin searched his new surroundings of Brooklyn, New York and found a shared penchant for smart melodies and musical experimentation in bassist David Kannenstine, and tabla player Tripp Dudley. For the past year, the Bobtail Yearlings have been performing a chamber folk version of YB to receptive local crowds, and will work together as a collective to record the next project: a concept album about the tragically short life of Rosalind Franklin, the English biophysicist who helped discover the double helical structure of DNA.

When all is said and done, perhaps it's true that we reserve our warmest affections for those bands that deliver exactly what the people know and want... but the Bobtail Yearlings aren't here to argue. All they ask for is freedom to push the boundaries of songcraft as a conceptual art form, all the while proving that those bands making unprecedented music—music the people can't possibly know they might want until it's been made—also deserve a place at the table. Populists make sure the message never loses its meaning, but visionaries help to keep it from getting stale. Today's next T. Rexes and Velvet Undergrounds can sit together peacefully knowing that in the end, music needs a diversity of temperaments and ideals to stay vibrant. After all, the future of music still matters... right?