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To complete his new album, Pete Yorn had to get all reflective

Pete Yorn
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Before singer/songwriter Pete Yorn began working on his fourth album, appropriately titled Back and Fourth, he took a look back at the previous three. What he saw was an interesting glimpse into his own creative process, arriving at the realization that he had fashioned an unintentional trilogy with 2001's musicforthemorningafter representing morning, 2003's Day I Forgot moving into the afternoon and 2006's Nightcrawler concluding with the evening.

"That was me, in hindsight, trying to make some sense of it all," says Yorn. "I like to organize things in my brain into neat little categories, and I was just trying to figure out what the connection between all those records were and that whole time in my life, and I came to the conclusion that they were notes on a theme as I went through my 20s and into my early 30s, reflecting on life in general and my perspectives on all that. And it kind of went a little darker as it went on. By Nightcrawler, some darker elements were creeping in."

Just as the trilogy was more or less unplanned, so too was Yorn's reaction to it. Without necessarily intending to move away from the spirit of his first three albums, Yorn understood his fourth presented him with a great deal of growth potential.

"I looked at it as an opportunity to do something totally different," says Yorn. "Maybe the trilogy was my own way of allowing myself to reset."

The reset process actually began during the tour to support Nightcrawler, when he took time to record The Break Up Album with actress Scarlett Johannson (which came out in September, almost three months after Back and Fourth), continuing into the new album's writing phase. In a turnaround from his typical methodology, Yorn wrote the lyrics first and then built music around the words.

"Ultimately it made my abstract style a little less abstract," he says. "A lot of times, I write and it flows through me and I disconnect from myself, and it just happens. I'm not really worried what anything means to me at the time. I usually figure it out after. I had a lot of stuff boiling up in me at the time — I was dealing with a lot of personal stuff and I didn't feel too good, frankly — and I was addressing it in kind of journals, so I was more conscious of what I was talking about in a literal sense."

After recording demos, Yorn and producer/Columbia label exec Rick Rubin whittled the material down to a tentative track list for the album. "Rick definitely gravitated toward the really personal, darkly lyrical songs," says Yorn. Rubin suggested Bright Eyes multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis as a producer for the project and Yorn agreed. He ultimately lived in Mogis' guest house in Omaha for two months while working on Back and Fourth.

"I figured it made sense to work where Mike was comfortable, to get his sound and the thing he does," says the Los Angeles-based Yorn. "Besides the record, I think it was good for me personally to just get out of town."

Perhaps the biggest departure was the presence of a band on Back and Fourth's basic tracks. Yorn has traditionally performed all but a few random instrumental sounds on his albums, so performing with a studio band was a major shift.

"I've never made a record that way," says Yorn. "The basic drums, bass, acoustic guitars, vocals and piano were tracked live, which was way different for me. I'm used to putting my stamp on everything. Sometimes you have things that worked for you in the past and you want to keep doing things that way, and you might be scared to try something new but a whole new world could open up. It could turn out great, sometimes it turns out shitty, but it's important to keep trying new things in life."