xx, PY
 

Pete Yorn

“There’s a thrill in trying to pull something out of thin air and make it real,” says Pete Yorn. “The imperfections, the chase, the intimacy—that’s where all the beauty is.”

Yorn delivers more than just thrills on his stunning new album, All The Beauty, offering up a revelatory meditation on growth, change, and the passage of time as he learns to find peace in appreciating the present moment. Recorded and co-produced with longtime collaborator Jackson Phillips (aka Day Wave), the album expands on the lush textures and raw emotion of the pair’s first two releases, completing the trilogy with a luminous, deeply perceptive mix of cathartic rockers and late-night ruminations. Yorn’s writing is at once direct and abstract here, often addressed to himself but riddled with piercing, existential questions, and his delivery is probing to match, urgent and insistent as it explores the open wounds of doubt, longing, and regret in a search for genuine human connection. The result is an album all about evolution, memory, and perspective, about letting go of the past, making room for the future, and loving each other—and ourselves—in a world full of messy contradictions.

“You look around and there’s so much beauty,” Yorn explains, “but at the same time, there’s so much pain and tragedy happening everywhere all at once. Balance comes with acknowledging both. The world can feel pretty bleak if you let it, but I think making this record was partly about choosing to notice the beauty anyway.”

Hailed as “one of his generation’s best songwriters” by SPIN, Yorn first broke out in 2001 with his extraordinary Columbia Records debut, Musicforthemorningafter, which mixed the blue-collar introspection of fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen with the deadpan stream-of-consciousness of Lou Reed and the jangling guitar-pop of The Smiths. NPR lauded the album as one the year’s finest, while Rolling Stone hailed it as “atmospheric, gently lit by sunlight and regret,” and the collection garnered RIAA Platinum certification on the strength of its universal acclaim, as well as Yorn’s relentless appetite for the road. In the decades that followed, Yorn would go on to solidify his status as a true songwriter’s songwriter, releasing eight more critically-acclaimed solo albums, landing nine Top Ten hits at AAA radio, and collaborating in the studio with everyone from Frank Black and Peter Buck to Liz Phair and Scarlett Johansson (Yorn and Johansson’s joint 2009 release, Break Up, achieved Platinum certification in France). With a voice Consequence of Sound described as “ruined and forlorn,” Yorn earned television performances on Letterman, Fallon, Kimmel, Ellen, Good Morning America, and more, as well as dates with artists as varied as R.E.M., Coldplay, My Morning Jacket, and The Chicks, and festival slots from Coachella and Bonnaroo to Glastonbury and Austin City Limits. In 2023, he made his big-screen debut appearing in Martin Scorcese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon alongside Jason Isbell and Jack White.

“I started making records almost thirty years ago, when I was basically still a kid,” Yorn recalls. “Back then, a lot of it came from imagination, from wondering what certain things might feel like. Now, I’m a father who’s lived so much more life, who’s been through some real highs and lows. I’m still writing from instinct, but everything’s informed by those real experiences.”

Some of those recent experiences—like losing his father, navigating his way through anxiety and depression, facing down a health scare, and getting sober—seemed like more than Yorn could handle in the moment, but in retrospect, they helped snap things into focus.

“If my last album, The Hard Way, was about going through the fire, then this one’s about appreciating what I have now that I’m on the other side,” Yorn explains. “It’s about finding gratitude for the moments that make us human, even when it hurts.”

Indeed, All The Beauty always manages to find some measure of peace, even in the midst of emotional turmoil. Album opener “Never Said No” sets the scene with a swaggering, guitar-driven groove as Yorn refuses to take the bait in a combustible relationship. “I think about you from the safety of my room,” he confesses. “I never thought we’d be here again.” Like so much of the album, the track is propelled by tension in search of release, by pressure in need of relief. “I don't wanna talk about what we used to do / And how things were better in the old days,” Yorn sings on the captivating title track. “I just wanna live this moment here with you / And not miss all the beauty of this place."

“It’s easy to be so focused on nostalgia or anticipation that you don’t see what’s right in front of you,” he reflects. “There’s something magical about knowing you’re in a meaningful moment while it’s happening, about being fully present for it.”

True presence, however, requires making room for pain and vulnerability, too. The bittersweet “All The Time” grapples with the discomfort of uncertainty and self-doubt, while the wistful “Mine To Call” reaches out for stability in unsteady times, and the dreamy “Magic (Helpless)” comes to terms with our emotional limitations. “If I had a magic wand I’d wave it for you,” Yorn sings over an 808 kick drum and looping guitar line. “I feel so helpless / I won’t remember this.”

“There are times when you want to fix something or help someone and you just can’t,” he explains. “The ‘magic wand’ idea is simple, almost childlike. If I could make it go away, I could, but that’s just not how the world works.”

Yorn frequently finds himself face to face with powers beyond his control on the album. The yearning “Trains” acknowledges that we can’t stop the inevitable; the hazy “Out Of My Head” struggles to shake a memory that won’t let go; “The Same Lie” spins out in an endless, hypnotic mental loop; and the shimmering “Estate” wrestles with the weight of dependence.

“There’s only so much waiting you can do, so much counting on other people to move things forward,” Yorn explains. “Slowly, you start to understand that you’re going to have to do that yourself.”

Ultimately that realization is at the heart of All The Beauty. By the time the record reaches its final act, Yorn has let go of all the “shoulds” and “coulds” in favor of savoring things as they really are. The cinematic “Idyllwild” sees joy and connection as it’s happening (“There’s no place / I’d rather be / I hope I keep these memories”), while lo-fi album closer “Everything” repeats the line “I love everything about you” over and over like a mantra.

“It’s a meditation on surrender,” he explains. “After the journey of all these songs, after wrestling with control and doubt and trying to fix everything, it just lands on surrendering to love and the realization that, in the end, maybe that's all that there is.”

For Pete Yorn, there’s nothing more thrilling—or more beautiful—than that.

Pete Yorn

“I’ll find my own way home,” Pete Yorn sings at the top of his exhilarating new album,  Hawaii. Lonesome as that notion may sound, there’s actually something ecstatic,  something triumphant in its delivery, a commitment to survival and self-reliance in the  face of doubt and uncertainty. 

“I’ve always been drawn to symbolism in my songwriting,” Yorn explains from his  home in Los Angeles. “With any given lyric, there’s always something more going on  beneath the surface.” 

The same can be said of Hawaii as a whole. Written and recorded with Day Wave’s  Jackson Phillips, the album serves as something of a sequel to Yorn’s critically  acclaimed 2019 release, Caretakers, building off the intoxicating creative chemistry  the pair discovered on their last go around and elevating things both sonically and  emotionally as it grapples with growth and change, escape and anxiety, independence  and isolation. The songs here are driving and propulsive, delivered with rich, three 

dimensional arrangements that draw on everything from ’60s surf rock and ’70s punk  to ’80s Britpop and ’90s indie rock, and Phillips’ production work is suitably raw and  cinematic, muscular in all the right places without sacrificing an ounce of  vulnerability. 

“I knew I wanted to make an energetic album,” says Yorn, “and the pace we were  working at really reflected that. We’d get together once a week and bang out a new  song every single time.” 

Vaccines had just rolled out and Delta wasn’t yet part of the national vocabulary when  the pair began work on Hawaii, and the sense of hope and possibility is palpable in the  recordings, an electric current coursing through the album even as darkness looms on  the horizon.  

“After being forced to take a break for so long, it felt like Jackson and I had built up  this creative head of steam,” Yorn explains. “When we finally got back into the studio  together, it just exploded into something more exciting and invigorating than I’ve ever  experienced before.” 

A New Jersey native equally indebted to Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar introspection  and Lou Reed’s deadpan stream-of-consciousness, Yorn first broke out in 2001 with his  extraordinary Columbia Records debut, ‘Musicforthemorningafter.’ Hailed by NPR as  one the year’s finest, the album garnered RIAA Gold certification on the strength of its  universal acclaim as well as Yorn’s relentless appetite for the road. Rolling Stone 

praised it as “atmospheric, gently lit by sunlight and regret,” while The Guardian called it “sublime,” and The AV Club deemed it “the first chapter in a long and  exciting career.” In the decades that followed, Yorn would go on to solidify his status  as a songwriters’ songwriter, releasing six more solo albums and collaborating in the  studio with everyone from Frank Black and Peter Buck to Liz Phair and Scarlett  Johansson (Yorn and Johansson’s joint 2009 release, ‘Break Up,’ went Platinum in  France). With a voice Consequence of Sound described as “ruined and forlorn,” Yorn  earned performances on Letterman, Fallon, Kimmel, Ellen, and more, as well dates  with artists as varied as R.E.M., Foo Fighters, Coldplay, My Morning Jacket, and The 

Chicks, and festival slots from Coachella and Bonnaroo to Glastonbury and Austin City  Limits.

It’s hard to think of anything more starkly reliable than the ticking of a clock, but time is an untrustworthy thing. It feels like ages since we’ve had a proper Pete Yorn LP to dissect, though it’s been just five years. And it seems like only yesterday that we first heard musicforthemorningafter, which came out back in 2001. Yorn’s brand new album and Capitol Records debut, ArrangingTime, plays with the elasticity of the years both in between and since — it’s not only a culmination of the Los Angeles by way of New Jersey artist’s adventurous latter-day projects, but a return to his original leaner methods.

For the first time since 2003’s Day I Forgot, producer R. Walt Vincent returns to help Yorn execute his most poised and diverse set of songs yet. ArrangingTime runs the gamut from elegiac folk to wasteland blues to upbeat, synth-kissed rock. Of course, some things never change. Yorn still plays the observer, stepping into characters — or his past selves from previous years — routing wistful poems and beatific visions through the weather-beaten voice of a man who’s seen a few things in his time

“I’ll look at pictures of places I went, or things I did,” says Yorn, “and I think, ‘Look at how great that day was and you just missed it.’ I think about the past and how much of it is a blur. The title of the album is a reminder to be present and within each song is a minor lesson about that. Time only gets faster as you get older.”

We blinked and Yorn turned 40, but he isn’t settling or slowing. If the extra-musical side of his last few years has been about anything, it is hard work. He’s focused on personal growth, broken bad habits, learned to get out of his own way, and become more lithe to life’s undulations. He got married. He gave the commencement address at alma mater Syracuse University (his speech was about running toward the stuff that makes you uncomfortable in life). And last year, after completing an acoustic tour without a backing band or a set list, he welcomed a child into this world.

“I was taking my life back,” says Yorn. “It was back-to-back with the records, and I toured a lot. There used to be just one way to approach the road in my mind: fucking burn it out. I had to realize, ‘Maybe I’m addicted to some things, and a little scared of adulthood.’ I said, ‘I want to tackle this.’ Now, discipline feels better than excess.”

As he prepares to release another album, it’s clear his music has been shored up too. By one measure, another trick of time, Yorn’s first three albums span a single day. The so-called “trilogy” — musicforthemorningafter, Day I Forgot, and Nightcrawler (2006) — captures the man’s progression from an unknown songwriter unspooling raw magic at the storied Café Largo, to the sort of dude who can dial up Dave Grohl for a ripping drum solo and trade twanged verses with Natalie Maines. Those all found Yorn solo with a producer, building songs in the studio (or garage).

But for his last two, 2009’s Back & Fourth and 2010’s Pete Yorn, he did the session thing, stepping into readymade bands under the guidance of Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis and Pixies genius Frank Black, respectively. And those were bookended by collaborative projects: 2009’s playful album-length duet with Scarlett Johansson, Break Up, and The Olms (2013), a sunny, ’60s-styled retro-pop duo with J.D. King.

“I went on a run abandoning my first approach,” says Yorn. “I was molting an old skin in a lot of ways. After that, it felt natural to come back to just letting it flow with Walt. I have no illusions: You can’t walk through the same river twice. I’m not trying to recreate an album I made in my 20s. I’m revisiting a method. I started off doing watercolors, then I did sculpting. And now I’m back on watercolors.”

But he does bring his experience with him to the looser style of his first producer, R. Walt Vincent (with work from a couple of others). ArrangingTime opener “Summer Was a Day” drops us into the desert at night — it’s lush with shimmering ambience, swelling strings, ringing guitar strum and skittering beats. And while “In Your Head” juxtaposes Springsteen’s heartland chug with Morrissey’s dramatic softness, a song like “Shopping Mall” is just understated and pretty — spare on instrumentation and generous with emotion. Penultimate track “Tomorrow” is almost a dance cut, and Yorn’s attempt to buck the singer-songwriter trend of the album-ending slow fade.

ArrangingTime flows like a mixtape with Yorn’s warm voice and perspective as the through-line. These 12 songs are populated by fragmented folks: people waiting for something to happen (the bus-stop sitter in the dreamy “Halifax”), or chasing a feeling they once had (the angsty burnout in the raucous “Screaming at the Setting Sun”). But it’s not all so bleak — light seeps through the cracks in “I’m Not the One,” where our host morphs into a loner coming to terms with his self-imposed isolation.

“I’m an observer,” says Yorn. “I’m into subtleties, the moments between moments, but I don’t pretend to know where all the ideas come from. I try to clear myself, create a melody and let that emotion dictate what comes out. I like my own songs when I haven’t even figured them out yet. I’m into the mysterious part of the process.”

But we’re still allowed to guess at the hidden lessons of ArrangingTime. In the case of the characters above, one’s stuck on the future, one’s trapped in the past, and the other’s learning to be present. The ambling “Walking Up” acknowledges outcomes both negative and positive as neutral — the titular act is what’s important: facing the challenge, eyes open, in the moment. Because as seemingly treacherous as that tick-tock, tick-tock can be, it’s not time that’s changeable. It’s the timekeeper.

It’s hard to think of anything more starkly reliable than the ticking of a clock, but time is an untrustworthy thing. It feels like ages since we’ve had a proper Pete Yorn LP to dissect, though it’s been just five years. And it seems like only yesterday that we first heard musicforthemorningafter, which came out back in 2001. Yorn’s brand new album and Capitol Records debut, ArrangingTime, plays with the elasticity of the years both in between and since — it’s not only a culmination of the Los Angeles by way of New Jersey artist’s adventurous latter-day projects, but a return to his original leaner methods.

For the first time since 2003’s Day I Forgot, producer R. Walt Vincent returns to help Yorn execute his most poised and diverse set of songs yet. ArrangingTime runs the gamut from elegiac folk to wasteland blues to upbeat, synth-kissed rock. Of course, some things never change. Yorn still plays the observer, stepping into characters — or his past selves from previous years — routing wistful poems and beatific visions through the weather-beaten voice of a man who’s seen a few things in his time.

“I’ll look at pictures of places I went, or things I did,” says Yorn, “and I think, ‘Look at how great that day was and you just missed it.’ I think about the past and how much of it is a blur. The title of the album is a reminder to be present and within each song is a minor lesson about that. Time only gets faster as you get older.”

We blinked and Yorn turned 40, but he isn’t settling or slowing. If the extra-musical side of his last few years has been about anything, it is hard work. He’s focused on personal growth, broken bad habits, learned to get out of his own way, and become more lithe to life’s undulations. He got married. He gave the commencement address at alma mater Syracuse University (his speech was about running toward the stuff that makes you uncomfortable in life). And last year, after completing an acoustic tour without a backing band or a set list, he welcomed a child into this world.

“I was taking my life back,” says Yorn. “It was back-to-back with the records, and I toured a lot. There used to be just one way to approach the road in my mind: fucking burn it out. I had to realize, ‘Maybe I’m addicted to some things, and a little scared of adulthood.’ I said, ‘I want to tackle this.’ Now, discipline feels better than excess.”

As he prepares to release another album, it’s clear his music has been shored up too. By one measure, another trick of time, Yorn’s first three albums span a single day. The so-called “trilogy” — musicforthemorningafter, Day I Forgot, and Nightcrawler (2006) — captures the man’s progression from an unknown songwriter unspooling raw magic at the storied Café Largo, to the sort of dude who can dial up Dave Grohl for a ripping drum solo and trade twanged verses with Natalie Maines. Those all found Yorn solo with a producer, building songs in the studio (or garage).

But for his last two, 2009’s Back & Fourth and 2010’s Pete Yorn, he did the session thing, stepping into readymade bands under the guidance of Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis and Pixies genius Frank Black, respectively. And those were bookended by collaborative projects: 2009’s playful album-length duet with Scarlett Johansson, Break Up, and The Olms (2013), a sunny, ’60s-styled retro-pop duo with J.D. King.

“I went on a run abandoning my first approach,” says Yorn. “I was molting an old skin in a lot of ways. After that, it felt natural to come back to just letting it flow with Walt. I have no illusions: You can’t walk through the same river twice. I’m not trying to recreate an album I made in my 20s. I’m revisiting a method. I started off doing watercolors, then I did sculpting. And now I’m back on watercolors.”

But he does bring his experience with him to the looser style of his first producer, R. Walt Vincent (with work from a couple of others). ArrangingTime opener “Summer Was a Day” drops us into the desert at night — it’s lush with shimmering ambience, swelling strings, ringing guitar strum and skittering beats. And while “In Your Head” juxtaposes Springsteen’s heartland chug with Morrissey’s dramatic softness, a song like “Shopping Mall” is just understated and pretty — spare on instrumentation and generous with emotion. Penultimate track “Tomorrow” is almost a dance cut, and Yorn’s attempt to buck the singer-songwriter trend of the album-ending slow fade.

ArrangingTime flows like a mixtape with Yorn’s warm voice and perspective as the through-line. These 12 songs are populated by fragmented folks: people waiting for something to happen (the bus-stop sitter in the dreamy “Halifax”), or chasing a feeling they once had (the angsty burnout in the raucous “Screaming at the Setting Sun”). But it’s not all so bleak — light seeps through the cracks in “I’m Not the One,” where our host morphs into a loner coming to terms with his self-imposed isolation.

“I’m an observer,” says Yorn. “I’m into subtleties, the moments between moments, but I don’t pretend to know where all the ideas come from. I try to clear myself, create a melody and let that emotion dictate what comes out. I like my own songs when I haven’t even figured them out yet. I’m into the mysterious part of the process.”

But we’re still allowed to guess at the hidden lessons of ArrangingTime. In the case of the characters above, one’s stuck on the future, one’s trapped in the past, and the other’s learning to be present. The ambling “Walking Up” acknowledges outcomes both negative and positive as neutral — the titular act is what’s important: facing the challenge, eyes open, in the moment. Because as seemingly treacherous as that tick-tock, tick-tock can be, it’s not time that’s changeable. It’s the timekeeper.