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.