Pete Yorn

Pete Yorn speaks with a laconic deliberation that makes Steven Wright sound like Robin Williams, but his languor masks a number of definite passions, the most immediate being the still-fresh victory of his alma mater over the Kansas Jayhawks for the NCAA Basketball National Championship. The Syracuse grad lights up at the mention of his beloved Orangemen.

“I’m so psyched,” says Yorn with an animation restrained by most standards but positively needle-pushing given his generally quiet demeanor. “I’m trying to get a Carmello Anthony jersey, especially since this is the only year he played. That’ll be a collector’s item. One of my buddies that I went to college with, we watched it at his apartment and we were all going nuts. Early on, they were ranked like 40th preseason and Kansas was ranked #1, but I guess they couldn’t have realized how well the freshmen would play. I just fell in love with the team over the season. In my senior year at school, we made the Final Four and lost to Kentucky. I was heartbroken over that, so it’s cool to get it back now.”

Although Yorn’s current exhaustion could be passed off as post-championship party burn, his weary air has its roots in other current events. He’s been on the fast track doing press for Day I Forgot, his sophomore album and the highly anticipated follow-up to his 2001 gold-selling debut, musicforthemorningafter. And clearly he’s distracted by his most immediate concerns—catching the redeye to Philadelphia for a radio show, swinging up to New York for an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman and a Tower Records in-store, plus a slate of week-of-release promo gigs—all to be accomplished before the official launch of the Day I Forgot tour.

In some ways, this is all an extension of the tour for musicforthemorningafter, which stretched on for nearly two years and had Yorn circling the globe several times trying to catch up with the album’s exponential popularity. Even his downtime was marked by one-off shows, benefits and radio appearances, and by the time the album’s promotional cycle ran its course, Yorn was ready for a break.

Of course, that break was just like every other proposed period of inactivity in the wake of musicforthemorningafter. “Three or four days into the vacation and I wanna get back to music,” says Yorn with a characteristically fatigued laugh. “I had the songs and I was just ready to tackle them.” With the songs written, there seemed to be little recourse but to return to the garage of co-producer R. Walt Vincent and attempt to recreate the debut album’s bottled lightning.

For someone who sometimes seems to operate at a metabolic rate low enough to qualify as suspended animation, Pete Yorn has worked at a relatively furious pace for most of his life. Demonstrating his musical inclination early on, the New Jersey native taught himself to play drums before he’d turned 10, then switched over to guitar and writing songs as a teenager.

The ease with which Yorn mastered his musical skills made him skeptical of their value in the real world. With thoughts of a career in law or accounting, he entered Syracuse University, but by the time he graduated, Yorn had written close to 400 songs and decided to forego law school until he had fully explored his musical options. After a move to Los Angeles, Yorn found a steady gig at Cafe Largo, where he made a number of fans and friends, one of whom was film producer Bradley Thomas, whose lot had recently been cast with the Farrelly brothers on Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary.