“I hate playing solo!” Sam Cohen declares. His Texan lilt, mellowed by years studying producing and engineering at Berklee College of Music and gigging around Boston, is accompanied by a chuckle as he recalls, “My mom asked me to play one of my new songs yesterday and I did, and I was like, ‘Ugh, even that performance, this isn’t what it’s supposed to sound like!’”
He jokes, “But she loved it. You can tell everyone that the next album is going to be amazing because my mom loved my new song.”
It’s funny: Cohen admits this aversion to playing alone as the lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter of his DIY solo project called Yellowbirds. After his previous band—the experimental alternative trio Apollo Sunshine—disbanded in 2010, Cohen moved to Brooklyn to begin anew musically and creatively. Less than a year later, the lo-fi GarageBand demos he made for himself during the transition became Yellowbirds’ debut album, The Color.
“Yellowbirds has always functioned sort of the same way a solo project would,” he explains. “I write all the songs. A lot of the arrangement ideas are coming from me. A lot of the playing on the albums is me. I produced the albums, as well. But, it’s always been with great, great playing contributions from various people who have been in the band over the last few years.”
Only recently did Yellowbirds evolve from an independent side project into much more of a collaborative effort. As such, Songs from the Vanished Frontier, featuring the now-regular lineup of drummer Brian Kantor, bassist Annie Nero and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, was released in late May via the Brooklyn indie label Royal Potato Family.
Yellowbirds create cinematic, bedroom pop—the kind that at first listen might sound like it should play during love scenes in indie films or innocuous iPhone commercials. But after sifting through the band’s catalog, you’ll find tracks textured with dense sonic layers and vibrant colors such as “Love Stories” and “Young Men of Promise.” Likewise, dreamy chord phrasings and hazy reverb soak through on nearly pastoral tracks like “The Vanished Frontier” and “What’s Out There.”
Lyrically, Cohen conjures feelings and images that supplement the music rather than telling stories outright. “I just like songs that drop images here and there that color your interpretation of the music,” he says. “One of my models for that is Neil Young. I really like how he does that—songs like ‘Out on the Weekend…It’s images and emotions, and it plays out like a dream.”
With inspirations stemming from other ’60s folk acts like Young to classical composers and big band jazz groups, pigeonholing Yellowbirds is simply futile. Cohen notes that he was listening to Beethoven’s first symphony on his turntable before the interview and has an extensive collection of Beethoven on vinyl that he found in a shopping cart full of records. “I also really like Debussy,” he says. “His chord voicing is so abstract. It’s the same reason why I love Charles Mingus. It just kinda melts. The players and the composers really get beyond what seems possible.”
This summer, Yellowbirds finally unfurls its sonic tapestry, touring across the country in support of Songs from the Vanished Frontier. After serving as the musical director for a re-creation of The Band’s swansong, The Last Waltz, in San Francisco last November, as well as opening for Guster earlier in 2013, Cohen is ready to reconvene with his full band. He’s no longer a solo artist or part of a two-man band.
This month, they’re holding a residency at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall, performing with a different group of friends every Wednesday night, including Alecia Chakour, Jocie Adams & Arc Iris, The Philistines Jr. and Superhuman Happiness. Later, they head to the West Coast for the first time, with a multi-day stop outside Portland, Ore. for the Pickathon Indie Roots Music Festival.
Cohen looks forward to performing his songs in their most raw forms and connecting with audiences through both the new record and live shows. “I guess I’m hoping that they’ll have the experience I have when I listen to the music that I love,” he muses, “where it just makes your eyebrows go up and tingles go around your scalp and make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
“That’s when I’m feeling music the most, or anything really beautiful. A wave goes over your body and you know that life is glorious.”