Jonah Yano: Jonah Yano & the Heavy Loop album track-by-track
Noise experimentation and free sound join Yano’s already plentiful flavour palate
Jonah Yano’s compositions are warm, soulful and hazily impressionistic, but he prefers to resist easy genre categorisation, flitting instead between jazz and folk traditions, r&b and hip-hop, rock, ambient and electronic.
On portrait of a dog — the 2023 album he made with frequent collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD – the Japanese-Canadian musician weaved his lilting, wistful voice into a harvest-hued mosaic of heartbreak and family memory, for which he recorded hours of conversations and digitised thousands of old photographs to wrestle with his grandfather’s encroaching dementia.
On Jonah Yano & the Heavy Loop, Yano has once again upended his musical direction, crafting an experimental, chimerical album with the live ensemble-turned-studio band (Christopher Edmonson, Benjamin Maclean, Leighton Harrell, Felix Fox-Pappas, and Raiden Louie) that he’s been painstakingly scouting for the last three years.
It’s an album of two halves, he says, with the closing track a 30 minute improvisation called ‘The Heavy Loop’, leaning into noise music and free sound and constituting the “raw materials” of the album’s freewheeling soundscapes.
Devotion
I think one of my weak points as a songwriter is writing love songs. It’s not something that comes naturally to me at all. So when I was writing the album and this song appeared out of thin air I was so happy and surprised because usually whenever I try to write about love it turns into a corny mess of admissions and ordinary sentiments. The song is about devotion, but it’s also about the sort of delusion it takes to be devoted – is it something we’re born wanting to do? Or is it something we learn and expect of ourselves? I’m still not sure the answer, but I think writing this song brought me closer to it.
Concentrate
This song was sort of like the starting gun of the songs that make up this album. It was the first whole song I wrote with my bandmates Chris and Raiden. I had been starting to think about recording the entire next album with my band at this point (February 2022 I think?) and when we made the demo for this song, it galvanized that idea into something very realistic. It’s got that beginners luck magic to me – we weren’t thinking too hard about making a song to be recorded, just having some beers in the dead of winter and jamming because there was nothing else to do.
No Petty Magic feat. (Helena Deland, Ouri)
I met Helena at a mutual friend’s birthday party a few years back – I had honestly already been a fan of her music for a couple years at that point. Actually now that I think about it, we wrote this song the very first time we hung out one on one. The way Helena writes lyrics is so astonishing to me – the way she uses language in her writing is akin to something like alchemy to me. She turns an ordinary word into an entire image and an entire image into a swift turn of phrase. We are also so lucky that Helena’s frequent collaborator/our friend Ouri was down to do some cello and harp for this song. She is a musical force herself, and I feel like her contributions to this song are essential. Helena and Ouri have a project together called “Hildegard” which I love so so much, and I am so excited for their new record.
Romance ESL
This song was a bit of a change for me. I think it has an energy to it that isn’t really found elsewhere in my music. It’s so loud and in your face – two things I definitely don’t relate to all that often. When I was writing the lyrics I was thinking about how interesting it is that so much of romance takes place in people’s second language. Especially here in Canada where so many different languages are spoken. There’s not much more to it than that, I think the energy of the song sort of speaks for itself.
Snowpath
This song is so special to me because before we recorded this song, I thought my album was already done. Clairo and I went to the studio where I recorded the rest of the album just for fun after the album sessions. However, the studio (Port William Sound) is such a beautiful and inspiring place that it’s hard to not want to write music while you’re there. And that’s exactly what we did! The song is sort of like a time capsule of that weekend at the studio. Snow everywhere, a sauna, clementines, hanging in the studio with the studio owners Jonas and Caylie.
The Language of Coincidence
I think that coincidences are a language and that if you listen closely, you can hear what they’re trying to tell you. It’s a thought that I wrote in a letter to my friends on their wedding day and it came back to me when I was in Japan last year. All these small coincidences started piling up and I wondered to myself what it all meant. That’s what this song is all about.
Someone Asked Me How I’ve Been
This song was born out of a studio jam with the band. We were recording other songs for the album and this one sort of just appeared out of thin air. I also wrote this one right after being in Japan with the coincidences which is why I mention my passport in the song. I think I was honestly going through it when I wrote this one because the idea of the song is just telling someone you’re okay when they ask, even though you are very much not okay. I think Chris’ saxophone solo at the end really illustrates that feeling almost perfectly.
The Heavy Loop
I think this album is two halves. The first seven songs being one half and this 30 minute improvisation the other. It’s nice to be able to show the final product of improvisation (the first seven songs) as well as the jamming itself (this song) on a record because you get to see behind the curtain in a way. I think the dynamic we have as a band is so special that I dedicated this entire 30 minutes to showcasing it. It’s what we sound like when we’re together and just jamming without much thought, which is my favourite part of making music.
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