On the afternoon before Yo La Tengo play a packed First Avenue show, frontman and guitarist Ira Kaplan saunters into the Depot Tavern. At the back of the empty restaurant, he removes a winter hat, and settles into a wooden booth across from me.

Kaplan carries himself with quiet confidence. His band — featuring his wife Georgia Hubley mainly on drums and longtime collaborator James McNew frequently on bass — released their 16th full-length studio album, This Stupid World, in February. Like all of the New Jersey-based indie rock band’s albums, it’s good. It has moments that aren’t like any of their previous albums, along with indulgent helpings of comforting distortion and feedback. (The night’s set would celebrate many of This Stupid World’s witty, tender, and ferocious choices among 23 songs, some varied covers, and guest appearances by Low’s Alan Sparhawk and NNB’s Mark Freeman.)

As we talk, it’s apparent that Kaplan cares immensely about the job that he has gotten to do for the past four decades. His approach to creating and archiving Yo La Tengo’s setlists is admirably meticulous. He’s not too cool to praise his heroes, like NRBQ, the Feelies, Robyn Hitchcock, and Television. Artificial intelligence? Not so much.

Interview Transcript

I’m gonna ask you a little bit about setlists, because I've noticed you'll mention [in interviews that] you keep track of all of them. If you indulge me a little bit, how do you do it? And why do you keep track of your setlists?

Ira Kaplan: It just speaks to my own interest in that stuff. Literally, when I was whiling away the time in high school that I was bored in class, I would just be doodling the Kinks setlists that I would like to see in my notebooks that were not filled with what the teacher was saying. As a Grateful Dead fan, especially in high school, that was something that was really intriguing to me. I've always been interested in how sets change and interested when they don't. The Feelies, one of my favorite bands, went years doing the exact same set. I think of it as close as I'm ever going to come to going to church. They're just doing the service and it was beautiful. Now it's much more freewheeling. But from the beginning, it became something I knew, and we knew we wanted to do was always play different songs. And so I like to take notes.

Do you have a big stack of notebooks?

Not anymore. It used to be. It may have been handwritten, at first. It was certainly typewritten for a long time. And then I transferred it all to a computer. So now it's just a big computer database.

Oh, that's handy, though. Because then you can easily check what happened last time you were in a place.

And I do. To a preposterous degree, we act as if, like us, everybody in the audience has seen every one of our shows. And everyone who will be here tonight will have seen every one of our shows at First Avenue, and even the 7th Street Entry. For the most part, whatever songs, a lot of the songs that we did five years ago the last time we were here, if we do them tonight, again — I’m sort of laughing about the word "again" — it will not be because we didn't know. It'll be we decided to repeat ourselves from five years ago.

I don't know if you've played around with ChatGPT much yet.

With what?

The AI program.

Couldn't be less interested.

I asked it, "Tell me what Yo La Tengo should play in Minneapolis tonight." I won't bore you with all of the details. It did a decent job. It obviously just scoured lots of available data to do that. But it chose probably what would it be if we went to Spotify, what would be the most popular songs...

See, then they're wrong already.

Exactly. They didn't include an encore. And so I was like, "All right, well, you need an encore." So they did that. And I was like, “But you're not including any songs that they played right now promoting their new album.” And there's no covers. [Learn more about that here: We asked AI to write a Yo La Tengo setlist]

Well, I'm happy we can defy the bot for now. Our time is dwindling when we'll be able to do that.

I do think it's interesting, because it is an exercise to just say in life: Are we phoning it in with what we create? Versus: Are we really being organic? And I don't know if it has much use beyond that yet. But that's really cool. I do like that there's just an interest in keeping people guessing with what you put into a set in a given night. Is there a ritual to actually doing it as you set up for a show?

Well, it's changed a little bit. Especially when we're doing the Hanukkah shows, when there's just so much that goes into every single night, it became very helpful. Helpful for all of us, but especially for the crew to know what we're doing on a given night because of the different people who are sitting in. We need one drum set setup or two drum sets. And so we've gotten into the habit of letting them know the night before. In fact, I think this year at Hanukkah, I managed to write all eight setlists before we started, and then with the freedom to tweak it if we needed it because over Hanukkah, we do eight nights without repeating a single song. So everyone seemed to enjoy knowing, so now I've been trying. It used to be just sitting in the dressing room before we go on, write it down. And now it's not like that. And so especially in on the first leg of this trip, where we were on the West Coast — mostly we did multiple nights in the same venue. So I would always come up with both nights to divide things up. And then it just became a little easier to do it that way. So like tonight's list was written in advance of the Chicago show. Chicago, Milwaukee, and tonight were all on one PDF.

I can't help but be interested in it.

This is a fascinating conversation. Yeah, I do really enjoy talking about the process.

If you've poked around on setlist.fm, it's like Baseball-Reference.com for bands. You could go deep into the data of whoever you want, as much as you want.

I love looking up NRBQ setlists. Even like the bands that almost don't change, looking at the minute changes from show to show, and a lot of bands who are trying to ultimately settle on a set they're going to do every night, but the beginning of the tour, the removing, flip-flopping four and five. That stuff interests me tremendously.

Yeah. Sometimes when there's special guests, and there's covers. Just that type of stuff, you can drill into that.

I like when they get it wrong, too. I'm very fond of the mistakes, and a lot of times, the cover songs are, to me, misattributed. That might be who did it originally. But really, the version being covered is not the original. I mean, in our case we've taken to doing "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" a couple of times; it's showing up on setlist.fm as a traditional cover of a traditional song. We're covering the Grateful Dead. We're not covering Woody Guthrie.

Would you ever go as far as to actually go in and tweak it?

Never. Absolutely not. I would only add more mistakes.

Something I was thinking about on [This Stupid World], was having ['‘Brain Capers” as] a locked groove track [which causes the end of the song to play infinitely] as part of it. It's like a little reward for people to actually pick up the vinyl and pay attention. I did a little digging just into the history of that in itself. And obviously, there's like, a lot more of it than I thought. [Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band] and [The Who Sell Out] are the easy ones to find, but it's around out there a lot. Did you stumble upon it in your collection?

You know, I don't remember where I first came upon it. One of our favorites is [tour manager Joe Puleo], who you just met. I think it was his radio show. And when he was in college, he was playing, I think it was "Little Doll" by the Stooges. And the record was skipping, and it skipped perfectly in time. And he just let it go for like 20 minutes. And he has a recording of it, which we've heard. It just sounds remarkable. I think it's a "Little Doll," but it's definitely a Stooges song. And then [New Jersey public radio station] WFMU one year, I think, as a premium did an entire album of locked grooves. So it's, you know, almost unbearable. You keep getting up.

But was there any thought here? Like, this is the one that needs a locked groove?

Oh, specifically. Yeah. And it became one of the challenges of sequencing the record was we knew that we — it was when we were listening to it, while we were working on it — we thought it would lend itself to that. So that became, we didn't want it to be the last song on the record. So you know, that was just one of the puzzle pieces that needed to be fit together, was to make sure we could get that song at the end of a side.

Robyn Hitchcock just turned 70 recently. I've read his point of view on getting to know you and you working in [New Jersey music venue] Maxwell’s and doing sound for shows and writing about him. And then a friendship forming and then [decades later] you all like, playing together a significant amount. Just seeing that evolution is pretty interesting and unlikely in many ways, because life doesn't always put people back together even after they connect.

That's for sure. We've been doing this a long time, a lot of unusual things could have happened, you know, and that's one of them. I really did not see that coming when listening to Underwater Moonlight thinking, "This could be the greatest record I've ever heard."

Oftentimes, what can happen is people can hear appreciation, someone who enjoys their music, and say thank you. But to grow from there to where it's actually more like a partnership and a chance to exchange creative ideas, it's interesting to me.

I don't know if he's mentioned, but I used to be the soundman of Maxwell's. And I was really dreadful at that job. And I knew what I liked to listen to, but I was really unprofessionally disinterested in learning anything about how to do it. And I apologized to most everyone I ever did sound for. And Robyn actually asked me to do sound for him somewhere else, which seemed flattering and bizarre. When he was doing solo shows, he would do these remarkable sound checks where he would just play songs that he wasn't necessarily going to play that night, including playing "A Day In the Life" on the acoustic guitar. Just the things that he could do and the breadth and the openness to doing different things. I know that had an impact. I think the first time we ever played, he invited me to come onstage and play with him at Maxwell's. I think for like one song, but he just kept calling more songs. I'm like, "I don't know how these songs go." He's like, "Don't worry about it." And even if it's never been explicitly remembered that that night worked somehow, I do think there is that awareness that all three of us [in Yo La Tengo] have that there are many worse things in performance than a mistake and doing something that you didn't mean to do. It can go a lot worse than that. And so just to sort of put yourself in a position where it might be good or it might not be.

I love the expression [you use when playing covers sets], "murdering the classics." It's perfect because there's reverence in there. You have to really be passionate to want to murder anything. But also, if covers are played too true, they aren't interesting.

You don't have to worry about that.

You've also obviously put out enough material that other people have connected to and they've put their spin on it. How does it feel to be in the listener’s shoes for that?

It's fantastic, it's great. You do know that "murdering the classics," that's a borrowed phrase?

I don't know its direct origin. What is it?

Spike Jones and His City Slickers. I first came upon them because my parents used to sing on car rides their song, "Der Fuehrer’s Face." And so it was a kind of comedy band from my parents' generation. And one of their albums was called Spike Jones Is Murdering the Classics. So that was our tip of the hat.

That makes sense.

Those shows are really fun to do, in a certain sense. Fun's kind of the wrong word. But listening back to them is not fun. Oh, and so when we've tried to compile those records, we've tried to enlist other people to sift through them and make suggestions. And frequently, we have to reject their suggestions, because they picked the ones we played too well. Thank you for picking the less messed-up version. But we're sort of after something a little more chaotic.

One other thing I wanted to ask you about: We lost Television’s Tom Verlaine earlier this year. And I mean, that was a punch in the gut to me. Just seeing that you've spoken about the influence and the quality of the records, and I just was curious to hear your thoughts.

Punched in the gut. That's good. The memories of seeing Television are indelible, I would say, even greater than the memories of the records. I mean, just to be at those shows, and just seeing the magnificence of that band at that moment. I mean, the reunion stuff was great, too. I never got to see them when Richard Hell was in the group, but I did see him before the albums came out, and it really was just jaw-dropping how great they were, how great he was. I remember seeing when Patti Smith made her return to the stage and he was sitting in a chair just playing along. I mean, just any opportunity to hear him play. It was time well spent.

Was that a person you met ever?

A little bit. We didn't know him very well. We are shy, and he was shyer. But a few encounters.

I worked in a record store for a little while, and that was my introduction. It's just somebody threw it on. It's just kind of my favorite way to hear something is to have no expectations whatsoever, and just have it interrupt whatever you're thinking about and have it be amazing.

Yeah, for me, it was different because the Village Voice, like James Walcott, was writing about what was happening at [New York punk club] CBGB's. So I kind of knew that Patti Smith and Television, this is something I am going to want to check out. So I kind of had some expectations when I went in, but they were met and exceeded.

Yo La Tengo’s This Stupid World is out now.