The Yagas are a unique new band out of New York that combines industrial, goth, and rock into a strong new sound. Fronted by Emmy and Oscar nominated actress Vera Farmiga, the band has just released its debut record Midnight Minuet and keyboardist Renn Hawkey took some time to talk about it.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Renn Hawkey interview –
On how The Yagas formed – Okay, so I was in a kind of transition mode at the time. I wasn’t like, “Hey, I’m gonna go start a new band”. It started in the parking lot of a kid’s music school, to be honest with you, called the Woodstock Rock Academy, which is owned by Jason Bowman, our drummer and his wife, Acacia Ludwig. You spend enough time in the parking lot and your kids are inside for three hours, having a time of their lives, chasing each other around with dull and sometimes sharp objects and writing on the walls and like just having the time of their lives. You’re thinking to yourself, “Why didn’t I have this as a kid?” Then you start to meet some of the other parents in the parking lot and then you realize they have an adult program and then someone has a spoof, signs you up for it and you, and you take the challenge, and you sign up and your wife says, “I’ll do it too”.
Vera (Farmiga) and I have been together 21 years. I kind of kept the Deadsy thing away from her a little bit, because we were transitioning into a different part of our lives. I was getting into real estate stuff and trying to start a family. I don’t think that it was until she was assigned “Duality” by Slipknot in Adult Rock Academy program where she really discovered her love of live music. Although she had been on tour a couple times with me and she’d seen obviously a ton of Deftones shows and Korn shows just from those tours. I think experiencing what it’s like to just open your mouth and let it out, I think just woke up something in her.
It got to be too difficult making the last record with Deadsy. I’m in New York, all those guys are in California and just Covid. It wasn’t, wasn’t going in the fashion and the timeline that I would’ve preferred. So, Jason and who’s the drummer and owner of Rock Academy, said, “You wanna write a song?” I said, “sure”. I think through natural selection, water finds the lowest point, we all kind of found each other. Mike Davis, our bass player and Mark Visconti, our guitar player, and the first song we wrote was called “I Am”. Look, I’ve played with a lot of people over the years and it doesn’t always work. Actually, most of the time it doesn’t. Sometimes it does, it doesn’t click. Most of the times it hasn’t clicked for me. I’m not a jam guy. I don’t do well playing other people’s music. That’s just the kind of musician that I am. This time it just worked. That was the first song that we wrote, and it happened very quickly.
It happened in our living room. I was on piano, Mark was on the guitar. Vera was shy, kind of hiding in the hallway, like, “What’s going on in there?” I just grabbed a mic and I said, “Get in here. Let’s, let’s see what you got. Let’s just see what you’re thinking.” I think it was terrifying for her. She’d never done this before. Not like this. I don’t know. I just thought that the song structure was unique. I thought it was dynamic, thought there was some good tones coming out of it. I thought, this is worth nurturing. There was no intention other than to just like, get together and just play.
It wasn’t like we’re gonna go make a concept record or come up with a new genre of music. It was like Weekend warrior stuff. But then the songs just started to fall out of us pretty quickly. In fact, there’s a catalog now of 25 more, more songs that we want to go and record. We work quickly and we work well together. So, I don’t even remember what the question was, oh, the origin story? It really became like we would seize three hours a weekend to just get together, write, I would travel with my laptop and my mics, sort of demoing songs. We went into the studio and with the intention of recording six songs. We booked two days and by the end of the two days we had done 13. We just banged them out.
On the origin of the name The Yagas – It’s funny because it took us a long time to find a name. We had great ideas for names, but they’re all taken10 times over. It’s wild. We had some cool names. I don’t remember all of them, but Vera being of Ukrainian heritage, there’s the Slavic Folkloric story of Baba Yaga who is this shape shifting old lady, I guess one could refer to her as a witch. Sometimes I think she appears as like a helper. Sometimes she is a seductress. Sometimes she fries and eats children. I think that the look, this is all kind of looking back on it, the collection of songs, it’s like a 10 headed baby each having a different personality. But I think that it all kind of belongs to the same body and it makes sense. For me, what the name gives permission to explore different aspects, and to really kind of genre blend and bend at will. But the origin is Vera. She came up with the name
On the vision for The Yagas sound – Everybody has their own background and influence of inspiration and geographically as well. Everyone was kind of scattered where they came from, how we all ended up at Woodstock largely had to do with Covid. Some of us have been in the area for a while, but trying to find respite outside of New York City.
Mike is from Texas, but he’s an insane jazz musician. He did 20 years doing jazz gigs and producing in the city. He also has his masters in the tabla. He plays the accordion, he plays a six-string bass. He’s a monster. But he loves Bauhaus. He loves the Cure. He comes from that, Joy Division stuff as well. Even though he can play like a motherfucker. He knows when to be when to hold back. I come from more of like a new wave background, but I’ve always loved that marriage of the heaviness of like a Type O Negative with melody. You can hear a lot of that in Deadsy as well. To me that just made a lot of sense. It seemed to be surprisingly absent in a lot of music, still to this day. The application of keyboards in music is a delicate one. I don’t know, I don’t hear a lot of overwrought, big analog. I’m a huge Cure fan. As much as I love The Beatles or Black Sabbath, I gotta say The Cure was number one for me growing up.
Mark and Jason, they come from a different headspace. Jason I think is a huge Judas Priest fan, as is Mark, but I think Mark’s favorite band is probably Tool, A Perfect Circle. So how that all mixes together in this cauldron to make these songs. There was never an intention of like, “We’re gonna make a song that sounds like this”. It was just always every song started with someone having an idea and then everyone would just kind of violin and add to it and pepper it and throw their salt in.
On the band’s lyrics – I would I think Vera would not refer to herself as a singer. I think she would say that she was a storyteller. That’s what she brings to this. She’s also just like, I don’t know, everything she touches she just does to the best of her ability, and it’s a remarkable thing. It’s inspiring to be married to somebody like that and have a partner. We’ve produced film together. We have rebuilt and built new houses together, and now this, and of course, raising children. The most complicated of all right? We do all these things really well together, but Vera had never done this before, like I said.
She has a good writing partner in Jason’s wife, Acacia. They have a great partnership, a great friendship, and a lot of it, again, like the song, “The Crying Room”, that’s a song that was Mark and I had been working on. You would never hear it, but the inspiration instrumentally for that song started with an Ozzy Osborne song. Mark was in the car and one of his long drives and he heard a song and showed up and it obviously, these things always morph. I’m sure you write music, you know how like a start off point like is, becomes unrecognizable. It just keeps going. We had just been working on this instrumental track where there was no repeat parts. It just kept going and going and going. Vera had gotten a text from Acacia. She was on tour with the Rock Academy. They go on tour, the higher level of like in the schools, it’s called Show Band. And they go on tour in the summers with the kids. They were in Massachusetts I think, and Acacia went into a church, and she texted and she said, “I couldn’t believe where I am. I’m in some church and there’s a room here it’s called The Crying Room”. I don’t really know how it just kind of unfolded. But immediately Vera was like, “Oh, that song they’re playing in the other room, this is perfect. This is it”. I wish Vera was here to speak to that. She’s in Hungary right now making a movie. She’s never done this before. She’s never put pen to paper and done this. I’m sure she’s done creative writing in the past, but yeah, this was a new thing for her.
On if they have received any backlash to having an actor front the band – Well, I’m still kind of processing it to be honest with you, because we pressed record a year ago. We only had been a band for like six months and we recorded, and so I wouldn’t expect people to just give us a pass and expect that it should be considered amongst all these other great bands and songs that have been around and doing their thing. We’ve had to work for it. We’ve had to earn it. I don’t think that it’s necessarily because she’s an actor. I think it’s just because it’s so new and it’s very different sounding. We have no record label, we have no infrastructure. Everything’s out of pocket. These videos that we make I produced it because we don’t have the resources. We really don’t have any sort of a machine. So. I don’t, I think that people wanted to make sure that this was a real thing at first, before automatically just like, “Let me review this one song that this band had put out”. So it’s taken a second to bring people to the table.
But I think we’ve, I think everybody’s there now and I think I’m still learning to talk about this whole thing. It’s all very fresh record, came out 10 hours ago. I do think that we haven’t had an exceptionally hard time. No. I think that what we’re doing is so raw and authentic that it doesn’t seem like it could just dismiss it by the fact that we put a full record out. It’s not just in her off time, because there was actor strikes that you decided to record song or two.
On if there are plans to play live – We’ve played a couple of shows so far. I love to play live and I also hate it, the stress of it. It’s a lot. It’s a lot. I love my bed. I love my kids. I love my family. I’m sure all my band mates feel the same way, but I mean, if those opportunities present themselves to play you one-off shows/ We missed the window on the festival circuit this year, but yeah I want to get on some of that. Yeah. There’s been a lot of invitations to play one-off shows, whether it’s in Turkey or Athens or Australia, Scotland, Ukraine, it’s hard to, we don’t have a booking agent.
It’s hard to just say, “Yeah, sure. We’ll fly over just for, for one show. Yeah”. It’s not doable. So to answer the question, there’s nothing quite like playing your music for an audience and them loving it. It’s also fun to like convert people too. I’ve played in front of other bands, and other audiences of other bands where you have to earn their respect. That’s kind of a young man’s game too, but it’s a fun challenge. But we have a lot of fans who are kind of scattered all over the world. It would be great to figure out how to do it. Right now, the best way for us to do it is to make visual content with videos and so on and so forth. We have a few other things planned. That’s the easiest way for us to share the project with everybody, but yeah, hopefully, hopefully soon.
