Yarn Puts a Brooklyn Spin On the Alt-Country Sound

“I’ve been waiting so long for you to comfort me, but this boy has moved on,” sings Blake Christiana , bittersweetly, about his home town in Schenectady from his band Yarn’sthird album, Come on In. He tells Brooklyn Roads that he left there about 10 years ago to find “a place where I could get excited [about music] again and make it happen.” That place he moved on to turned out to be New York City or, more specifically, Brooklyn.

He chose our borough initially because “a friend had couch in Bay Ridge…where I could stay for free,” but quickly decided that, “It’s a great place to live…I’ve never lived anywhere else since.” In fact he currently resides “in walking distance” from Jalopy, Red Hook’s iconic music venue where he sat for this interview with us.

Shortly after he put down roots here, Blake began interning for a recording studio where he watched in frustration as performers seemingly squandered time and “probably a thousand dollars a day” by showing up “with absolutely nothing prepared, nothing written. I’d be setting up mikes and beat machine and I thought, ‘Man, give me a chance.’” His chance came while working at another studio where he did get the chance to record, which ultimately led to his first band, Blake and the Family Dog.

Flash forward to the winter of 2006-07 when Blake says he wrote a lot of songs while touring upstate, and then “came back down to Brooklyn and wrote a whole lot more.” As he wrote, he concluded that, “These songs weren’t going to work with the band I had.” Or to put it in the country vernacular, that Dog wouldn’t hunt.

By this time he and fellow Family Dog guitarist Trevor MacArthur had “started playing with a mandolin player Andrew Hendrix and all he wanted to do at the time was wail on his electric mandolin and I said, ‘Man you just got to pick up your acoustic again and play some of these tunes with me.’” The idea was, Blake tells Brooklyn Roads, “to make some great acoustic country-ish record. Not country not like Toby Keith, but more like Jerry Garcia, the Band and the Flying Burrito Brothers.” The Burritos’ Gram Parsons was an especially strong influence. “I spent a month bingeing on his two solo records.”

In early 2007, the trio plus what Blake calls “a rotating rhythm section” debuted at Kenny’s Castaways in Greenwich Village as Yarn. It was Andrew who came up with name. “He had a dream…saw the name Yarn on the marquee at the Beacon Theater. He mentioned it to me and I said, ‘cool.’” What was cool about it, Blake says, was that it is short and has a double meaning that alludes to “what we’re doing — telling stories, picking strings.”

With the addition of Rod Hohl on electric guitar, Rick Bugel on bass, and Jay Frederick (since replaced by Robert Bonhomme) on drums, they recorded their self-titled first album (and the follow up, Empty Pockets) at Excello Studios in Williamsburg. “I love that space. The atmosphere is good and the live room is amazing.” Among other gems, those early session spawned “No Future Together,” which won the Independent Music Award for Best Alt Country Song in 2007.

Blake likens the migration of musical artists to Brooklyn over the last 10 years to “Simon and Garfunkel moving to the Village in the ‘60s.” While he is concerned that rising costs may be making the borough tougher for aspiring artists, he sees a positive side to this struggle. “No question this city is not an easy place to survive in…let alone thrive, which makes it easy to write a sad song,” he tells Brooklyn Roads. ”You’ve got problems here that you wouldn’t have elsewhere. Not to diss the city, it’s been a great muse but I’ve written a lot of songs talking about Brooklyn.”

There is a reason he has stayed on here, however. “The beauty of Brooklyn is that it is a melting pot,” says Blake, which makes it all the more puzzling to him that “the media is so shocked” by the concept of a country band originating from Brooklyn. “We’re in New York where you can hear everything—country, Indian, Asian. You can see whatever you want and go partying with the dirtiest of rednecks.”

Regarding his favorite Brooklyn venues, he says, “I love the vibe of this place” (Jalopy) and fondly recalls a gig at Southpaw: “That’s a good room…we made some dough and had some fun.” He adds that, “Earlier on in Yarn’s days we would play Pete’s Candy Story. That’s like a miniature version of Jalopy. Cool little stage.”

Among his favorite fellow Brooklyn performers, “I’ve always loved the Doc Marshalls. I believe they have since moved to Nashville but they are back here on a regular basis. We’ve got some friends in Ollabelle. Tony Leone lives over in Williamsburg and I think Byron [Isaacs] lives somewhere in Brooklyn as well [as does Fiona McBain]. Those guys are great.”

His dream gig, however, would be to play with Willie Nelson. “I’ve got to get some time in with Willie before it’s too late,” Blake tells us. That’s not so far fetched when you consider that Nelson has played Brooklyn several times and “He’s not afraid to collaborate with young people. Bring it on, Willie!”

What’s next for Yarn? “We just wrapped up mixing Leftovers Volume 2   , which will be out this fall, and we’re finishing our new album, which will be more electric. If all goes according to plan, we will follow up in six months with a more acoustic, singer-songwriter album.” And of course, there’s a lot of touring, during which Blake Christiana and Yarn will be doing plenty of “telling stories, picking strings.”