Baba Yaga is a figure in Slavic folklore who can haunt your dreams, guard and protect you, or seduce you. If you’re Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga, she may be the figure haunting your dreams, pouring sand down your throat. So who better to name your band after?
Longtime collaborators and life partners Vera Farmiga and Renn Hawkey along with their friends, Jason Bowman, Mark Visconti, and Mike Davis joined together to form The Yagas — a shapeshifting, genre-bending quintet whose sound stretches from metal to rock, classical to Ukrainian folklore.
The Yagas have just dropped their debut album, Midnight Minuet on April 25 after releasing three very different and catchy singles. Recently, I sat down with Renn Hawkey, not only a founding band member, but also the producer of the album, to talk about recording painful and cathartic music at the beach, the difficulties of picking a band name, inspiration, and how sometimes it’s okay if your music may have a squeaky chair on the track.
So let’s start with the band name. Obviously you guys have inspiration from Baba Yaga. So why that symbolic figure? Is she like a muse? A mirror? A warning?
This is a question I always look to Vera to answer [for two reasons]. One, she chose the name and two she’s Ukrainian and Baba Yaga is a Slavic folklore.
I think if you ask everyone in the band what the meaning is you’re going to get a different answer. I’ll give you my version of it. First of all, finding a band name is fucking impossible. We literally went through so many names only to discover that every single one of them has four other bands that already exist. We arrived at the Yagas. I don’t want to tell Vera’s story but I think as a young girl her uncle would tell her these bedtime stories about Baba Yaga that tormented her. Vera has this recurring dream where this old woman whispers in her ear while sand is being poured down [Vera’s] throat. I think that she has always associated that woman kind of as this Baba Yaga. So when the name came up I thought that works really well. Baba Yaga is a shapeshifter and most people know her as someone who is frying and eating children in her hut that has chicken feet. If you have seen the artwork from the album, Vera drew that — she is one of those gifted and talented Jersey girls.
I do love that! That’s amazing.
[Baba Yaga] is also known to be a seductress or a guardian or a helper to lost souls in the woods. I think that there’s this shape shifting aspect of her character that appeals to me because I don’t think as a band we are one thing.
The band does feel like a shapeshifter. I know you guys have referenced your influences being like Nine Inch Nails to traditional Ukrainian music.Â
Were you guys thinking about a genre when you were writing or recording or was it all just organic, what came out?
No! It’s all just purely organic. There has just been no premeditation whatsoever. It’s funny that we arrived at a name that gives us permission to be shapeshifters and to blend genres. You can’t put us in a box. And some people will be like, “Then fuck you, this is not for me.” Then other people would be like “that’s cool.”
I think having produced it, I can tell you when I listen back to it, I can objectively listen to it and it makes sense to me. I do think objectively as a piece of art, it makes sense from start to finish. I say that only because what people have experienced of us thus far are three songs that are very different from one another.
You have “Crying Room” which is this nebulous song with no repeat parts that serves almost like a three-act structure where you have an intro, this heavy middle and then your outro. It never repeats so it’s a very unconventional song. It’s a strange song to present to the world [as a first single] where you’re like this is who we are. But, for some reason it really resonated with people. Then you jump to the next song, “She’s Walking Down” which is a throwback, thrashy, industrial post punk song. I don’t even know what you’d call this last single, “Life of a Widow.” It almost feels a little bit more like alt rock … it’s a strange tune.
You mentioned “The Crying Room,” I really love that song. It’s so intense and I know that it’s tied to personal grief and everything that was going on with Ukraine. Was it more cathartic or painful to create something so tied to grief but getting through it?
Oh, you would laugh if you could see us recording it. We recorded the vocals to that at the beach at like six in the morning over coffee on vacation. It couldn’t have been a more beautiful setting. It’s really funny because we wrote the music for it and we had a name and there were some lyrics but there was no melody and the song.
Jason, who is our drummer, is married to a woman named Acacia who is like the ghost Yaga. She’s not in the band but I always consider her as part of the band. She contributes lyrically and she’s an inspiration and a friend. They were on tour with the Rock Academy, which is a music school they own, and they were doing a tour in the Northeast. Acacia had some time off, they were somewhere in Massachusetts, and she went into a church and they had a room called the crying room. She texted Vera and she goes “I wonder what the fuck happens in here in this room.” She was going through some grieving of her own and again I don’t want to speak for her but dealing with some loss and I think Vera and her just kind of were able to sculpt this thing together that became the song, the verse, then when it came time for them, and this is where the funny part is, we tracked that, the verse, at the beach at like six in the morning.
Everyone is like trying to sleep in and Vera is singing her ass off in our little bedroom. I always travel with my laptop and my mic in case. You know, when you’re married to Vera Farmiga, when she’s ready to rock you’ve got to be ready. That’s how she works and when she’s inspired it’s not like we’ll do it later. So we didn’t have a chorus and she just let that out. She just started fucking screaming and crying and as she’s literally recording it. I started crying just listening to it.
As I said, it’s a three act structure. You have this intro where you’re talking about what the problem is. Then you’re facing the problem in the chorus and you’re just letting it out and you’re letting it rip and you’re screaming at the top of your lungs. Then the third act is what we do as people when we cry. We have this come down when we’re blubbering a little bit. When you come down from a big heavy cry. And that just informed the structure of the song and it couldn’t be another way. You couldn’t go back to that chorus. That would’ve been ridiculous. So what it made for was a very interesting dynamic song with this three act structure.
So you recorded at the beach. What’s the weirdest environment you’ve recorded in yet?
Oh gosh. We record a lot of our vocals in the basement of our apartment. But where’s the weirdest? We’ve tried the attic. We did that song “I Am.” That’s another one of these things when she’s like turn the mic on and she just fucking did that and I was like what the fuck was that? That happened in the attic. But most of it happens at home when the kids are in the kitchen like “Where’s my breakfast?” Or Vera is like sitting on a chair that’s got like a squeaky bearing on it and you can hear it in the recording. There’s a song called “Pendulum.” Vera often will give me, although she’s open to it and gives tons of options, she likes to do things in one pass. So if there’s imperfection, it’s my job to deal with it, not hers. She doesn’t want to go back because, to her, it’s a performance.
As a producer on the album, what was it like actually producing your wife’s voice in this emotionally charged music. Was there any moment that surprised you? You’ve been together a long time now, what was that like for you?
She and I do a lot of things together from raising babies to making a film together. I produced [the film titled Higher Ground] and did the music for while she directed and starred in while she was pregnant. We love doing these big pile-ons like let’s take on huge responsibilities together. We have other projects in development and so for us to decide to make a record is not a strange choice for a couple like us. I don’t even know what she and I are going to do next year. We might decide to build a plane or something together; I have no idea. I think we like the challenge of working together.
We love spending time together. We ignite one another. We’re both fire signs. I think that there’s no challenge that is too great for either of us. We see the other one working on something, there’s always that feeling of “How can I help? How can I alleviate the stress of this? Can I contribute?” So when it came to recording vocals, it was interesting because she had never done it before. I also had never produced before. I had done demo stuff with Deadsy, but this was my first stab at producing a record. She had never sung before. We just started this two years ago. There was some on the job training for both of us, but like I said, I got accustomed to it. When she’s inspired to try I have to be ready to go so I have my little to go recording kit. We tried going into the studio and hated it. She likes trying things in the living room or the kitchen or the attic where she feels inspired to do so.
That brings me to what’s next? Are there plans with her background to do something like an immersive show or film to go with the album?Â
Have you seen the videos? The dream was to do a video for every song, it’s just I have to stop the bleeding at some point. We have no label, no money, no bank, nothing. We have ourselves. We pay out of pocket to do all these things to make the videos and make the recordings. I produced it because we didn’t have the money for a producer. We went into the studio to record where we did because our friend owned a studio and gave us a good deal. We wanted to be able to find a way to do a video for every song and I thought it would be really cool but we’re not Beyonce. We have concepts for every song too and that sucks.
It really helps you put yourself in the song and that’s amazing. Speaking of visuals. I’m just trying to imagine live visuals, what are we going with? Is it going to be like an opera? A horror movie? A punk rock basement séance? What vibe are you going with since the album really captures everything.
We’ve played a couple of times but there have been limited resources, time, the lightning show was great and we had our fog and our smoke. We had planned on some projections only to discover that, I thought their projector was in the back of the stage but no, they had a projector that came down in front of the stage. Vera had designed all these projections that were going to be behind us for each song, but we weren’t able to execute it. The next show that we did was the Bowery Ballroom with six other bands and there just wasn’t enough time. It was like a 10-minute changeover. If we had all the money in the world and a large stage to execute, I would imagine there being some, I’m a big fan of fog and just kind of atmospheric lighting. I imagine it being very dark and surprising. I mean it’s not like Lady Gaga.
Two last questions I always ask — what is the weirdest question you have been asked in an interview so I can pay that forward.
I think the question you just asked me! What’s the weirdest question? In this incarnation? In this band?
It can be further back if need be. Â
Somebody thought I was somebody else. A long time ago someone, and I still to this day have no idea who they thought I was when they were interviewing. They were asking me ‘How’s Kiedis?’ They’re like Anthony Kiedis. Last I saw you was in Argentina. It was really embarrassing and weird but I never got to the bottom of who they thought that I was and I just kind of brushed past it. I guess that would be it!
That’s a good one.
I don’t know Anthony Kiedis and I’ve never been to Argentina.
The last person I asked didn’t have a really crazy one. They said that the weirdest question they had been asked was what color is the new album if they had to define it as one so what color is the album?
There’s a beautiful green that I just discovered. Can I look it up? It’s a new color! I’ve gotta find it. I have to dig for it. It was this Victorian green with a cool name. It was almost like an absinthe but it was more beautiful than that. I am going to find it and I’m going to text you. I greatly appreciate your time today and I can’t wait to get this out to our readers! I’m so excited. I have to find this color! It’s killing me! Thank you so much for your time!
[Editor’s Note: This text came to our writer after the interview]: Smaragdine green!
