The Postmarks write Memoirs when they’ve only just begun

By Jenna Humphrey
Published: August 25th, 2009 | 12:00am

Consider the tender drizzle of a Sunday or a cat’s tail curled down past the windowsill, and you begin to approach the sentiment of the Postmarks. Horns, strings, guitar, harpsichord, and keyboard coalesce into loungey chamber-pop arrangements perfect for a late morning of mixing watercolors, or at the very least pressing batter into a waffle griddle.

As songstress Tim Yehezkely tells it, the formation of the Postmarks’ newest album, Memoirs At the End Of the World (Unfiltered), happened partially up a tree. “A friend of our family has a tree house in North Miami. It’s literally a house in a big, gigantic tree. There’s a bathroom, a shower, a kitchen, a bedroom. It’s all very clear — the ceilings are clear — and it’s on the lake. I was in school, and I was studying a lot, and I needed to be surrounded by something that felt like somewhere else. So I went there for a couple days.”

Yehezkely has perhaps always been the girl in the tree house, picking up instruments on her own. “I don’t like learning formally. There’s more creativity when you pick up an instrument you’ve never touched. You play with new sounds.”

She avoided structured learning growing up, instead following the curve of opportunity. “In elementary school, they start you in band and chorus. I was playing clarinet, oboe, and flute. I really loved being in a band. At a certain point when I was learning the oboe, I thought, ‘Oh, it would be cool to be in an orchestra. Chopin is sexy,’” she remembers. But it seemed that there were never enough instruments to satisfy Yehezkely’s musical appetite. “I had always wanted to learn piano, and my parents finally got one, so I learned piano. Someone gave me an accordion, so I started learning accordion. I had a few guitar lessons when I was 13.”

After a chance meeting at an open mic night in Palm Beach, Yehezkely formed the Postmarks with composer, arranger, and producer Chris Moll and Jonathan Wilkins, who was scoring independent films at the time.

Of finding her songwriting voice, Yehezkely explains, “Chris said, ‘You don't have to write; you can just sing.’ And I said, ‘I want it to be me if I'm going to sing it.’ I would feel like a puppet if I hadn’t written the songs. So that's how it ended up working out.”

Being more of an organic creator, Yehezkely had to motivate herself with Memoirs, the Postmarks’ follow-up to their 2007 self-titled debut. “For the new album, more so than before, there were deadlines. It had to be a little, ‘treat it like a project.’ You sit down and do it. You have to glean from what you did rather than sitting in a purely inspired state.”

But where that diffused, non-expecting state wasn’t a possibility for Memoirs, the advantage of experience presented itself.

“With your first album, you have as long as you want. It could have taken all your life. And then they want another one in six months or a year. Are you going to push yourself? Or do you say, ‘No, I'm going to let it develop naturally’? But in a way, you learn the process — so it does become faster.”

Rather than restricting her, though, this pressure pushed Yehezkely deeper into the subconscious. “This album was more imaginary,” she says. “Our first was more personal. I think songs are inevitably from personal experience, but this time, not consciously.”

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