Yoni Wolf on WHY?'s least hip-hop album, Eskimo Snow

By Emily Savage
Published: September 26th, 2009 | 5:00pm

Yoni Wolf is hanging out at his parent’s house in Maineville, Ohio, a leafy suburb of Cincinnati. He’s been helping his brother, Josiah Wolf, mix some music for his upcoming solo album, checking his email every six minutes or so, and catching up on the first season of 30 Rock.

“I just kept hearing how sweet it is out here, how happening, and I wanted to go where it was happening,” Wolf wryly jokes.

Wolf is, in fact, rebooting. He’s taking a bit of a break from his hectic life as vocalist-keyboardist of Oakland-based experimental group WHY? before the impending shit-storm of publicity and a year-long world tour in support of the band’s fourth full-length album, Eskimo Snow.

The album, once again, comes courtesy of Bay Area mainstay Anticon — a label often associated with hip-hop acts, though Wolf has dubbed this new album "the least hip-hop out of anything I've ever been involved with.”

While Wolf has been heavily influenced by the musical style in his previous groups, WHY? has never been a straightforward hip-hop act. It has maintained a hybrid mix of indie rock melodies backed by lyric-heavy, art-rap style vocals, but Eskimo Snow moves in more of an art rock direction, with a slower pace and vocal styles.

15 years back, Wolf was just another ‘90s teenager, listening to East Coast positive hip-hop à la A Tribe Called Quest. He bristles slightly at this admission, “It just sounds so cliché, some 30-year-old white guy talking about his heyday!” He then corrects himself, “Actually, 30 is my heyday — I like feeling a little more settled in my life, I don’t worry about every single thing I do, and I have a little more clarity then I used to.”

His father is a Messianic rabbi, and Wolf occasionally tinkered with the synagogue’s four-track as a teenager — though he says his brother was originally the chief musician in the family. While Wolf messed around with recordings, he gave himself the rapper name Big Mix, after a cereal of the same name.

After high school, Wolf’s interest in music grew, and he started up a band with his brother and a rapper named Doseone (Adam Drucker). They played shows such as local Battle Of the Bands and named themselves Apogee, later changing the name to cLOUDDEAD.

WHY? began as Wolf’s solo project in the late ‘90s, but by ’05 he had added Josiah on drums and Doug McDiarmid on guitar, among an assortment of other collaborators for each record. After a string of albums and singles, the group recorded both their highly regarded ‘08 release, Alopecia (Anticon), and the new Eskimo Snow in Minneapolis during the same session.

Wolf says most of his songs come to him over long periods of time; it is not a simple task for him to simply sit down and write. “Most songs work their way up with little bits here and there, things I piece together. Sometimes there’ll be a story that starts to come out of it but it’s almost like a mosaic — a shard here and a shard there." He adds, “I tend not to write except in controlled silence.”

Meaning, Wolf isn’t typically too keen on writing music while touring, which may be a problem starting this month. WHY? will spend the next year touring the U.S., Australia, Japan, and Europe.

“It is a way to live, but touring kind of wears on you,” he says. “You become mentally fatigued, but there are worse ways to make a living — it’s kind of like being in the army but with much better barracks.”

For now, Wolf bides his time among family and friends back in Maineville. His rabbi father has even taken an interest in his son’s music, and the indie rock world as a whole. “There’s a high school pirate radio station here that plays all this indie music and my dad will be like ‘Have you heard of Islands? They are pretty good,” Wolf laughs. “And I’m like ‘Yeah, Dad, I toured with them!’”

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