Nate from Yours Truly

TOO OFTEN, WITH THE HELP OF YOUTUBE, WE TRY TO SATISFY OUR ‘LACK OF LIVE MUSIC blues’ with crappy, pixilated, cell phone recorded performances with drowned out vocals and dancing torsos taking up the foreground. And a lot of the time, these crappy videos never seem to cut it.  So, my friends, I recommend to you the greatest solution to all of your YouTube pains: Yours Truly.

Yours Truly is an amazing website crammed with tons of videos of your favorite bands playing your favorite songs in living rooms (Memoryhouse), parks (Tame Impala), or even with drum lines (Maps and Atlases) – that beats the Troubadour any night, right?

Nate gave me an inside scoop on how it all started and what it was like to shoot Excuses [my favorite!]  by The Morning Benders. Check them out, you will love it, truly.


KEBA: How did you come up with the name "Yours Truly"?

NATE: The name has always been there as I remember, I think Babak made a video with Thao Nguyen once and called it a Yours Truly session years before we actually started developing the site. 

K: How do you select the bands that you want to shoot?

N: We generally select the bands we love which we think would translate well across a live video. After that, we try to meet the band where they are at, so if they only have an hour to give, great! We’ll try to film them at the venue or somewhere close to them. If the band has the whole day, maybe we'll bring them into a studio or some other location. The thing is, everything needs to be flexible, but that's the environment we prefer to work and thrive in.

K: My favorite session is The Morning Benders' "Excuses" one where all the people are packed in the room singing and playing together - what was it like to shoot that and how did it end up coming together? The first time I watched it, it was flabbergastingly epic....I can imagine how awesomely LOUD it would have been in person.

N: Chris Chu of The Morning Benders hit us up with an idea and we instantly fell in love with it. He basically arranged all his musician friends to meet at the studio and all we had to do was simply show up and capture what was taking place. Going in, we really had no idea what to expect. We had not heard the songs before hand and we really didn't know how many people would show up for the session.  Once things started rolling though, the energy in that room was indescribable, just completely magical and was one of those things 'where you had to be there' or 'can never be duplicated again' type of moments. 

K: The Yours Truly concept is interesting because it's something between an official music video and a recording of a concert. I enjoy it because it has a live feeling but it's not in front of an audience or in a typical setting...it brings a new life to a song that you have heard a gazillion times. How do you feel when you are recording these things? Do you feel more like you're at a show, or does it feel more like you're on the set of job?

N: Rather than being a spectator at a show, I feel like while I'm filming, I'm taking part in the music. Not that I’m creating it or participating on stage or anything like that but just allowing the music flow and dictate the next movement. I try to treat the process of live filming and the results (the images recorded and edited) completely different. To me, they're not the same thing and often times, how I feel during filming and with the footage later spawns totally different responses. So it's important to keep them separate and allow each experience to speak for itself. ☼