We recently had the opportunity to chat with one of our favorite on the rise artists, Yoke Lore! Check out our conversation below!
For our readers who aren’t familiar with your music, can you share with us how you began your career?
I guess I’ve been playing music forever, I guess I chickened out, but I started I guess in the industry as a drummer in the band “Walk The Moon,” and I dropped out of college to go on tour with them, and then I kind of felt like I needed to do my own music, so after a little bit of touring, I asked my college if I could come back, to finish my education, then afterwards, I started yoke lore.
As a musician, do you enjoy taking part in the visual aspect of your work? Do you have a specific aesthetic?
Yea, I do all of the artwork for my projects. I draw all of the album artwork and a lot of the merchandise, t-shirts and stuff. The projections for our live stuff that I design, and also I’ve been selling fine art prints of designs I’ve made, I’ve been commissioned a lot to design tattoos for my fans. All of my art is a particular aesthetic. I think people like to see it with a visual representation. I have much to leave that art making is like, in a sitcom, there’s a live cam show, and each camera gets a different angle of the same situation, and you switch between cameras to round out the perspective of the audience, and I feel like that’s how all art making should be, where you see it from all different perspectives so you can get a whole view of what’s going on, so I think that’s just one aspect of what I’m trying to do!
You’re almost done your most recent headlining tour, what has been your favorite moment so far?
At Bowery ballroom in NYC, I was singing my cover of truly never deeply, and I got to the second chorus, and just kind of like looked at the audience for a little bit, because its fun to watch them want it and give it to them, and the crowd went for it without me, and they went for the chorus so I just let it happen and kind of conducted the audience and sang the rest of the song that was left, and that was a really memorable moment for sure. It was pretty wild.
How would you say you’ve evolved as an artist since “far shore”?
Um, I don’t know, i’m not sure there’s much of an evolution as there is, more of a learning process. I, more specifically, honing in to how it is I want to present myself as an artist, I’m getting better at defining what yoke lore, or what I want yoke lore to be to people, and I think that the music has to be there, that’s a given, but I think the real evolution I’m looking for and the maturation I’m trying to generate it more so in as an expresser, as a speaker, as a writer, to really sincerely and honestly present my own kind of struggles that might give people a degree of insight into their own struggles!
Your video for “everybody wants to be loved” is sick! Can you take us through what it was like creating that?
I Wanted to create a character that was kinda going through the lyrics of the song, and like a recognition experience, not being so sure about throwing yourself into the romantic dating scene of the world, and you kind of close yourself off and you don’t want to fully expose yourself to all of the dangers that come with that, and then kind of learning in the end that it doesn’t have to be so dangerous, that that vulnerability can offer you a degree of strength that you might not have had access to before.
As someone who is very artistic, what is your stance on the defunding of arts in schools across the globe?
Its really really tragic, I think of art and education as so fundamental to not only developing a some sense of creativity which you can live your life to a holistic fullness, learning to think creatively helps us to live better lives, and I worry that if we lose that aspect of creativity in education we really lose that ability to live truly and communally in experience.
Can you take us through your process of creating Dead Ringer, from it’s inception to the release?
Yea, Dead wringer, its a song about patience, at first, it had a chorus, and it was way more deliberate, the song at its inception was just about me moving fast like the first verse was super in depth and it’s just about moving and get it while its here, in a way I guess, and I didn’t really like it for a while and then I realized I needed to find a degree of self consciousness to be relevant, because I’m not that deliberate and id like to be sometimes, and i’d like to be less conscious and id like to be a bit more reckless, but I think I’m set into a certain amount of self awareness. So I changed the chorus and brought it back to the idea of that pacing and my speed, me second guessing it sometimes, and the fear of connecting.
And lastly what’s next for you after this tour?!
I have two songs coming out in November. So after those come out and then I’m gonna chill for a little bit, and then I’m going on tour with bishop briggs sometime in December.
Listen to Yoke Lore’s new single here
