released November 11, 2011

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Recorded and mixed by Mike Walker, Mike Nardone, Daniel Lee and Adam Salsberg

All songs written & performed by You Me & The People

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Mike Walker - guitars, lyrics, vox, synths, bass, sampler, drums, keyboards, ukulele, arrangements

Mike Nardone - guitars, sampler, keyboards, sound effects, synths, bass, accordion, arrangements

Daniel lee - guitars, lyrics, vox, cello, arrangements

Terrill Mast - aux percussion, drums, melodica

Andrew Panzer - trumpet

Michael Byrnes - bass

Seth Engel - drums

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front cover photo taken by Mike Walker

mastered by Mike Walker

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First conceived in the fall of 2010 and finally finished in the winter of 2011, YM&TP is NN’s first full length LP and at that time it was the most ambitious project I had ever taken on. The album was primarily written in a 4 story apartment building on Halsted St in Lincoln Park. At the time I was living with Mike Nardone and Daniel Lee and we occupied the top two floors with some other friends. It was a crazy time in our lives. Dan and I were 20 and Nardone was 19 and as many are at that age, we were all starving for new experiences.

We named our apartment ‘Warmhau5’ and started throwing parties every month. Word spread around Columbia and DePaul campus and soon these parties were attracting over 100 people from all over the city. It was completely insane. We would blast dance music, drink heavily and indulge in all sorts of questionable activities. Warmhau5 soon became the place to be for pretty much everyone at Columbia College and I met many people through these parties. When the parties became too much to handle I would sometimes lock myself in my room and only let in people that I knew. I would teach them a specific knock and when I heard it I would open the door and we would spark up some weed and great conversations would always arise. This is how I started bonding with people like Seth Engel who became one of my best friends on this planet. During one party we hung out in my room and I showed him the beginnings of ‘Worst Storm Since 69’ and he came up with a guitar harmony that I included on the final recording. After about four or five months the cops would always come to shut down the parties. I’ll never forget one night we threw a bash for our friend Travis’ 21st birthday and when the cops showed up he slammed the door right in their faces.. What a total legend. They then proceeded to come in through the back door which was wide open.

During the week, when the party goers were all gone and the house was quiet, I would often chat about music with my roommates. Mike and Dan were a constant inspiration to me in those days. The three of us usually hung out in Nardone’s room because he had the best speakers and a nice record player. They both introduced me to countless bands that year. Mike would bust out records by toe, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Anathallo and The Books while Dan would show me stuff like Minus The Bear, Broken Social Scene, Elliot Smith and Mogwai. I would bang on and on about how great Gorillaz, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens and Radiohead were and we would endlessly play each other our favorite songs while neglecting our school work. We weren’t exactly straight A students back then.. But I was studying music on a much deeper level than I ever had been before and I have those two to thank for that. Their influence on me made it’s way onto this album in a massive way. I think the album sounds very Midwestern. Mike is from Michigan, Dan is from a small town near Champaign Illinois and I’m from Arlington Heights so we’re all Midwestern boys.

Songs 1 and 11 (the first and final tracks) were both written on the same winter evening during a record breaking snow storm that was nicknamed the "Snow-pocalypse." The two songs were completely different in every way imaginable. However, I decided that we would bookend the album with these two tracks and the other tracks in between, that had yet to be written, would serve to bridge this musical gap & hopefully make a piece of music that was both eclectic and cohesive. One of the better acoustic numbers ‘We Ran In Tandem’ was conceived when Daniel walked into my bedroom one night playing my vintage 1960s Stella guitar with a gentle finger picking pattern that he thought Mike & I might like. We ran with it and stayed up until the early hours of the next morning honing the track down into a complete song. We recorded almost the entire song into GarageBand using the built in microphone on my old MacBook Pro. We tracked individual vocal parts in the bathroom because we liked the reverb sound it had. Super janky but it somehow worked.

When it came time to add additional layering to the bridge section of ‘We Ran In Tandem’ we decided that cello and trumpet would work nicely. Dan provided some gorgeous cello parts but we couldn’t seem to get ahold of a good trumpet player to add the final touch. Then one day when I was walking around the neighborhood I ran into my old friend Andy who I had met all the way back in the 4th grade. We had bonded during our time in the school’s musical theatre program but because we then went off to different high schools I hadn’t seen or spoken with him in over 5 years. Then all of a sudden there he is on the street outside my apartment. We lived right across the street from DePaul University and he was currently studying there.

Andy also had an incredible talent for playing the trumpet and was the star player of his middle school and high school jazz bands and had won many competitions and awards for his virtuosity. I asked him if he still played and if he would be interested in playing on a song I was working on and he grabbed his trumpet and came over that very same day and did what you hear on the album. He transformed that song into something much more hauntingly beautiful. His parts were very minimal but packed full of emotions and atmosphere. Back in 4th grade, Andy taught me how to sing in harmony when we were on a camping trip and to meet him again randomly on the street and then collaborate on a track was one of those beautiful moments that the universe just gifts to you if you’re in the right place at the right time. There was a lot of that going on back then.

This album also marks the first time I ever played/recorded music with my great friend and collaborator Terrill Mast who has since played on almost every consecutive NN release and is an integral part of the band’s sound. On the track ’Sunstoned’ which was mostly improvised on the spot, you can hear two musicians getting a feel for each other. Making that song with Terrill was one of the most enjoyable and liberating recording experiences of my entire life at that point. He had this extremely freewheeling approach to recording back then that was quite attractive to me. It was an approach that was very different compared to Mike and Dan’s recording methods. I was very keen to work with him again in the future and he eventually became my closest collaborator. He had just turned 19 when we recorded ‘Sunstoned.’

One last story I’d like to tell is about the track ‘I Know The Truth.’ I had originally written this track during the summer of 2010 and recorded it in full using GarageBand. I was really proud of it because it sounded completely unlike any other songs I had written up until then and I wanted to include it on the album. Then one night, during one of those out of control Warmhau5 parties, my laptop was stolen because I stupidly left it sitting out in the open. I was very naive back then.. Those parties would inevitably attract people who we didn’t know and some of them had less than pure intentions when attending our parties. Vinyl records and instruments were also stolen but the worst was definitely when my MacBook disappeared. The next day I was lamenting to Mike about how ‘I Know The Truth’ was probably lost forever and he said something like “Nah man, we can re-record it together and make it even better.” So Mike, being a true brother, invited me into the makeshift recording space that he had set up in the laundry room and we bashed out the version that you hear on the album in about two days. Mike used to play in his parent’s wedding band and they would occasionally play this song over the PA and watch people go nuts much to his amazement. It’s a very special track that stands on it’s own in our vast catalogue of songs. We’ve never done anything remotely like it since.

Every song on this album feels like a new discovery of what we could achieve sonically. The track sequence runs the gamut from folk, ambient, instrumental freak outs, Chicago tinged indie rock, electronic pop to straight up dance music. It is a mixture that on paper would not work at all but with the way we sequenced the tracks it actually has a flow from song to song that feels somewhat logical. I think I really wanted to make a record without the limitations of choosing one specific genre to come from musically. This philosophy of musical restlessness and refusing to stay in one spot is something that has remained with the band through our entire career. We always want every album we release to contain lots of variety and to surprise the listener with what comes next.

As our lease came to an end in the summer of 2011 things were definitely changing. Mike, Dan and I were still as close as ever but we all had different plans for the future and we knew that we would not be able to renew our lease at Warmhau5. Dan would end up moving back to Champaign for 3 years and Mike would move into a place in Little Ukrainian Village with his then girlfriend. I eventually moved into a condo called The Roosevelt Collection in the South Loop with Terrill and another friend where I would eventually put the finishing touches on the YM&TP album. Some songs like ‘Château d'If’ and ‘Converted Attic Space’ were written and recorded with Terrill at The Roosevelt Collection, the former being worked on with Mike Nardone who had come over for a nocturnal visit. Though Mike, Dan and I would never again be roommates, I think we all feel like that year living together held some of the best times of our college years and we will always cherish those memories. I’m so glad that we’re all still such close friends.

YM&TP is quite significant to me because it marks the beginning of many ideas and concepts that we would continue to mine for years to come. We really felt that we had something special and that we had a lot to prove to the Chicago DIY community so we poured everything we had into this album. And what we ended up with was an album filled to the brim with great songs that I still hold very dear to my heart even to this day. It was also the first album I made that people actually told me that they liked. I remember handing out CDs for free at DIY house shows and then having those same people come up to me at the next show a week later telling me how much they liked the album. Girls especially liked it for some strange reason. And that's always a good thing. I think we somehow managed to capture the spirit of the times with this album and I suppose that is what any artist aims to do with their work.

Every story has a beginning and You Me and The People is ours.

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