Jackson Watkins of Yail

It’s hot today. Getting in my Jetta feels like a sauna, minus the humidity. Dry, arid, hot, and deadly.The summers here are great, as we get rain almost daily to cool us down, but the heat is awful. You can almost hear the heat radiating off the pavement as you walk down Old Town Fort Collins. The buildings reflect it back into your face with an overwhelm.

I’m driving down to Old Town to meet with Jackson Watkins, the frontman of Fort Collins punk band, Yail. He’s meeting me on his lunch break at The Bean Cycle, an artistic coffee shop on Main Street Old Town.

Yail’s sound is oddly calming, as fast paced as they can be. Their recent album “Elegies”, starts off raucous, as Jackson sings about death, going against the powers that be, bleeding out. He yells over the lush guitars and the drums that churn behind him. It reminds me a lot of the midwestern emo sound. Bands like Marietta, American Football, and other post-punk emo music of the early 2000’s. The album is a sonic painting of nature, greens, life, nighttime, and loss. You can hear every element as the album progresses. The second song is calming and starts out with gentle strings and Jackson singing. Monsters, demons, hiding them from other people. It leaves a lot up to the listener to interpret, as the song changes with a tapping riff. The drums kick in and the atmosphere changes. The whole album is like this. Mellow reflections, presentations of anger through sound, unrest, lush sounds, and reflection. At first listen, it blew me away that a band that sounds this good was from the place I live now. This was a band I had to interview.

I walk into The Bean Cycle and I see Jackson. I introduce myself to him, as I’m greeted by his eloquent glasses, dark- but minimal- tattoos, light smile, and a band tee. He has a coffee in his hand and we sit down and begin to talk, the sounds of coffee being made, people chattering, and more, behind us.

To start, where are you from?

I was born in Denver, Colorado and then I've been in Fort Collins for like the last eight years, since about 2013. I’m actually just about to wrap up here.

What sparked your interest in music?

What it was is a friend of mine showed me this band called Propagandhi when I was probably 13 or 14 years old, which kind of spiraled my interest into punk and underground. They were like the gateway, I guess, because Propaghandi is definitely not a small band but kind of the gateway into like hardcore, emo, Folk-punk and all those fun genres. Which kind of sparked my interest into community-based music, or DIY music. I think that was the origin of that. I never really wanted to be a professional musician, and I still don’t want to be a professional musician. But I’ve been listening to a lot of music since I was 14 years old and it started when my friend showed me Propagandhi.

When did you decide to start your own band?

I think the first band I was ever in was actually in college, which is later I guess than a lot of people. But it was with a person I met through Seventh Circle Music Collective, which is a music venue in Denver. And I was volunteering to run sound there and I met one of the people in the band who happened to live [in Fort Collins] called Blue Line Frontier, which I used to be in. That was my first experience playing music and being in a band. I didn’t really start that project though, I just kind of jumped into it. Then it was just me and one other person for a while and we turned it into a full band and we did the band stuff that you do: toured, played shows. As far as Yail goes, that was a side project with Nick, who I knew through the music scene, and Larson, who I knew from the music scene. It developed naturally from “hey, let’s make an album for fun” to it ending up being really fun, so we just kept doing it.

What sort of sound influenced Yail?

There’s a band called Leer that I’m really obsessed with, I think that inspired a lot of the music initially. A lot of pop-punk too, like Joyce Manor. Bomb the Music Industry, Jeff Rosenstock. Laura Stevenson, as far as writing lyrics and song structure goes. Honestly, I don’t think it was very thought out. I just had a few riffs and said “Hey Nick, we should write something on top of these.” It wasn’t super thought out. Especially with Yail, it was just all out of fun. Nowadays, it’s more inspired by emo and scrams, that kind of stuff.

When I listen, I hear Joan of Arc and a Get Up Kids sound, personally.

Joan of Arc is an interesting comparison because I like that band a lot, but it’s not one of my favorites that fuckin’ Tim Kinsella, or whatever his name is, is in. Initially. If it was back when Yail started, I would’ve been more like, “Oh yeah I just love Cap’n Jazz and American Football.” But now, I don’t think we’re that inspired by Joan of Arc, but it’s a band I definitely migrated into.

I was listening to your music with my dad, since he raised me on all that type of music. I played it for him and he said, “They sound like a different take on Joan of Arc, I like that.”

Hell yeah. Is your dad from the Midwest?

He was born in Washington, but he’s been around for a while. He lived in Seattle during the Grunge era, so he’s in the know.

That’s sick, dude.

I feel like Joan of Arc reminds me of a lot of Chicago dads, that’s the vibe they give me. Especially American Football. It’s funny because I’m moving to Chicago in a couple of months. That’s the land of Joan of Arc in my head.

What sorts of things guide your creative process in the band?

That’s a good question. The thing about the three of us, Larson not so much, but me and Nick, we aren’t hyper-prolific, creative people where we’re always writing things. We just get in these modes of “alright, let’s put some stuff together” and write two or three songs and they’ll all come together at once. Larson’s a little different because he’s always writing music, and I think that’s because he’s a little more creative than the rest of us, to be honest. That’s why his band The Red Scare releases a song every week it feels like. I think the biggest driver was just being a part of the music scene. Creating things for the scene we’re a part of. It’s just for fun, it should be deeper than that, but it’s not. Fun is just what drives that process.

Adding off of that, do you feel the Fort Collins scene is one that welcomes you?

Yeah, I feel like we’ve been welcomed here. I think that previous bands of mine have had a little bit more community success in Denver. Recently, as in the last two or three years, Fort Collins has really come together. I think that’s from a few different places and a few different things. I think a lot of people driving the scene when I was in college were either really young or a lot older, and there weren't too many people in my age group. It took us a while. When those folks started booking shows, that’s when people sort of came together. Larson used to run this venue called Flesh Mall, I don’t know if you remember it or not.

I’ve only lived here a couple of years, so probably not.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that was the transition into more of a put together music scene in Fort Collins, in my opinion. But that’s how we started meeting people. To answer your question, yeah, I feel really supported in Fort Collins.

I feel like the scene is really interesting, because it allows for different types of bands to flourish, and it’s one I haven’t experienced before. I was in Utah for eight years or more and I feel like it was more restricting on letting people create there. I think it’s really cool for it to have variety.

Yeah it’s very diverse, musically. If we’re talking four or five years ago before you were here, I feel like the genre was more insular. It was more structured. You’d have a lot more success if you were a punk rock band or something like that. Nowadays, it feels like there’s more openness to different genres, which feels a lot like Denver in that sense. It didn’t feel that way four or five years ago, it feels a lot more cohesive to me, at least.

What sorts of things inspired your recent album “Elegies”?

Elegies themselves are hymns or laments for the dead. I wouldn’t say [the songs] are hymns because that implies something religious, which is definitely not our thing. Most of them are lamenting the death of individuals, or the death, pain, and suffering that’s caused by institutions of power. Those are all broadly within the framework of science. A lot of the themes of the songs are about the science institutions in the US, and this is coming from someone involved in it- because it’s what I do for a living- how it’s contributed to systemic oppression of almost every group of people in the United States. And how concepts that we try to distance ourselves from in modern science, like eugenics and phrenology, that we know are bad, still have massive influences in the way people conduct science. A lot of the songs are just about that, too. Structural inequities that are caused by the scientific institution. Then there’s a song about Animal Crossing.

Listening to the album, that opening snippet in “The Mismeasure of Man”, really sets the tone of the album from the jump.

Yeah for sure. That opening snippet is from an academic debate between David Suzuki and Phillipe Rushton. And Rushton is just this racist ass. He’s dead now, which is good, in my opinion. He was a pusher of the theory that IQ is associated with race- which is awful- first of all, but even scientifically, the conclusions that came from that were really bad and really drawn out. It became a manifesto for white supremacy in the United States, all from taking scientific literature too seriously, or not knowing how to interrogate it. So all that kind of inspired it, and that theme is shown all throughout the rest of the album.

What’s next for Yail?

Dude, fuck. I don’t know. I’m moving to Chicago in a month and a half. Nick and Larson aren’t. I think we’re gonna try to do the record-parts-around-the-country thing. I think touring- we definitely have to tour again- but I think playing local shows will be harder. I think those are really the drivers of success for bands. We’ll see what happens. I imagine it’ll be kind of business as usual, less shows and less music being put out.

I then briefly mention I’d love to photograph the three of them before things change for the band, and we start discussing “generic” photo spots in Fort Collins.

I did some scouting around Old Town last week for some unseen patches and spots I haven’t seen before, so we’ll try to switch it up for you guys and make it stand out.

Dude, we would love to. I think a lot of the photoshoots in Fort Collins are either against a brick wall, with art or something behind it, or in the Alley Cat.

Dude, absolutely. Or it’s up at Horsetooth at night, the lights in Old Town. It needs to change.

There’s a lot of monotony, I agree.

My last question, it’s a routine for me to ask the people I interview what pieces of advice they have for those that want to do something similar. What pieces of advice do you have for those wanting to be in a band?

My biggest piece of advice is don’t let bands with 500 followers on Instagram tell you what to do, like us. Do your thing. I’ve never seen massive success as a band, but I think the most important part of music is community involvement. That’s what separates DIY music scenes from popular music scenes. We share a lot of the commodified aspects, even though sometimes it’ll be free or pay what you want, we all still conform to the typical music things. Putting out vinyl, tapes, playing shows, going on tour. Those are all things that popular musicians do too, right? I think the most poignant advice I can give is find a community that you can base not only your music in, but your ideological goals in. For us, that involves a lot of anarchism, communism, DIY through means of independent success. Trying to operate music venues, houses, garages, and not get shut down by the cops. Avoiding cop-like behavior in music spaces. I think that community was the most important part of our formation, and every band I’ve been in has been the same way. The only advice I can give is find a community, and put out music.

We wrap up our interview there and exchange Instagram handles to discuss from there. I reached out to him after, thanking him for his time and the conversation.

The three of us eventually met up a couple weeks later for me to shoot photos of them, a few weeks out from Jackson’s move to Chicago. We walked around Old Town at one in the morning and it felt somber, knowing these three have to pause what they’re doing for a bit. Jackson even jokes about it a few times during our shoot. They all had energy about them, even if the four of us were terribly tired from our work weeks.

Thank you to Jackson for sitting down with me at his lunch break to talk about things. Thank you to Larson and Nick as well, for working with all of us on a schedule to get these photos taken. It meant a lot to me to document the three of you together one last time before things change in the coming months.

You can find Yail’s album, “Elegies”, wherever you stream music. They’re on Instagram (@yailtheband), and on Twitter, through Jackson (@jacksonprobably).

-M

Daniel Leka

David Hale