Spencer Yenson is on a mission to figure out what it means to be human. Yenson moved from his home in California to the Nashville area in 2022, nursing the end of a seven-year relationship. "It started out rough - a car accident, sleeping on strangers' couches - but I had fresh eyes and a heart that was broken open."
One night, Yenson found himself engulfed in a conversation about navigating bad trips, the origins of consciousness, and Blink 182 and being a San Diego kid, Yenson had some thoughts to share. His conversation partner turned out to be a fellow artist, an articulate fella with a subtle accent. "We decided to hang... see if we could make something, since we both record using Logic."
Yenson played his new friend Andrew Krivstov some of the demos he created on his phone using GarageBand. One demo, in particular, stood out. The working title was "Shadows in the Cave." Yenson recalls, "He liked some of the chords and lines in there... we ended up chopping it up and building a new song using that as the foundation."
What they ended up creating was a psychedelic synth-wave anthem called "Bodies." Sonically, you can close your eyes and be transported to an SNES neon cityscape. It's slick yet gritty. Epic yet playful. Yenson describes Andrew's process in the studio, "Andrew is meticulous with sounds, he has a hell of an ear. He's also a talented multi-instrumentalist, showcasing that all over the track."
Lyrically, Yenson meditates on the beautiful absurdity of inhabiting a human body billions of years in the making. "It's simple, but our bodies are essentially our introduction to having borders in this physical reality. The idea of 'I' or 'Me' from there, we then attach identity to certain thoughts or being members of a group, but it really starts with something as simple as this is my hand or this is my body. I believe we can embrace our physical nature but also know that we are connected to everything. It can be a helpful reminder whenever we are taking an identity too seriously to the point where it's even causing us to suffer."
As natural as these ideas are expressed, Yenson doesn't come across as pretentious or yearning to be taken seriously. There is a bit of a fun psychedelic trickster energy to his output a la the Flaming Lips or MGMT. ‘Bodies' is the first in a collection of songs that are like postcards from various stops on Yenson’s human journey.
"I think there is a looming cloud in the form of a potential bypass of our humanity. The idea of who we are and where we're going... And how, it seems where we're going on this path is into a printed machine model representation of humanity."
Isolation, uncertainty in the face of automation, and trying to keep our footing on the technocratic treadmill - these themes all come through in Yenson's tunes, but his music is far from bleak. "Ultimately, I'm full of hope even though, to many, that might seem silly. If I didn't have my own experiences of human and spiritual growth, I would probably be full of nihilism. There is a lot of uncertainty right now. As creatives, we are facing a tremendous paradigm shift in particular. If human art is destined to lose the war of attention to AI and become devoid of worth to the consumer, so be it. I will continue creating.”
Currently, Spencer Yenson is learning how to be a human in his new landing spot in New York.