Natalia Yanchak of Candian group "The Dears"

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The Dears - Lost in The Plot

Natalia Yanchak is been with The Dears since 1998 and she plays the keyboard. She's the only woman left in the the revolving door lineup, which is kind of a shame but hey. Also, she's the wife of frontman Murray Lightburn. Here's her blog, Twitter Facebook and a couple of interviews: 1. A Conversation with Natalia Yanchak from The Dears (Sorry dears, its an audio interview and there is no transcript. Would someone have the time and ability to maybe put one up?)

2. Never Destroy Us: An Interview with Natalia Yanchak of the Dears

Natalia Yanchak is not just some woman in a band. She joined the Dears back in their beginning stages as the keyboard player, but also as an organizer and visionary. Her vocals add a sweetness to the strong, warm baritone of frontman Murray Lightburn along with a raison d’être for the romantic yearnings that are a hallmark of so many of their songs. They are now married with a young daughter, and the band is as strong as ever. The new release, Degeneration Street, was performed start to finish in a few live gigs last fall, and the group onstage looked like it was having a blast. Before heading out on tour again, Yanchak chatted over the phone from her home in Montreal to update PopMatters.



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When exactly did you join the band and tell me about those early days with the Dears?



I joined the band officially in 1997 or 1998. I had met Murray [Lightburn] at a bar—I was DJing at a local haunt in Montreal, the infamous Biftek, which [is] overrun by students now although it was back then also. That’s what they call a steak in French, biftek, but it’s not a restaurant so I don’t know why it’s called that. Murray had come in and he sat at the bar and for some reason he just poured his heart out to me. It wasn’t like it was love at first sight, I was kind of like “Oh, poor guy”. We had some mutual friends who introduced me to the Dears and to Murray so I went to see them play a show at this hole-in-wall kind of place called the Barfly. They were looking for a keyboard player but after I saw them I was totally skeptical. I was like, “It’s going to be terrible.” But it was amazing—I thought it was great.

So then I joined the band, and I was the more pragmatic one to Murray’s creative force. I was the one who said, “So… we have to put out a record. We have to have band photos. We have to play shows. We have to do this.” I also had a radio show at the local college [McGill University], co-hosting this all-Canadian rock show. I was listening to a lot of music, writing record reviews for Vice and other local stuff. I was very immersed in that other side of the music industry that a musician might not think is very important, especially when they’re just getting it together. So I sort of brought that angle to the band.



Was keyboard always your instrument?



That was definitely the instrument I felt most comfortable playing. I’d been playing organ in some other bands around town. When I was much younger I took Suzuki violin lessons—I learned how to play the recorder and then I took piano lessons as I got older. In my teen years I picked up the acoustic guitar and did some of my own DIY 4-track recordings. I had this friend that lent me this Arp AXXE synth, my first analog synth I ever used. It’s such a pure analog synth, really the basic building block of what an analog synth is, so it was fun for me as a teen to mess around with that.



Going back to the band, the group almost called it quits after your third CD. How did things come back together?



We had recorded our first CD, End of a Hollywood Story, which came out in Canada in 2000 and then we recorded No Cities Left, which came out in Canada 2003. It didn’t come out in the rest of world until later. There were a couple years of us just focusing on Canada. So it was a really long time between those two albums. There was a lot of touring and people getting to an age where maybe being in a rock band isn’t what they want to do for the rest of their life, which is totally fine. You can’t make anyone do what they don’t want to do. Murray and I were faced with the question of “What are we going to do? What should we do?” Definitely the question was asked, “Should the band be over?”



For me, it was really a realization of how I’d been playing this role in the Dears since 1997 so it predates all these people who have come and gone. That’s always been the tradition of the Dears. It’s always been about capturing the essence of the Dears, not about the individual ego of each person. For me it was a soul-searching period while we were making Missiles [from 2008], about who I am and who I am in the Dears and what the Dears is and what it means. I kind of realized, it’s not about me and it’s not about the people that are leaving the band but it’s about this amorphous entity that is the Dears. It’s also about connecting with people in so many different ways—emotionally, spiritually, or however the music connects with people. That was more important than any of the personal bullshit that might be going down. That realization, which is going to come off as sounding so extremely pretentious but whatever, is how the Dears are bigger than me so therefore the Dears must continue. It must carry on.MORE

She's just released a story, her debut writing effort I believe: The Dears' Natalia Yanchak Releases 'Final Fridays' Story Inspired by 'The Office'

Yanchak always wanted to be a wordsmith, but that desire was dampened as a Concordia University creative writing class "basically destroyed" the urge for about a decade. A little while ago after gathering up some ideas, she took action. And while Yanchak quickly points out "it's not science fiction" in the traditional sense, there is some science to it.

"I take it as a learning experience where I have to research these scientific concepts or astrophysical formulas and stuff like that," she says. "Stuff that I don't really know anything about even though I was in enriched math in high-school. I really enjoy that exploration."

Recent blog posts show she's putting the pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, rather.

Yanchak recently submitted a piece into an environmental-themed writing contest hosted by io9, a website primarily geared towards science fiction writing. "They were trying to encourage people in that a lot of policy can come from this creative thinking, real life policies coming from people with fantastic ideas and trying to solve them even though it's fiction," she says. "So that inspired me to write this longer story."

As for her first public piece, Yanchak described it on her blog as a cross between 'The Office' TV show ("the U.S. version," she says) -- and the novel 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.' It seems she's at a loss for how else to describe the piece, which is entitled 'Final Fridays' and concerns a robot, an office worker named Elton Barnes and draconian coffee workplace regulations.MORE

The Dears - Blood (Live in Mexico City)