Payam Doostzadeh, the bassist for alternative rockers Young the Giant, doesn’t wear too much jewelry, but when he does, it’s usually something created in Pittsburgh.
Over the past few years, the California band connected with Studebaker Metals in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, taking a tour of the workshop and picking up some jewelry.
“My father-in-law is very into antique jewelry and stuff like that, so it was something fun to talk about with him, and a little spotlight on a local Pittsburgh business that’s great,” Doostzadeh said. “They’ve been really lovely.”
The band, which broke through with singles like “My Body” and “Cough Syrup,” will be back in Pittsburgh on June 23 when their Victory Garden tour hits Stage AE on the North Shore. They’ll be joined by Cold War Kids and almost monday.
Young the Giant is currently touring in support of its new album, “Victory Garden,” which dropped on May 1 on Fearless Records.
In a Tuesday call from Buffalo, Doostzadeh spoke with TribLive about the new album, radical empathy and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
How has the Victory Garden tour been going so far?
The Victory Garden tour has been going really well. We are almost three weeks or a month in, and it’s 44 dates or so. I believe we are past the quarter point through the tour, and we’re out with Cold War Kids supporting us and almost monday, and they’re all really great guys. It’s been kind of like a little summer camp. Everyone’s very nice and a lot of great personalities on tour. Some of us play pickleball or ping pong or whatnot, and the music is great. It’s just been a good time. It’s not lost on us that, especially this year, this summer, there’s a lot going on in the world. Financially, people have a lot of things splitting their time and their dollars. So when people come out to our show, we really appreciate that, knowing that there’s so many other things that they could do. But we really try to give the best show we can, and I think we’ve really elevated our live set on this tour more than ever so we’re really proud of that.
Speaking of that live set, how important was it to incorporate and to showcase the new album?
We’re doing a thing this year on this tour where we are doing half songs with other half songs, just trying to get more, instead of playing full arrangements, not for every song, but just for a couple. So instead of playing, say, 20 songs, we’re playing 26, but in the same amount of time. That’s been great to highlight more music as we now have six full-length albums, and it is the 10-year anniversary of our third album, “Home of the Strange.”
It’s tough as you have more and more albums. It’s like, OK, you don’t want to just play the three hits from each album because that might not make the best set with the pacing and all of that. You want to highlight the new album, but people are not as familiar with those (new) songs. It’s a balance of finding the songs everyone wants to hear, the songs that you think you haven’t played very much.
Are the new songs getting more familiar for the actual band since you’ve only been playing them for a few weeks now?
I think we were fortunate enough to have “Different Kind of Love,” the first song that we released as a single on this album, reach the No. 1 alternative charts here in the U.S. and Canada too, just recently. So people have heard that one and are familiar with that one. The first track of the album, which is the song that we start the set with, “Evergreen.” And then there’s some toward the end of the record that people I think are still digesting, but it’s fun for us. I think for any artist, it’s always the most fun for them to play their newest music, because that’s what’s most exciting. As the tour goes on, we’re already seeing people have had even an extra week or two, an extra couple of listens is enough for people to really digest and understand and appreciate the songs. They’ll just keep getting more comfortable as time goes on.
You mentioned “Different Kind of Love” hitting No. 1, and that was the band’s first No. 1. What do those types of milestones mean to you?
It’s actually funny because on our fourth album, “Mirror Master,” we had a song, “Superposition,” which went No. 1 on some chart but not on another chart. It was actually news to us that “Different Kind of Love” was our first because we were like, wait, I thought we already had one. I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to diminish that at all or downplay it. It is definitely an achievement, and I think ultimately, it just gets people to notice more.
At the end of the day, it’s a talking point, like, this song went No. 1. That gives them a vetted reason to maybe check it out. I think it’s still early as far as it just happened. We have a couple other songs that we’re going to radio with right now that I think will hopefully do the same thing. I think there’ll be even more of a story when there’s multiple songs on the same album that have gone No. 1. I’m just really excited. Ultimately, this album campaign has just started and has a lot of legs behind it.
With the new album, I understand that you brought up the idea of victory gardens. How did you hear about them and how do you think that idea wound up shaping the album?
I was honestly just watching a video on YouTube about victory gardens and the history of them in Europe during World War I and America during World War II and how so much of the agriculture, I think during World War II in America, about 40% of all of the food being grown was happening in community gardens and neighborhoods, which was just an incredible thing. And a little bit of backstory too, but we went on a bunch of these one-week focused writing retreats out in the mountains in Idyllwild and in the desert in Joshua Tree, just as a band to really focus.
We did the majority of our writing for the album and demoing for the album in that fashion. It was during our last writing retreat in Joshua Tree where we got into our vacation rental the night before we got into the studio. We were just reconnecting and trying to bring down walls so that everyone check in with one another and see how life is going. We all have kids now, more or less, and that can be very demanding of attention and bandwidth. Our drummer, Francois, had let us know that night that they were expecting their second.
Later that night, we’re in the jacuzzi. The property had a jacuzzi that was overlooking the desert and it’s the middle of the night, and we’re just looking up at the stars. I honestly just brought up the idea of victory garden, not even for the album title, just as a concept, because we had written songs already like “Bitter Fruit,” which has themes about wanting to laugh and smile and cry like a child, see the world for the first time again, like our children do. I brought up the idea of victory garden as this amazing thing about diving into your community, when if the world at large feels so out of your control and feels like it’s spiraling negatively, you almost want to protect your children from that and your neighborhood and your community. So you just dive into that.
I thought of the metaphor of the victory garden as kind of like how I’m raising my daughter. She’s going through her seasons and you have to tend to your garden and you’re learning more. The garden’s learning from you, you’re learning from it, and I just brought that idea to the band. Eric, I think, was the one who just was, there was a pause and he was just kind of like, wow, I think that’s what we should name our album. And then everyone kind of agreed. I was just like, oh yeah, I think that’d be cool. (laughs) Then the next day we went in the studio and wrote “Evergreen,” which was the album opener, and we also wrote the last song on the album, “Life Is a Long Goodbye,” in that week. That rounded out the album writing process. I think at that point, we knew we were done and we had the concept because we were jokingly earlier in the night thinking of other album names, and honest to God, I don’t remember what any of them were, but we were just being silly and then I inadvertently brought it to the band, and we went with it. I think it’s really fitting.
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The album has been described as an ode to radical empathy. What does that mean to you?
I think radical empathy means, the idea of just in a time of everything being so chaotic, you can think of it as a child comes into this world and all they do is love. There’s no hate or division or anything like that. They just see the world for the first time, and they think everything is awesome. That’s because most children, you would hope that the world is also treating them with love. That’s what they see. People are more likely to see a young child and they want to preserve their innocence and they want to show them love. Whereas as adults, it’s like we might be more defensive or guarded. So you think of it that way, if we all as adults try to view the world through the eyes of children, through the eyes of everything ultimately comes down to love and connection. That’s my little takeaway from it, but it can mean a lot of things.
The band played a few songs in the back of a truck in April. Was that your first time doing that? Where does that rank among the most unusual pieces the band has played?
Oh, the flower truck? Yeah, we did a little flower truck performance, one in London and one in Los Angeles in Venice in our hometown where some of us live. We have, funnily enough, also played in the back of a moving truck at a rodeo. I can’t remember if it was Austin or Houston or somewhere in Texas, San Antonio, somewhere like that. We played a rodeo — it was our headline show — but we played basically at the end of the rodeo, and they drove us out on a truck on a flatbed, so that might be one of the most novel entrances to a show.