The Yum Yum Tree conjures Atlanta in Peter Gabriel’s English studio

Turn Down the Noise, the new album from Atlanta rockers The Yum Yum Tree, sits comfortably in a familiar groove with the kind of soulful but hard-driving rock that made Collective Soul, Drivin N Cryin and R.E.M some of Georgia’s chief exports during the ’90s alternative boom. That warm aura of local color so coats the proceedings that one might be surprised to learn much of it was recorded at Real World Studios, the residential recording facility near Bath, England, owned by progressive rock luminary Peter Gabriel.

I met with Yum Yum Tree bassist/vocalist Andy Gish at Tasty Bakery Cafe, a Kennesaw eatery that feels like a corporate echo of the coffee shop and tea lounge culture of that bygone era. That absorption of organic culture into the endlessly renovating machinery of Atlanta-area economic progress factors strongly into Gish’s new album and her thoughts on the evolving local landscape.

“As you know, our city is changing so much,” she explains. “There are times where I’m driving down the street, and I’m like ‘Wait, where am I? Am I on Piedmont? Am I on Cheshire Bridge?’ Because you just don’t recognize it.”

“Porchlight,” a song on the new album, explores that metropolitan feature creep and its ramifications on the local arts community. “We used to have lots of house parties in this house we lived in off of Ponce,” she explains. “We started The Yum Yum Tree there; we had a lot of parties there. I drove up one day, and they had closed in the porch. I just started crying. That porch is so important to me — so many things happened on that porch.”

The experience triggered an internal crisis for Gish and a sense of alienation from the city that had so become home to her that she referred to herself as being “from Atlanta” despite hailing originally from Texas. “I want my city to change,” she affirms. “I want it to thrive. “But at the same time I want to feel like I still belong in it.”

As such, the song “Porchlight” memorializes the house parties, music and human connection that happened on that particular porch and how porches in general are such an important social fixture in Southern culture. A verse in the song proclaims, “They’re tearing down buildings around me. They go down without a sound. Closing in porches for nurseries in this cardboard condo town.”

It’s a bleak lamentation, but one that’s consistent with Gish’s conviction that real art emerges from the genuine and the organic. “Brand new and shiny isn’t beautiful to me,” she says. “I love the little authentic failures in life. I think that’s where a lot of really amazing art comes from.”

It might at first seem unlikely that the gritty alt-culture realism of The Yum Yum Tree would find itself at Real World Studios, the sonic home base of art rock pioneer Peter Gabriel, but that yearning for the organic and the human gave her a natural kinship with the “Sledgehammer” singer.

Although now a registered nurse and harm reduction advocate, Gish was working as a primatologist at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University when Gabriel visited to play keyboards with bonobo apes. The interspecies jam session featured Panbanisha, an ape with whom she’d worked extensively.

“It was also a Thanksgiving potluck, just to make it weirder,” she chuckles. The surrealistic experience culminated in her sitting across from Gabriel during the meal. Despite staff being instructed not to speak to him, proximity led to conversation, and Gish found him to be warm and personable.

Gabriel was interested in her musical background and was impressed that her favorite musician was Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett. “He goes ‘that old guy that I know?’” she fondly recalls. The rock star pretense was gone, and a relaxed, jovial conversation followed that included Gish having the opportunity to show Gabriel’s daughter pictures of her dad’s legendary reverse mohawk haircut from his Genesis days.

“You could just feel the kindness in him,” says Gish. 

Gish didn’t reconvene with Gabriel while recording at Real World, but the rest of The Yum Yum Tree — drummer Matt Harr and guitarist/vocalist John McNicholas — did have the occasion. For her part, Gish spent the time overcoming her own anxiety around recording at the legendary facility. 

“I had serious imposter syndrome,” she says of her first day on-site. “What am I doing here? Why did I think I could come here?” She found herself emotionally breaking down that evening, but quickly settled into a comfortable working groove.

In a larger scope, the experience fits within Gish’s own vision for fostering new artists. “My dream is to have a place where I live with a warehouse next to it where all kinds of artists can, for very little rent (or chores) just have their art be there so that they can work stuff out.”

It’s a noble vision, hopefully one that will come to fruition in the real world.

Where & when

The Yum Yum Tree plays The EARL on April 4. Tickets are $15 in advance and $17 day of show. Turn Down the Noise will be released April 10. 

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.