Jharis Yokley joined Preston Frazier for a Sitdown to discuss his new album ‘Sometimes, Late at Night,’ how Jose James played a central role of encouragement, and the collaboration process with BIGYUKI:

PRESTON FRAZIER: I’ve been listening to Sometimes, Late at Night repeatedly. There seems to be an arc about the album in terms of relationships. So, could you talk a little bit about the theme of the album?
JHARIS YOKLEY: In the liner notes, there’s a dedication to a relationship with my ex-girlfriend a few years ago. I was thinking about her a lot. We broke up a few years ago, and I didn’t know if I made the right choice by ending it between us. Now, I think I made the right choice – and when I ended it, it felt right. I had so many feelings that were unanswered and unresolved. I put a lot of them in the music. It’s just a mantra, like phrases I put in many of these songs, just the repetitive singular sentences I felt about her at that time.

PRESTON FRAZIER: When did you start writing them?
JHARIS YOKLEY: In March 2020. I talked to Jose. He was like, “Bro, you should make an album.” I’d always had Instagram videos where I would put some of my tracks on Instagram to me playing to them. I would use samples and create beats off of the samples. Jose said, “You should make your music based on those beats.” I don’t think he was saying that he would sign me to his record label back then, but he was encouraging me. I was making a lot of beats. So, having enough music was never a problem. It was just finding out what the album was going to be about. Since my ex was always on my mind, I thought, “Let me make this album about her and our relationship.”

PRESTON FRAZIER: The album has 10 songs. You co-wrote five of them with Masayuki Hirano, aka BIGYUKI. How did you start the writing process for the album?
JHARIS YOKLEY: It was very informal. It was just me in my room, messing around on Logic or Ableton with my MIDI keyboard, finding sounds I liked and eventually molding them. There are a lot of things that I create that don’t sound good. [Laughs.] I’m always just messing around. Many of them are terrible, and the ones you hear are like the decent ones that come out of that process. So, it was just months and months of me messing around on my keyboard, and that’s how I got the melodic aspects of many of these songs. The lyrics, well, I used to walk dogs when I first moved to New York. When I was walking the dogs, I would always sing them nonsense songs about me either picking up their poop or walking them in the rain or something. I would make these songs up, and the lyrics would be simple but melodic. The lyrics made me think, “Oh, I missed this person,” then follow the breadcrumbs, saying, “Sometimes at night, I miss this person.” I was like, “Sometimes late at night, I miss this person.” 

Then, following that trail, “I kind of wish she had missed me, too. I think she misses me, too.” I brought these demos to BIGYUKI in the studio, and in Woodstock, N.Y., we went to Dreamland, a fantastic studio. The songs were one-minute snippets because I was used to making videos for Instagram, so I just had one minute of the melody and some chord changes. We need those songs to be longer in an album. I would go to Yuki and say, “In this section, I don’t have anything.” So, you have to make something kind of up and see what you come up with. He’s a genius. He was, “Oh, cool. I got it.” So many of those songs, like “Only See Her” and “Let Her Go,” resulted from the collaboration. There are a couple of main parts in those songs where it goes into some synth weirdness, and you hear a growling synth line and all that stuff, and he’s doing crazy things. That was all BIGYUKI. I was like, “Bro, just do your thing.” He has some sections on the last song, “Was It Really Love,” where he just harmonized whatever the original harmony and melody were and made it new – and he did that on that song. On a couple of tracks, he just took control and went crazy places.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Was that the point where you knew you had an album?
JHARIS YOKLEY: Yes, I just put 10 Instagram beats into a Dropbox folder and thought, I guess this will be the album. I didn’t know, because we don’t have the track order and everything else thought out at that early stage. Once we recorded, I thought these songs were more fleshed out now. And then, once we did the vocals, I thought there was a cohesive sound – which I didn’t think there was before because there were just 10 random beats.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Let’s talk a little bit about the recording process. You mentioned you went up to go to Woodstock to record the album. How did you start with the basic tracks?
JHARIS YOKLEY: All of the tracks are built from the demos. The demo is in every single track on the album. Some of the melody lines are just me, playing it from the MIDI keyboard from years ago in my bedroom. They stayed on the album because I liked that sound, and Yuki fleshed out the sounds and made them fuller.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Did you overlay a real kit regarding the percussion and the drums?
JHARIS YOKLEY: Exactly, because my friend had a studio I would go to, and I recorded drums in the demo versions. So, my demos were fleshed out. They didn’t sound like many other demos, but I did want to redo the drums to play with Yuki. Yuki and I have an excellent synergy when playing drums and synths together. I wanted to erase my old drums and replay them with Yuki to get some of that synergy and improvisational spirit. It was recorded live, and since Yuki’s only one guy, he had to go back and overdub some things. He did the bass, and then I did the drums live.

PRESTON FRAZIER: After that process, was there editing involved?
JHARIS YOKLEY: We had to cut and fade out some of the songs. We had fun. There was editing after the recording. I got the files back, and I went back to Brooklyn. I messed around a little bit with the mixing and effects, like the song “Miss You” is the most different from the recording session, because the original demo is just like a four on the floor, with a more dancey groove. I might mess around with doing a remix of that song, actually, with that original groove. Just by happenstance, at the end of one of the takes, I was messing around, and I played this weird groove, which ended up being the groove that goes on the first half of “Miss You.” Since I didn’t like the four on the floor, I took a sample of me messing around at the end of the recording session and just looped it on the first section of “Miss You.” Otherwise, “Miss You” might not have made the album.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Did you initially intend to sing on this release?
JHARIS YOKLEY: No, not at all. I’m not a singer. This is my first time jumping into that lane. Jose was just like, “Yeah, man – do it.” It’s funny because when the pandemic happened, we had never played together before. At that point, I had just gotten the gig with him in March of 2020, so right before the pandemic hit. He gave me voice lessons. I had vocal lessons with Jose about once a month or something. Singers have my respect. No, singing was not on the menu when I first started – but I’m glad it’s here now.