June 2025
“Hopefully I’m becoming a better person, a better songwriter…”
Blake Christiana, the gravel voiced vocalist and guitar player for Yarn is speaking about the direction of the group’s new music, hinting at mentions of gospel choirs other elements that are new to the group on their forthcoming album.
“In my earlier recorings, you’ll hear whiskey and women. I mean, it served its purpose. But as time has gone on I’ve become more thoughtful of what’s happening in the world and what people need out of music, and I think that’s connection and release.”
It’s a perspective and musical sound that took some exploration to find. Yarn developed their country sound in one of the most unlikely of places, early 2000’s New York City. The group got their start seemingly through sheer hustle and stubbornness.
It began when a musician Christiana played with booked a weekly gig at a Greenwich Village bar called Kenny’s Castaways. Christiana describes the shows as a hodgepodge of musicians and a lot of songs written out as simple chord charts and the oft changing group of musicians would take the stage weekly and see how the crowd reacted.
Those nights became Yarn, the band made up of different people coming and going, but the common linearity being those weekly nights in the bar performing to whoever showed up, whether that be a few or a packed house.
“At the time a lot of promoters were like ‘don’t book a show two weeks before or after,’ and I’m like screw that, there’s a lot of people in this city. If you wanna be a good player and really hone your chops, book every night of the week!” Christiana laughs recalling ignoring the conventional route.
“This was also when Napster was big and music was free. That’s around the time I started my music career, you know, just an impractical time. But I was bound and determined – let me sell a few tickets and t shirts.”
It was an era when radio was still dominant but a clunky collection of online outlets hadn’t fully formed yet. It left Christiana writing and performing a southern style of music in a very unsouthern location.
“I didn’t know about Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown. The internet didn’t have any part in it, definitely not social media, that wasn’t even really around. Maybe Myspace was around, but I didn’t know there was a radio format [for what would be known as alt country].”
Christiana took a handful of contacts given to him by a friend in another NYC band, Doc Marshalls, and reached to venues under the name of a fake manager and a fake booking agent.
“I just took to it the old school way: boots on the ground, and busted my ass!”
Yarn would release their debut self titled album in 2007. Since that time, the group has released a number of studio albums, one offs such as their limited cover record of songs from Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite For Destruction”, and most recently their first live album.
While Christiana has stayed the only consistent member of the nearly two decades long course of the group, to this day he continues the habit of going against the conventional grain. One major project is the group’s Yarnival Music Festival, a three day long concert that also has fire jugglers, stilt walkers, and other circus like sideshow performers across the festival grounds. He admits it was inspired by trips as a kid and a adult to places like Boston’s Quincy Market and New York’s Coney Island, where the freak shows left an impression that he feels compliment the musicians performing throughout the fifth year festival.
Throughout it all, Christiana maintains that its all an evolution of the energy of performing in that Greenwich Village bar each week – where you need to capture the room’s attention and keep it.
“It definitely made us improvisational and not afraid to be that way.”
As for the music, “The messages are really about love rather than the darkness which has been in my music for many years. Embracing the beautiful world, that’s how I feel, and more, how I want to feel about this life. And the music reflects that.”
Yarn will perform at the Crystal Bay Casino’s Crown Room on Saturday, June 21st.
Tickets are available here.
