It’s been six years since I started writing about Yeasayer. It’s been five years since I made a very tired Yeasayer sit up against a wall in the Commodore Ballroom to pose for our photoshoot, looking more miserable than they are in real life, because in real life outside of photos, they’re lovely chaps.

It’s been four years since I saw another amazing Yeasayer show, on the Fragrant World tour, and hung out with Yannis from Foals afterward.

And it was just in January when an incredible,  “I am Chemistry” single and video landed in our laps and shook me out of a funk. A collaboration with amazing Montreal-born artist David Altmejd, the video matched the song, twisted and intriguing, and signalled the sign of things to come: album Amen & Goodbye dropped a few months later and I was, as I said, ridiculously excited. Six years after I started writing about Yeasayer, and on the cusp of fmy *cough-tieth* birthday on May 29th at the Imperial, I reconnected with Anand, Ira and Chris, and it felt so good.

So good to sway through “Half Asleep” and “Gerson’s Whistle” to kick off the set, so good to bellow through “Henrietta” and chant about handsome farmers in “2080”, so incredibly good to dance like a loon and beam along with the rest of the club to “Madder Red” and “Ambling Alp” and “One” in the encore.

So good to watch Anand command the room amid light-flashing cutouts of Kali, babies Mark Twain. So good to see Chris unhook himself from his side-facing keyboards to jolt and joke,. So good to see Ira masterfully riding pedals and creating crunchy, frontbone-not-backbone bass sounds. But the best? The most goodest of all? The merch guy wasn’t lying when he raved: “Wait till you hear the live version of ‘I Am Chemistry’”. He wasn’t kidding. “I am Chemistry”, the song that hooked me back in January, was MASSIVE and more meaty, live. It reminded me how good, so good, that Yeasayer can be. As long as they keep surprising me, keep moving me, keep piquing my brain and making me dance, I’ll be writing about them. It’s been 19 days since I saw them. But who’s counting? \m/