Scott Yoder rolls into town on his ‘Lover, Let Me In’ US tour

The Fotons, a two-piece art rock outfit between Sophia Muñoz and Frank Calzada, Dayton’s answer to The White Stripes, will also be performing.

Yoder’s “Lover, Let Me In” tour, in support of his latest record of the same name, kicked off at a VFW hall in Missoula, MT. Every night from Oct. 1 through Nov. 8 is booked, spanning nearly half the country — an audacious schedule considering the tapped-out van. When we spoke, the tour was only 24 hours old. It would be just as long until the van would croak in the middle of Big Sky Country.

Yoder’s music echoes The Kinks, T.Rex and Television, while his visual aesthetic lives somewhere between David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust. He suggests that his penchant for the theatrical — flamboyant, dandyish and otherworldly, as it’s been described — can possibly be traced back to being a latchkey only child.

“I definitely had a lot of alone time to kind of explore entertainment, and worlds that have that,” Yoder said. “I guess that would be the mechanism for how I got involved with things that are more showy. But as far as my innate draw to that, it’s hard to really pinpoint why I wanted that. I mean, there’s plenty of people that are only children that don’t end up like me.”

When he left his previous project, The Pharmacy, Yoder started his solo venture in 2015 with just an acoustic guitar. He slowly built up band members, adding only what was needed. Then, at a certain point, he felt if he were going to make a loud enough noise, if he were to demand and command the audience’s attention, he was going to have to be something to look at, too.

“I’ve been in front of enough strangers that I think I only feel comfortable when I’m on stage,” he said. “The stage is a place to put on a big show. You are putting on a show because you’re on stage and there are lights on you. You are asking people for their attention. The thing I want to draw attention to is all my bombastic, colorful ideas, visually.”

Yoder performs intentionally, perhaps out of some subconscious attention-seeking trait born out of being an only child. Using the full possibilities of the stage is his way of paying respect to it. But, as he points out, even the bearded folk singer wearing jeans is a form of dress up. The level of dress up is the thing that varies.

“I really wanted to set out to not obscure any of my songs or any of my lyrics or ideas with a band,” Yoder said. “With my previous band, I felt maybe a little bit more like an anonymous band member. I didn’t feel like there was as strong a vision for how things were being carried across. So I just wanted to be very intentional about the songs and have them be completely unadorned and be able to stand on their own.”

Digging through stacks of old records, and not finding it particularly enticing to be into whatever the present moment has going on, Yoder keeps his interest locked decades before his time. As a Millennial, raised on reruns, Yoder’s fixations live in the past, hence the comparisons to The Kinks, T. Rex, Television, and Bowie.

But he appears as much informed by film and visuals as he does by music.

Despite the loud imagery, Yoder suggests he’s a rather distant person. Self-contained, introspective and cerebral, it’s only fitting he wrote his fifth solo album solo, tucked away in his tiny house in Seattle with only a litter of feral cats for company — an only child, through and through. Over the course of 10 tracks, “Lover, Let Me In” ruminates on Lebanese poets, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the urgency of his first love.

“I can be aloof, but I think this record is me trying to crack that open and shake myself out of it,” he said. “This whole project is about trying to connect with people in ways I can’t through words.”

As of this sentence, Yoder’s found new wheels — a decommissioned morgue minivan, in fact. But instead of corpses, it now carries four 1970s-attired bandmates, sputtering toward the next gig, and the next, and the next. Lover, let them in.

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