Pitchfork

Photo by Kirstie Shanley

Loose, limber, and ready to lay it all out, the venerable New Jersey institution known as Yo La Tengo will lope their way around North America on their Freewheeling Yo La Tengo tour, which kicks off this evening in Pittsburgh.

For a month, the band will play shows of an unstructured nature, using last year's righteous ...Beat Your Ass LP as the jump off, but with nary a musical diversion too far out, nary an anecdote too rambling and incoherent. Their website describes the tour like so: "A little bit 'Storytellers', a little bit 'Unplugged', with a soupçon of their famously varied Hanukkah shows, it will feature the band playing an almost-acoustic set of songs from their entire catalog, with stories about their life as a band, and an encouraged back-and-forth with the audience."

Freewheeling, see? That's just how they're gonna roll.

Yo La Tengo:

10-09 Pittsburgh, PA - Warhol Museum (two shows) %
10-10 Bloomington, IN - Buskirk-Chumley Theater %
10-11 Chicago, IL - Lakeshore Theater (two shows) %
10-12 Milwaukee, WI - Discovery World Museum
10-13 Grand Rapids, MI - Calvin College Fine Arts Center %
10-19 Port Washington, NY - Jeanne Rimsky Theater at Landmark on Main Street %
10-20 Woodstock, NY - Colony Cafe (two shows) %
10-22 Philadelphia, PA - First Unitarian Church Sanctuary %
10-23 Alexandria, VA - Birchmere %
10-27 Mexico City, Mexico - Manifest Festival
10-29 Portland, OR - Aladdin Theater %
10-30 Seattle, WA - Town Hall %
11-01 San Francisco, CA - Palace of Fine Arts Theatre %
11-03 Hollywood, CA - Ivar Theatre (two shows) %
11-04 La Jolla, CA - Museum of Contemporary Art (two shows) %
11-10 North Adams, MA - Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art %
11-11 Ithaca, NY - Cornell University ^
11-15 Boston, MA - Museum of Fine Arts (two shows) %

% as the Freewheeling Yo La Tengo
^ with Broken Social Scene