16 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
1
BROTHERHOODDEPT.
SUNANDMOON
R
ick Yorn, the Hollywood manager
and producer, was dining recently
with his younger brother and client,
the singer-songwriter Pete Yorn, at
Walker’s, in Tribeca, after a day of pro-
moting Pete’s new album, “Caretakers.”
Rick, fifty-one, is six years older than
Pete, whose 2001 début, “Musicforthe-
morningafter,” established his reputa-
tion as a songwriter’s songwriter. A
third Yorn brother, Kevin, the oldestby three years, is an entertainment at-
torney. He lives in Los Angeles, where
all three Yorns, formerly of New Jer-
sey, now make their home.
Rick wore a baseball cap at a jaunty
angle; Pete was in a black Psychedelic
Furs T-shirt. They sound like brothers,
but they don’t look much alike. Pete is
melancholic, with black hair and brown
eyes, like their mother, Joan. Rick is fair
and blue-eyed, and he smiles a lot—a
slightly sideways grin reminiscent of
his client Leonardo DiCaprio. He looks
more like their father, Lawrence, a re-
tired dentist, who wanted his youngest
son to be a tax attorney.
“He’s got more of the sun in him,”
Pete said, gesturing across the red-
checked tablecloth at his big brother.
“I’ve got more of the moon.”
The dreamy synths-and-strings jan-
gle of “Caretakers” (produced by thirty-
year-old Jackson Phillips, who co-wrote
many of the songs with Pete) echoes a
particular musical moment in the early
eighties, as it played out in the Yorns’
split-level ranch in Montville, twenty-five
miles west of the city. Music was the
brothers’ obsession. Rick had a drum kit
in the basement, and when the older boys
jammed with their friends, who’d bring
over Marshall stacks, “Petey,” barely seven,
was allowed to hang out and listen.
“Rick would be the drummer, and
my oldest brother would be the singer,”
Pete recalled. “And they would have
these burned-out older high-school kids
over, and my parents would let them
smoke. And I’m thinking, This is the
coolest shit ever.”
“Kevin loved metal,” Rick added,
“but he was more of a singles-pop guy.
Remember? All over his floor, there
were scratched up maxi-singles from
Madonna and Bryan Adams—”
“Blue Öyster Cult, Rick Springfield,”
Pete cut in.
“Yeah, but he loved Zeppelin, too.
And he loved Van Halen. We loved
Halen.”
But then, in the early eighties, Rick
brought new sounds to the basement.
He got into alternative (R.E.M.) and
Brit Pop (the Cure, the Smiths), which
were not Kevin’s thing. “Kevin never
went alternative,” Pete said. “Maybe
some New Wave stuff.”
Pete’s music is full of nostalgic refer-
ences to those bands and styles; he seemsSean Spicer
very visual when I learn,” he said. “I’m
not one of those people who can, like,
read directions. If I get a set of direc-
tions, instead of reading it, I YouTube
it.” Spicer likes to watch a tape of each
day’s rehearsal and study what he needs
to improve.
Did he see any parallels between
dancing on TV and his tenure as press
secretary? “None,” he said. “Well, maybe
puns: like, dancing around things?” He
said that, when he watched clips of
himself giving press briefings, “I would
go, Oh, wow, I didn’t realize I came off
that way. I should’ve kept that answer
tighter.” The rehearsal studio is on the
other side of the Potomac from the
Holocaust Museum (Spicer once re-
ferred to Auschwitz as a “Holocaust
center”) and from the Martin Luther
King, Jr., memorial (he once told the
press that “just the other day” Trump
“sat down with civil-rights leader
M.L.K., Jr.”).
The producer wanted to shoot a reel
of Spicer and his partner rehearsing,
to use on the show. He filmed Spicer
putting on his knee pads, which were
dinged from days of practice.
“Do you know what a tango is?”
Spicer’s partner asked him.
“No,” he said. “Well, I know that
it’s fast, and a little Latin.”
“It’s a sharp, accented dance,” she
told him. “We saw the fun Spicey, but
this is serious.”
The producer wanted to start again
at the knee slide. Spicer’s partner gave
him some notes. “I’d rather you slide
only, like, two inches, and have a big
moment,” she said. “I’d rather have it
be a mini slide than a massive fall.”
Afterward, they solemnly watched
the first take on a monitor.
“The slide looks like it’s just check-
ing the box,” Spicer said, dejected.
“You’re O.K.,” his partner said. “Noth-
ing’s worse than a cringey moment, and
I’m not seeing you do that. It looks clean,
and it doesn’t look painful.”
They’d been rehearsing six days a
week. “For my wedding, my wife and I
took a lesson or two,” Spicer said. “And
then we thought, This is silly, we’ll just
wing it. I basically didn’t dance at my
own wedding.”
Spicer’s dance partner counted out,
“Five, six, seven, eight,” and then she
and Spicer tangoed across the room.
“Elbow up, drop the shoulder,” she in-
structed him. After ninety minutes,
Spicer was breathless and sweaty. Eyes
closed in concentration, he took a few
spins around the studio, partnerless,
going over the routine on his own.
His partner gave him more tips. “Ev-
erything needs to be regal and upright,”
she said. “Think of it as though you’re
walking under a small ceiling. And
what did I tell you to do if the floor is
slippery? Take small steps.”
Spicer took it all in. “If you suck,
you get kicked off,” he said. “From a
military standpoint, I’m an after-action
person, like: What went well? How
did that go? That’s how I’ve lived most
of my life.”
—Antonia Hitchens