Armed with a reverence for rock’s unsung heroes, obscure arthouse films and the excruciating minutiae of New York Mets baseball, Ira Kaplan is probably one of the sharpest non-conformists making music today. But on this particular sunny day at home in Manhattan, he’s taking a moment to consider the idea of sticking to a plan. “You know, a lot of the things we do, we do as close to ‘by accident’ as we can,” he says, with just a hint of irony. “We always try to be open to the possibilities and receptive to what’s around us. In a way, that sounds like a plan, but we don’t mean it to be.”

In fact, Yo La Tengo—consisting of Kaplan, his wife and drummer Georgia Hubley, and bassist James McNew—have made a storied career out of tearing up the rock blueprint. On the trio’s all-acoustic Freewheelin’ Yo La Tengo tour back in 2007, for example, they made the audacious move to take audience requests (which they’ve also done during their annual fundraising visits to WFMU radio in New Jersey). And, back in 1990, Kaplan and Hubley started collecting material for an album of their favorite cover songs, spliced with original material—an album, aptly named Fakebook, that they hadn’t even expected to make. So, for the band to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Fakebook’s release with yet another covers album seems almost…well, conventional.

But here’s the thing: like Fakebook, YLT’s latest outing, Stuff Like That There, which was released in August on Matador, ripples with a sense of unbridled spontaneity that breathes new life into some familiar chestnuts, even as it showcases the band’s irrepressible curiosity, along with a healthy dose of self-awareness. “I would say we certainly didn’t want to call it Fakebook 2 or Son Of Fakebook,” Kaplan quips. “We wanted to strike a balance between explicitly doing something again, but giving it its own identity. We did try to make it sound off- the-cuff. Sometimes it’s not as off-the-cuff as it may seem, but I hope the record feels like we’re just sitting around singing some songs.”

To add to the ‘round-the-campfire feel, the band invited a couple of old friends to help stir the embers. First came guitarist Dave Schramm, who played lead guitar in the earliest incarnation of YLT and also contributed to the Fakebook sessions. Schramm’s rich tone and fluid phrasings, rife with vibrato and watery reverb, lend a vintage Sun Studio sheen to songs like “Automatic Doom” (written by bassist Dan Cuddy and recorded by his Hoboken, N.J.-based dream-pop band, The Special Pillow, which grew out of the legendary Hypnolovewheel—a YLT fave) and the Hank Williams classic “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (a longtime live staple, with an arrangement inspired by Al Green’s own cover version from 1973’s Call Me).

Producer, mixing guru and dB’s alum Gene Holder also sat in at the console—his first work in the studio with Yo La Tengo since 1992’s May I Sing with Me. “We have such a long history together,” Kaplan notes with a chuckle, “and stuff like that really ends up being extra emotional when you’re building on something that’s been under construction for the whole life of the band. Where he’s really at his best is the mixing, and so some of the slap echo you hear, once we used it, we were like, ‘Yeah, we should keep coming back to that.’”

With the gang all back together, it was McNew’s turn to make a daring and radical move when it came time to figure out the album’s instrumentation. Since Fakebook had been tracked in its entirety with Al Greller on upright bass, McNew declared that he would do the same. The only catch: He’d played electric bass all his life. He hadn’t even attempted to play an upright bass until earlier this year, let alone owned one.

“Sure, it’s a pretty big lifestyle change!” McNew says, decidedly without understatement. “I found one in Texas that I really liked, and through the help of some very dear friends who I owe very big favors, I managed to get it back to New York by early January. Then, basically, I homeschooled myself for a while, and learned just enough to make an album. [Laughs.]

I kept at it all the time, and I still have so far to go, but I really enjoy it. It’s also a gigantic pain in the ass. Now I totally understand why the electric bass was invented. It’s a great size, it’s a little bigger than a guitar, it’s got frets so you can see where all the notes go and it’s really loud. It’s way better than upright bass. But I’ve come to love this thing, and I love playing it. It really is like starting over, you know?”

For all of the straightfoward simplicity its title implies, Stuff Like That There is layered with the odd nuances and quirks that Yo La Tengo fans have come to expect and cherish, revealing a band that, after three decades of recording, touring and woodshedding, is thoroughly at ease in its own skin. The beating heart of the record resides with Hubley, whose spare but insistent grooves and mesmerizing vocals transform a song like Darlene McCrea’s “My Heart’s Not in It,” which opens the album, into a dreamy drive-in ode to lost romance and innocence. And then, further on, she and Kaplan sing “The Ballad of Red Buckets” (Yo La Tengo covering Yo La Tengo—who’d have thought?) in near-whispered harmony over a hypnotic, Autobahn-ish beat that renders the song almost unrecognizable, in a pleasantly surprising twist, from the shoegazey original.

“We’ve played that in a lot of ways over the years,” Kaplan explains, “and probably pretty early on—I don’t remember when specifically—Georgia started singing it. On Electr-O-Pura [1995], it’s just me singing the verses, and then, that changed at some point. So having a new vocal arrangement has made it a song that we’re extra attracted to, and in playing it live, when things have taken on a new light, it makes it extra interesting for us.”

Elaborating further, McNew ties the new arrangement to the band’s more recent Fade tour. Broken into two sets—one quiet and folky, one loud and amplified—the shows became crucibles for experimentation, with “Red Buckets” emerging from the quiet set. “Ira would play a Wurlitzer electric piano sound, I would play an acoustic 12-string through a ton of analog delay and Georgia would play drums. And it had this really dreamy feel to it. But Ira made up this cool left-hand bassline part and, basically, I just copied that and put it on the upright [for the album version]. If there’s one thing I love, then it’s never changing, and playing the same part until the song is over. [Laughs.] That’s one of my favorite things in the world to do, especially with Georgia. It’s such a nice feeling when we just lock up like that—I feel sad when the song ends. I just want to keep going!”

From the countrified whimsy of The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” to the summery, psychedelic drift of Antietam’s “Naples,” the album provides copious glimpses not only into the band’s incomparable chemistry, but also into their enviable taste in music and their wonderfully diverse record collections. Yo La Tengo have always come across as devout fans of well-crafted songs, whether they’re lingering with love over the vivid imagery of Great Plains’ “Before We Stopped to Think” (sung reverently, almost elegiacally, by Kaplan and punctuated by Schramm’s beautiful guitar vibrato) or fleshing out new material of their own (like the jazz- kissed “Rickety,” with McNew laying down a bass pulse that nods to Coltrane’s “Acknowledgment” from A Love Supreme).

“You know, when we started looking over what we’d done in the past,” Kaplan recalls, “I would say ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ and [Sun Ra’s] ‘Somebody’s In Love’ are probably the two that we’ve played the most over the years. In the case of ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,’ it goes way back. We very well may have done that song without James, it goes so far back in our repertoire. But once we decided this was what we wanted to do, all these other songs just kept coming into our minds—songs that we had never played, and then other songs that we had played maybe once or twice. It’s not that different from any other process, except the songs for the most part aren’t ours. One thing led to another, and suggested another. We ended up recording 22 songs, so this is about two-thirds of them.”

With all this in mind, after 14 albums and three decades honing his chops, Kaplan still seems to be just as hungry, just as driven, as he was growing up in the suburbs north of New York City. And, as always happens when one gets older, the things that influenced him when he was very young somehow started to find their way back into his purview. Just a few days after this interview, in fact, Kaplan headed to Chicago to join Alex Bleeker and The Freaks for an after-show tribute during the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well weekend.

“Oh yeah!” Kaplan exclaims animatedly. “I spent a lot of time listening to the Dead when I was pre-punk rock. And then for me, punk rock was such a sea change that I was like, ‘OK, now I’m listening to Patti Smith.’ And then, it just kind of [crept] back. One day, not long ago, I put on Live/Dead and listened to the song ‘Feedback,’ which I remember finding completely unlistenable when I was young. As much as I loved that record, I was gonna stick with sides one through three. This ‘Feedback’ thing was not for me. And this time, I listened to it and it was like, ‘Oh, ‘Dark Star’ is OK, but ‘Feedback’—Oh my god!’ So, in some ways, every time I do an interview, every question gets the same answer. It’s very moving to me to have the Grateful Dead as part of this timeline of my life, and to have another interaction with them in a different moment.” (Kaplan is also slated to contribute to The National’s long- awaited Dead tribute project.)

Gearing up for a fall tour of the U.S. and Europe (yes, they will be joined by Schramm—his first tour with the band since 1986—and yes, McNew will play upright bass), Yo La Tengo are poised, once again, to challenge the notion of what it means to be rock stars. Mainstream acceptance and gold record sales have eluded them, but they’ve never coveted widespread recognition anyway, nor attached a monetary figure to success. As McNew puts it, they’re just not built to be jaded, mostly because they’re still having way too much fun.

“These shows coming up, I’m actually nervous and excited about,” he says. “I’ve yet to play in front of people with the upright, so I’m feeling that. It’s got me a little shook up, but I think I’ll be OK. But really, we’ve been so busy this year—our first show of 2015 was only just at the end of June, in Calgary. And it was great to have the family together again. It was so much fun to just let it rip. To have that and to do that again, and to feel that power onstage, it’s just so fun to be in front of people again. It felt really great.”

And with the band touring well into November, the question then arises: Will Yo La Tengo ever bring back their much- vaunted Hanukkah shows?

“We don’t plan either way,” Kaplan says. “The answer is not ‘no way,’ and the answer is not ‘for sure.’ If a situation makes sense, then we’ll do it. The Hanukkah shows started almost as a joke, and then it became a dare, and then once we did it the first time, it was so different from anything else we did that we felt like we had to do it again, and the next thing we knew, we had a tradition. And then Maxwell’s [in Hoboken] closed, and that made it—I think we had gotten to the point where we were feeling too much pressure to do them. We weren’t disappointed, but that was one of the perks of Maxwell’s closing. It made it easy to take a break from that, and see if we want to do it again. If it happens, then it’ll come more from inside than from market forces.” [Laughs.]

Whatever comes to pass, whether they’re “murdering the classics” or just freewheeling it, Yo La Tengo have staunchly maintained their commitment to craft, creative instinct and authenticity, all while joyously flying by the seat of their collective pants. It takes a canny sense of humor, and maybe just a little zen attitude, to keep that up for 30 years. And they’re definitely not done yet.