Fairfax native Noah Yoo and singer-songwriter Sedona Schat are Cafuné. (Photo by Noah Falge)
Last year, Cafuné guitarist Noah Yoo’s cellphone began rapidly pinging with notifications from Shazam, an app that tells you what music you’re hearing, as apparently over 3,000 people wanted to know the name of their song “Tek It.” Most of them were users of the popular video-sharing social-media platform TikTok, where the alt-pop band's single, released in 2019, was the soundtrack for a variety of video clips.
Things have changed since then for Yoo and the other half of the band, vocalist Sedona Schat, who met at New York University. The band is now signed with Elektra Records, and Cafuné has its own TikTok account with nearly 143,000 followers. They’re also opening for Scottish pop band Chvrches at The National on Sunday, July 31.
We spoke with Yoo as the 27-year-old Fairfax native was preparing for a performance in Brooklyn, talking about learning to play the violin, going viral and honing the band's sound.
Richmond magazine: What originally sparked your interest in music?
Noah Yoo: I grew up playing violin. Just, you know, classic Asian parents, “You’ve got to play violin,” type of vibe. But then over time, that sort of evolved into playing music in church, then bass guitar, then moved to playing guitar and bands in high school and stuff like that. But I was kind of a late bloomer, to use it generally. I didn't really start listening to bands until I was in eighth grade. Then once I really got into it, it became apparent pretty quickly that it was the only thing that I was interested in. Nothing else quite scratched that itch.
RM: Thinking back to when your song “Tek It” went viral on TikTok, describe your feelings when you found out the song had blown up.
NY: I’d just come back from a trip to Philadelphia, and I was sitting at a restaurant catching up on emails when we saw that our music just had been Shazamed something like 3,000 times. My reaction was like, “OK, that feels like a statistical anomaly.” So I asked our friend Jenny, who's now our manager, if she knew [what could account for this] Like, were we just playing in a very popular cafe somewhere? And then she said that it was just TikTok, so we should probably make an account.
RM: How have you used this experience to further your social media presence, particularly on TikTok?
NY: I was pretty active and around when Vine was first popping off around 2014, so for a long time I felt it [TikTok] was just like any other video app. But then once I started spending more time and allowing the algorithm into my life, I realized that it was a completely different beast. It's become one of the main ways that we can communicate with our fans. I feel that we can be very open with our fans and show them our studio and what we've been doing. We're doing a track-by-track series of the album we put out last year, telling different stories about the songs and giving people an insight as to what we were thinking about when we were writing them.
RM: What was it like during the first years of performing and producing the band?
NY: The main challenge was, especially during the NYU days, figuring out what kind of band we wanted it to be. As a two-piece, it was difficult to get a sense of how we wanted to write music and be able to play it live. What ended up happening was that the first part of our musical arc was a little more electronic-focused, and then through doing college shows and stuff like that, we realized that a lot of that music didn't translate quite the way that we wanted it to. As we expanded the band to be more of a full rock band, we found a sound in which we felt very comfortable. As far as self-producing, it's got its ups and downs. It means that you have a lot of creative control, but it's also a lot harder to know when to let a song go or when something is finished. I think that we like being self-sufficient, and I think that that's definitely a big priority for us.
RM: What are you most looking forward to on tour?
NY: One big thing, especially as it pertains to Richmond, growing up in Northern Virginia, Richmond is the closest to a real hometown show that I will have played. It'll certainly be the biggest Virginia show we played ever, so I have a lot of old friends from high school and family coming. I'm really looking forward to that. I've always wanted to share this part of my life and what I do with the people that I grew up with and with my family, so I'm looking forward to that night.
Cafuné opens for Chvrches at The National on Sunday, July 31, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $29. thenationalva.com
