Yes You Are banks on a series of ‘destiny moments’

Late on a Sunday morning, the five members of Yes You Are have arranged themselves in the basement of guitarist Jared White’s childhood home in Shawnee, cramming themselves and their instruments among the couches and the large indoor plants. It’s an impromptu-looking scene, but the band averages four or five rehearsals like this every week. And here, White’s mom always feeds them.

Jacob Temeyer busies himself behind an elaborate keyboard station. Joe Wilner is tucked into a corner with his drums. White stands in front of him, looking like he skipped his coffee. Next to him, bassist Willie Jordan (also of Drugs & Attics) looks like a young Jack White without trying especially hard.

The four of them start playing, and Kianna Alarid, the group’s unmistakable frontwoman, sings her first note. The room melts away.

Alarid plays no instrument. Instead, the music plays her. There’s little room here for her to dance, but that doesn’t stop her from twisting her body in place and shaking her head in time with the heavy beats of “World Without End.” Her dark hair falls around her face as she belts into a tightly grasped microphone. She looks fierce. She is in charge.

Alarid, 36, has worked on her craft a long time. She spent most of her 20s in the Omaha, Nebraska, band Tilly and the Wall, which rose to a comfortable level of success in the mid-aughts, touring with Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley (and, later, Jenny Lewis), and then came to an abrupt halt.

“Two of the members in my Omaha band had gotten married and had kids, and so we just went on this break,” Alarid says. “I had been doing that my whole adult life. Tilly and the Wall started in 2001, and I was 22, and we went on break when I was 31, maybe. I was a full-on adult who had done that my whole life, so when that stopped, I was like, ‘What do I do now?'”

In an effort to start over, Alarid moved to Kansas City in 2010, settled in and started looking for creative partners. Nothing went anywhere until she met White, in spring 2013.

“Jared is the one who found me,” she says. “He got in touch through friends of friends, and he was also working on music, his own stuff. And I had gone all over, worked with all these people, and I was looking for a collaborator. And I think Jared was looking for a girl — I want to say a face, like the face of a band.”

White, whom Alarid calls a brilliant, very intense musician, is Yes You Are’s mastermind, the mysterious Oz behind the curtain. That they found each other was, she says, a “destiny moment.” It’s a phrase she repeats often in our conversation. For Alarid, Yes You Are was the vital next step in her career, and she communicates her gratitude for the band’s formation in almost metaphysical terms.

“The question that sort of changed every­thing for me was when Jared asked me, ‘You know that that band [Tilly and the Wall] wasn’t the biggest thing you’ll ever do in your life, right?'” she says. “And I just felt like, ‘Oh.’ It was this release. That was that. It was over. That was a year and a half ago. It feels like one minute ago and a hundred years ago.”

Sunday’s practice session over with, we are speaking over wine and food at Westport’s Cucina della Ragazza. Alarid and Temeyer are both present, but Alarid does most of the talking. She speaks with a dramatic flair that fits her striking appearance: heavy eye makeup, bright-pink lipstick, tall platform shoes that look like an impulsive Etsy purchase.

Temeyer, 25, sips his wine and nods along. In addition to keyboard duty, Temeyer is also the band’s engineer; he’s the one who has cobbled together 12 demos for the band’s untitled forthcoming album. It’s a work in progress. The group hasn’t settled on a recording studio yet but has posted three songs on Bandcamp.

In fact, Yes You Are’s online presence is borderline secretive. There is no website and no names listed on Facebook. But anyone who has seen Yes You Are live can attest that the band has arrived as a fully formed authority.

“There is nothing else for us,” Alarid says. “We are insane. We put all of our focus into this. What’s that phrase, ‘You work to live until you live to work.’ That’s true. We know what we want. We just don’t know how we’re going to get there. Not yet. But I think when you’re OK with that, something releases. Like, if you’re willing to let everything go, the things you want will end up coming to you.”

For Alarid, being in Yes You Are means maintaining this odd balance between Zen and zeal. Part of that approach, she says, she owes to her 3-year-old daughter, Ori.

“My kid is everything to me,” she says. “She’s every waking minute. And we have the best relationship because she sees how focused I am on my dream. I think something happens when you start to believe in your dream, when you just train yourself to believe in something that everyone else will say is impossible. My daughter, she sees how happy Mommy is. And I want her to see me succeed.”