The Dears' Natalia Yanchak Releases 'Final Fridays' Story Inspired by 'The Office'

While Montreal group the Dears have a bit of downtime with only a handful of summer festival dates planned this year, singer-keyboardist Natalia Yanchak has a deadline looming and intends to hit it.

Actually, she might be burning the midnight oil this evening since it is tomorrow (June 1) to be exact. Yanchak plans to post her first piece of "publicly available fiction" online. Fans subscribing to her Scribd page get first crack at hearing Yanchak read it for an audio podcast.

"Myself, I'm not much of a songwriter, I sort of help on the arranging side or the production side," Yanchak tell Spinner. "So it's like of like a creative outlet for me that's just really coming from me."

Yanchak always wanted to be a wordsmith, but that desire was dampened as a Concordia University creative writing class "basically destroyed" the urge for about a decade. A little while ago after gathering up some ideas, she took action. And while Yanchak quickly points out "it's not science fiction" in the traditional sense, there is some science to it.

"I take it as a learning experience where I have to research these scientific concepts or astrophysical formulas and stuff like that," she says. "Stuff that I don't really know anything about even though I was in enriched math in high-school. I really enjoy that exploration."

Recent blog posts show she's putting the pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, rather.

Yanchak recently submitted a piece into an environmental-themed writing contest hosted by io9, a website primarily geared towards science fiction writing. "They were trying to encourage people in that a lot of policy can come from this creative thinking, real life policies coming from people with fantastic ideas and trying to solve them even though it's fiction," she says. "So that inspired me to write this longer story."

As for her first public piece, Yanchak described it on her blog as a cross between 'The Office' TV show ("the U.S. version," she says) -- and the novel 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.' It seems she's at a loss for how else to describe the piece, which is entitled 'Final Fridays' and concerns a robot, an office worker named Elton Barnes and draconian coffee workplace regulations.

"I haven't thought about the one-sentence synopsis," she says. "It's a normalized office. It's like a work day interaction that sort of satirizes the normal life in a near future way."

And she assures Spinner that the story has nothing to do with her bandmates.

"It's not music related in anyway way," says Yanchak. "Even I would roll my eyes if I was doing that. 'It's a Pitchfork-near-future-dystopia.' I'm just joking."

So no plans then for a sci-fi concept album from the Dears down the road?

"No, they're all sci-fi albums, they're all apocalypse albums," she jokes.

As for what's actually going on with the Dears, Yanchak says the band are always writing, so "there's definitely stuff brewing" towards the next studio album they'll start working on in 2012. In the meantime, they'll be touring their latest release, 'Degeneration Street,' and likely recounting their spot on Funny Or Die's Music Time With Jennie P ad nauseam.

"We're not actors and when we make music videos we have to plead with the directors that they don't make us act," says Yanchak. "So it was weird because we were in this tiny studio and they were asking us to say lines. We were like, 'This is going on Funny Or Die? But this is going to be Die.' But they did a really good job of editing it and it actually made us laugh."

Yanchak only hopes her own editing skills match those of Funny or Die.

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