If you dread Valentine's Day -- the gooey candy, the cheap champagne, the skyrocketing cost of flowers -- take solace in today's delicate in-studio performance from Yo La Tengo. The veteran indie rock trio of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew joins us to play three delicate love songs from their new album, Fade. Plus: how the third-place entry in the recent "Draw Yo La Tengo" contest ended up inside the CD cover. And: Ira talks about the band's upcoming performance of a live score for filmmaker Sam Green's new documentary The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller. 

Ira Kaplan on celebrating Valentine's Day:

"I grew up in a household without organized religion, so the informal religion in our house was 'no holidays.' Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, it was all, uh -- Flag Day was kinda big, but other than that it wasn't much."

Ira on naming the album "Fade," a word that pops up in the album's lyrics:

"That was actually accidental. It's something we'd avoided consciously over the years. Not only a title song, but pulling a line from the record [for the title]. When the idea of calling the record 'Fade' came up, we all looked at each and said, 'Yeah, I think that would be appropriate.' We lived with it for a while, and everyone kind of liked it. At the time, we weren't actually singing the songs -- we had finished the record and were working on other things. Then, when we got around to practicing the songs, we said, 'Oh of course it's appropriate.' It's mentioned in two or three songs."

Set List

• "Before We Run"
• "Is That Enough"
• "The Point of It"