Fuck Yeah. Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Describing how her bandmates have evolved over the past few years, Karen gets a bit choked up. “Brian’s like, the Buddha, the Jesus, the Mohammad. He’s the fucking saint, man,” she says, her voice straining with emotion. “Brian can always find a silver lining to any fucking dark cloud. For awhile, he was the rock in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then he went a bit rogue, really eccentric, finding his own place for himself, but he doesn’t fail.

It took me back to something Orzolek said in Brooklyn, about how she never knew what to say when fans told her the Yeah Yeah Yeahs helped them endure tough times. “You were asking, ‘If it’s so hard, why do you keep doing it,’ ” she began. “For one thing, this band has gotten us all through a lot. Me specifically, the death of one of my best friends around the time we started.” Her chin quivered, and her eyes welled up with tears. This was not a performance. “I was 22. I was a baby. I was totally traumatized and devastated and lost, and if I didn’t have the Yeah Yeah Yeahs taking me around the world… . I’m no different than some of these fans. Next time a fan says that to me, I’m going to say, ‘Me, too, dude.’

Every Sunday night circa 2000, Orzolek and a friend, “a rockabilly Korean girl who watched only French new-wave films,” would go to Shout, a mod dance party held at Bar 13 off Union Square, so Orzolek could practice her persona. “I’d have, like, seven cosmopolitans and be doing knee slides on the dance floor,” she said. “It was like my coming out.

Orzolek said she remembered the moment when she discovered that lightness. “I was in fifth grade,” she told me over margaritas and chicken wings at a Cajun restaurant near her downtown apartment. “We had to do a lip-sync performance of ‘Wild Thing,’ and I was the lead singer. The girls wore poodle skirts, but I was the boy. I slicked my hair back and wore these sunglasses that were so dark I couldn’t see, which was great, ’cause I was pretty unaware of the audience. I got up and just went nuts. I went totally crazy. It really freaked out a lot of the teachers and the kids too, because I was goofy but pretty mild-mannered. It was like this thing came out.