Their tunes - with lush, folksy charm and lyrics that startle and ache - offer a way out of dead-end irony and rock recycling. Mike McGonigal went down to Georgia to search out the source of these simply sophisticated songs. His two-day visit to the band's home base unveils more than a school of music . . .
No other band put songs together like Neutral Milk Hotel. Their marching-band-from-slumberland sound captivated hearers of their joyful 1996 debut On Avery Island. Let's begin where NMH are most discernibly different: with their words, forged by Jeff Mangum, who also does the initial songwriting. It's hard to imagine anyone else singing lyrics like these ("Two-headed-boy, she is all you could need / She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires"), at least not convincingly. One set of imagistic word-clusters connects to another, leaving the listener pondering the song - and the new album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea.
The short, folky, plaintive "King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One" opens the album with Mangum's multi-tracked voice sweetly nasal-singing "When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers/And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees/In holy rattlesnakes that fell all round your feet." Jeff uses phrases like "and how you," "as we would," or "and this is the room" to link scenes and images together, making them whole -- a smart, speechlike device.
Mangum's magic realism is striking, too, not just in the convulsive beauty of its juxtapositions, but in the way it so imagistically conjures a scene. Real-life detail makes the scene authentic - Mom and Dad weren't just fighting, "she would stick a fork right into Daddy's shoulder." If you ever listen to music for any of the emotionally cathartic or romantic reasons that are curiously out of style these days, Mangum's songs are likely to resonate for you.
Early one morning, my wife, Paige La Grone, and I drive the five hours to Athens. Nowadays, a decade and a half after the initial music-community hype about the place has died down, it seems genuinely groovy and fun again. Before Austin or Seattle, after all, there was Athens - Pylon, the B-52s, Love Tractor, REM. . . . And today, once more, it is a booming music town.
Mangum lives in a house with busy, arty roommates who include his old friend Julian Koster (besides playing in NMH, he has solo project the Music Tapes, whose new, pop-up-packaged single is a collectible; and he contributes to the Black Swan Orchestra - a sort of ambient/found-sound outfit featuring members of off-kilter psych-pop act Olivia Tremor Control) and Jeff's girlfriend Laura Carter (she sings and plays keyboards in the big-sounding yet frisky Elf Power, whose album When the Red King Comes is out on Arena Rock; she's also in dadaist performance group Dixie Blood Mustache, for whom she plays a discontinued-model sax-synthesizer that sounds curiously warped). Their house is a sloppy, brilliant mess - pretty much what I'd imagined.
CDs and melodicas are strewn about. I spot discs by bizarre, genre-hopping '70s Brazilian rock act Os Mutantes; jazz bassist/ bandleader Charlie Haden; and musique concrte composer Pierre Henri. By the fridge there's a stack of gig flyers in psychedelic watercolors.
Old keyboards and reel-to-reel machines clutter the house. The walls are covered in artwork by friends and residents. A door is postered with photocopied images from turn-of-the-century editions of The New York Times, and in a corner there's a beautiful old organ a friend of Jeff's bought for 15 bucks and gave to him.
Next to the organ there's a physics book by Einstein, and another by John Cage on nothing. Part of the hallway is lined with tinfoil; big and elaborate puppet props from an Elf Power show are strewn about the living room. There are clothes in the corners, and a stack of vinyl records by Moondog, Minutemen, and Monk, among others. As she's showing us around, Laura gives a sneak preview of a string instrument she's making out of a gourd as a present for Jeff.
And there are two dogs - one looks almost like a big greyhound, the other's the ultimate Muppet mutt. The mutt, which looks way more like a stuffed animal than any living creature I've seen, was rescued from an animal-testing laboratory. The dogs are happy. They have a yard out back, but they clearly want to hang out with Laura and Jeff and their visitors.
Jeff Mangum smiles easily. Nevertheless, he's a bit shy, or guarded, at first. When he finally loosens up, the words trip over themselves, syllables smashing into one another as they scramble to get out. Jeff is a real good listener, too, and a pretty good storyteller. He's describing a cult headquarters in Georgia where some UFO conspiracy-theorists are building pyramids. He and his pals went there to take photos . . .
Mangum mostly looks like he spends his time hunched over a guitar or keyboard or mixing console. His hair is mid-length, swept back, doesn't look like it's been washed today but still looks good . . . his pants have holes, but who cares? He has the authentic look of cool - the look a serious artist or heavy-duty absent-minded scientist has, and he seems to be one of those people who lives healthy and looks good without trying. You can tell he doesn't think about the way he looks - except when he's going home to see his folks. Speaking of a trip there with Laura, he mutters, "I should try and find some clothes that don't have holes in them."
Mangum is charismatic in a low-key way, and clearly no egomaniac. While he doesn't seem oblivious to his talent, or embarrassed by it, he does downplay it (typical line: "I just write pop songs, you know?") while enthusing about others' work. (In this he reminds me of the genuinely humble Jim O'Rourke, the experimental Chicago guitarist/producer/engineer who's fairly recently discovered the delights of pop-based sound.)
Jeff and I settle down to talk in the living-room, focusing first on the songwriting process.
Are you conducting experiments on how many words can be said in one breath, in one song?
[laughs] The songs sort of come out spontaneously; it'll take me a while to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word-bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next to the next, till it reaches the end. A stream of words keeps coming out like little blobs, in some sort of order. Like with "Two-headed Boy," each section sort of came out at a different time, so many I've forgotten most of them by now. None of the editing happens on paper: it goes on in my little computer-storage brain.
How often do you write songs?
All the time. There's at least four records' worth of stuff that's not out and may never come out ever . . .
Is it because these haven't fit in with the concepts of On Avery Island and Aeroplane? Because your records are concept records . . .
No. They're stories. But I guess a story is a concept, huh?
When you're walking around doing whatever, do you have melodies happening in your head?
All the time. My songs pretty much revolve in my brain most of the time. It's usually whatever's coming next. Right now I have a lot of Hawaiian music in my head.
Are you on a slack-key kick?
It's not real Hawaiian music - that's the closest thing to what it is that I can call it. For some reason I hear the ukulele in my head lately. It's like everything I've done, just intuition.
I know you're into French musique concrete composers like Ferrari and Henri, and I guess that's part of why NMH sounds so great - those dissonant touches in the background. The mixture of ethnic-influenced droning sound, carnival music, and total noise that you put in these pop songs seasons them and makes them instantly recognizable as Neutral Milk Hotel . . . but why don't you make out-and-out experimental stuff yourself, too?
Oh, I do. I do music like that. [Jeff later shows me boxes full of tapes of his experimental music that hardly anyone's heard.]
But with songwriting, there's a place I've reached where I'm comfortable expressing it openly. [Mangum made songs for 10 years before unleashing them on the public; since he's only been making experimental music for three and a half years, we might have to wait a while to get to hear it.]
The kind of music Ferrari and Henri make is part of the same angelic, otherworldly music that's in my head, and that a lot of the jazz guys seem to inhabit. It's amazing music, and it really has nothing to do with rock and roll.
How much of an influence are the sounds of the circus?
I'm very influenced by the circus. And by my dreams. In a lot of dreams I have, I'm in the circus. I'll dream there's a Ferris wheel in flames, and I'm walking through the crowd.
Do you think of different records as like different places in your head? Places that exist, but only you can see or hear them?
Oh, definitely.
And the record is sort of a document of that?
You're right. There's a certain feeling the songs come from, and the songs can't come into being unless the feeling comes to me. It's kind of an uncomfortable, lonely feeling I get in my stomach. And I get freaked out so I have to go play and sing; sometimes a song evolves, sometimes not. The songs are all sort of in the same place for sure.
"Song against Sex," and the one on the new album that goes, "Your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies" - these seem to be visceral reactions against copulating bodies. Does sex gross you out?
I'm grossed out about sex being used as a tool for power; about people not giving a shit about who they're putting their dick into. I've known a lot of people who have been badly damaged by some asshole's drunken hard-on. That really upsets me.
Your work has elements of the way a six-year-old, looking at a car going by, might find it weird that such a thing exists. I hear this in Aeroplane, in the line that goes "How strange it is to be anything at all." Is that your philosophy?
I usually wake with a shock. Whatever dream I'm having has something to do with being freaked out that I'm in my body. Then I relax, forget it, go have a cup of coffee.
Do you reconnect with that first-wake-up feeling in your music?
Yeah. It's also about the crazy sleepwalking dreams I have.
You sleepwalk?
Incredibly, yeah. I have all kinds of crazy hallucinations. I open my eyes and see things. I've seen, like, spirits moving through the walls. I've seen a vortex coming through the wall. I've seen amorphous balls of light bouncing around the front yard. I've seen giant bugs on the floor. I was in a hotel room in Amarillo, Texas and all I remember is standing on the bed, seeing the wall in front of me filled with lights popping like popcorn out of the wall.
I like how the word "sober" appears in your songs: it goes against the grain of the hippy "underground" mentality still prevalent in many music scenes. There are magazines where you can't read a review without anything interesting or droney being compared to a drug. Yet doing a lot of drugs, it's much more difficult to make interesting art. Think how much better it'd be not to be fucked-up.
I had the typical drug experiences in high school, but I don't do anything now. Other people can do what they want, I don't preach. Plenty of rock people have made great records while totally fried!
When I started writing "Ghost," the song that goes [he sings] "Ghost ghost I know you live within me," we thought we had a ghost living in the house, in the bathroom. So I locked the door and started to sing to the ghost in the bathroom. But that was sort of like singing about the ghost who we thought was whistling in the other room, and that kept waking me up, and then also a ghost that may or may not live within me. And it ended up being a reference to Anne Frank, too. A lot of the songs on this record are about Anne Frank.
It's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their
faces fill with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses
in their eyes. - "Holland, 1945"
Art that refers to World War II and the Holocaust . . . I don't hear a lot of records doing that in 1998. Yet that was only a generation or two ago. What compelled this? You read The Diary of Anne Frank?
Yeah. I know it might sound kind of cheesy. Right before recording On Avery Island I was walking around in Ruston waiting to go to Denver to record. I don't consider myself to be a very educated person, 'cause I've spent a lot of my life in dreams.
And I was walking around wondering, would everything make more sense to me if I knew the history of the world, or would I just lose my mind? I came to the conclusion I'd probably just lose my mind. Next day I walked into a bookstore, and there was The Diary of Anne Frank. I'd never given it any thought before. Then I spent two days reading it and completely flipped out . . . spent about three days crying . . . it stuck with me for a long, long time.
I'm not sure I could allow myself to connect with a book that much.
While I was reading the book, she was completely alive to me. I pretty much knew what was going to happen. But that's the thing: you love people because you know their story. You have sympathy for people even when they do stupid things because you know where they're coming from, you understand where they're at in their head. So here I am as deep as you can go in someone's head, in some ways deeper than you can go with someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash.
I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine, having the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. Do you think that's embarrassing?
Wanting to go back in time to save Frodo the Hobbit . . . that would be embarrassing. But feeling intense empathy over a real and shocking narrative -- no.
The record doesn't necessarily take place in that time period so much. It's a reflection of how I see that time. I'm not even sure anyway if time is linear, if it's all going in one direction. The world is an incredibly blurry, crazy dream I'm sort of stumbling through. Science has pretty much figured out that the reality we live in isn't necessarily reality.
A lot of the songs on Aeroplane freaked me out, and it took other people to make me be comfortable with them, and to see it was okay to sing about this stuff, not shut the songs inside. 'Cause it was too intense. I would ask a friend, "What the fuck am I doing?" It took a while to figure out the songs were positive, they were okay, not just fucked-up nightmares I was throwing up.
And now a song for Jesus Christ
and since this seems to confuse
people I'd like to simply say that I
mean what I sing although the
theme of endless endless on this
album is not based on any religion
but more in the belief that all
things seem to contain a white light
within them that I see as eternal
- a note to the lyrics
Do you think this record's lyrics are gonna weird people out?
When you sing "I love you Jesus Christ" rather than "I love you Peggy Sue," people might think of you completely differently, because of that line . . .
For a lot of these songs I was able to lock myself in a room and allow my mind to let out what it wanted without worrying too much about what others would think. A song about God was inevitable, because of my upbringing and the intense experiences I had, growing up, going to these crazy church camps where everything was very open. We talked about sexuality freely, we talked about . . .
How old were you?
From eleven to seventeen.
Where were the camps?
In central Louisiana, out in the boonies.
Was it a hippie kind of Christianity?
It wasn't really hippie, it was just weird. You could spill your guts all over the place. People were leaping and freaking out. It wasn't so much a God trip as an emotional trip. Even if you were an atheist, if your parents shipped you down there, you could talk about it. You could talk openly about your atheist beliefs and there would be debates; and being an atheist was as beautiful as anything else.
A few weeks ago in Athens, we played a show with Vic Chesnutt. He sat on the stage and played for 30 minutes, singing songs about how action and reaction are the closest things to truth in the universe, how he's had out-of-body experiences but they weren't supernatural. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. My love for Christ has more to do with what Christ said and believed in. Then the Church put this fucked-up bullshit around it and made it this at-times really evil thing. If you attach man to anything, he's gonna fuck it up somehow. You think that's too cynical?
No, we all fuck up. My church is my records.
Right. With Aeroplane, I feel it's spiritual - but not religious.
On your first disc, you thanked your hometown of Ruston, Louisiana.
It was a way of thanking the whole town, and the community there, but also it's where I grew up, so there were a lot of intense experiences there.
You don't particularly have a Southern accent. How come?
In school I was surrounded by racist, sexist jocks. From an early age, my friends and I all felt we didn't belong there. We all kind of saved ourselves from that place. The little world we had there was beautiful. But when we saw some guy going "Hey may-an whah don' we lahk git drunk and lahk fuck that whore over thair mahn," we wanted to be as different as possible. When I was young I must have made a conscious effort to stop talking that way, 'cause that's how those motherfuckers I hate talk. My lack of accent stems from that early rebellion.
The Elephant 6 people carry on from there. We sort of record for each other and write songs for each other. Anytime I'm in here recording, if I'm going places I don't understand, I'll know my friend Will's gonna listen to it. I give him a tape and he'll really dig it. So that gives me a certain gratification, to put something on a tape, walk down the street and hand it to him.
Which bands is Will in?
[laughs] Will Westbrook, he's in the Gerbils, and he also does a solo thing called Wet Host. He's a sax player. There's about 25 people who live here now, who all came here from Ruston. We gravitate towards each other. We've always played together, our whole lives. But we're not a closed club or something. There are people showing up all the time and they go, "Well, I sort of bow this thing and it makes a squeaky sound!" Then we go "Waaaa! Cool, man! Come squeak on this thing over here!" If anyone wants to play, they just have to show up and want to play.
The curious thing about In the Aeroplane over the Sea is that it's a more folky, guitar/vocals-centered effort than On Avery Island, while it's the first record Mangum's done with a fixed lineup. NMH used to be Jeff and whatever friends were around at the moment. He's ping-ponged across North America under the moniker. But this group came together roughly two years ago, not long after the release of Avery. Julian Koster was a catalyst; he was the first E6'er to release records on an established label - doing two albums as leader of Chocolate USA in the early '90s for Bar/None. Not long after that group ceased to exist, he arranged for NMH to stay in the basement of his grandmother's apartment on Long Island, in New York. Imaginative horn player / arranger Scott Spillane (also in the Gerbils, who make slightly skewed pop - closer to the Apples in Stereo, exceptional and distinct, sloppy but great - like the better songs by Fly Ashtray or Uncle Wiggily but maybe even more obscure at this point; their record Are You Sleepy is due on Hidden Agenda) had been working in a pizza joint in Austin and living in a van. At Julian's urging, Scott got on a Greyhound in Austin and rode all the way to Long Island. He credits Julian's vivacious personality as the reason he joined. Scott is not as introspective as Jeff; he's more of relaxed groover.
Jeff had been in a bad funk before all this, not knowing if he really wanted to tour after the release of On Avery Island. Julian made Jeff get on a train to Chicago to visit a drummer called Jeremy Barnes (never got the names of his other bands). According to Jeremy, Jeff only played half of one song with him the whole time he was there, 'cause he was freaked at how expensive the studio time was, and was happy enough with the way they sounded together. Nevertheless he asked Jeremy to drop out of school and meet the group in Long Island in three months. To the chagrin of his folks, Jeremy agreed, because he "loved Avery so much." He's been in the band ever since.
Jeremy is quick to point out he's not a Ruston guy: "Oh no no no, God no." He'd been in a free jazz band in Chicago who'd played with Chocolate USA, and dug them. He stayed in touch with Julian, hoping to work with him in the future.
The newly assembled Neutral Milk Hotel group stayed in the New York area for several months, playing a lot of shows (including a celebrated turn at the Terrastock festival) and touring as well. They now all live in Athens, where Will Hart from Olivia Tremor Control landed and settled seven years ago.
While we're in Athens we meet the extended family of Elephant Six people. They all seem very busy amusing themselves: making art, making sound, talking about art and music, telling stories, smiling, listening to each other's new mixes. I feel like I'm in a bohemian coffee commercial - I don't meet a single jerk. Everyone's music is at the very least pretty good.
I know we were only there two days, but someone could at least have been rude . . . then I wouldn't have felt these twinges of envy and awe, and this article might have more of an edge to it.
It seems like sort of a commune you have here in Athens, one that works. And you've talked about getting land and building your own dwellings out in the woods, and all living together, right?
Yes. Pete from Olivia Tremor Control is really into geodesic domes, and Scott and Laura have ideas about how to maintain a community . . . giant water-wheels that would create electricity, things like that.
What makes Athens so great?
'Cause everybody's here!
I'm not like these other people who like it so much - not that I dislike it. See, I've never been particularly comfortable anywhere I've lived. And Athens is a nice, easy town to live in.
Jeremy, asked the same question, replies, "One really good thing about Athens is how cheap it is. We tried to live in New York and you just cannot do what we do there unless you're independently wealthy. Here, I pay like a hundred dollars rent for a beautiful house, and I have enough space, and live with people I really love.
"I live with Will and Pete from Olivia; our house used to be a boarding house. We painted it, and the inside looks like something out of Dr. Seuss. Will basically records 24 hours a day. There's a piano in the house, and Pete, who plays piano for Olivia, is playing all day.
"In Athens, everyone's always doing something. I come home from practice and Pete's playing something really interesting on the piano. I go up to my room and in the room next to me Will's recording some sort of a dream drone or a bizarre tape loop. Then I go by Julian's and he's recording some amazing saw harmony.
"It's really inspiring. In Chicago, that sort of thing was happening, too - but so spread out it could never have the same impact for me."
You can tell Neutral Milk Hotel are a band now, even though this "band" record is actually more folk-oriented, driven by Jeff's reedy choirboy voice - more in control here than on the debut - and the crisp clear power of his acoustic guitar. Still, every accent, every note the band and friends make seems essential, and Aeroplane is a more cohesive record by far. On the next record I imagine there'll be still more room for the rest of the band to stretch out. I could certainly hear more instrumentals like Spillane's "The Fool," which sounds like Sweet Emma leading the Ohio State pickup ensemble through a turgid, mournful Eastern European folk song. But this record is stuffed with so much sound it's hard to ask for more: fuzzed-out bass, trombones, bells, something called a zanzithophone, flugelhorn, sax, a saw played perfectly in tune, a shortwave radio, tape hiss, white noise, everything.
Both Avery and Aeroplane were recorded in Denver with Robert Schneider, the head of Apples in Stereo and the E6 patriarch.
Tell me about the recording sessions.
The energy and love Robert puts into the recordings, how personally he takes it, and that there's always enough time to do exactly what you want to do, it is so amazing to work with him. I know he understands me. It's like sitting at home recording - but with a person who pushes you to new places. Robert lets you find the very best, most interesting sounds, like, inside yourself.
Do the songs change as you take them to Julian, Scott, and Jeremy?
The recording process is sort of a spontaneous thing . . .
Do Neutral Milk Hotel practice?
No, we don't really practice, we're not a practice-space band . . . A lot of the saw parts, for instance, Julian develops on tour. He'll make them up at night while we're on the road; eventually he'll have something he's happy with. The horn arrangements are done the same way.
So the song components get ironed out in playing live together?
Sort of. But there are very primitive things that flourish when we record. Julian will go "Oh you know I play saw on this song," and I'll go "Oh well Christ, we've been sitting here wondering what the magic key to this song was, and you've been playing saw on this song the whole time." Then he'll take what he was doing live and expand it from one saw part that was very simple, to sitting in the bathroom playing it for three hours until it's a three-part-harmony saw part that sort of sounds like Hawaiian singing or little angelic voices.
You use heavy distortion . . . it could just as easily have sounded clean . . .
All the recording sound is intentional. There's a certain way we've gotten used to things sounding, after recording on four-track for years. There are certain sounds we love to hear. All the heavy distortion stuff is intentional. When we did On Avery Island and this record, we did the best-sounding record we could possibly make. We used as much old-timey equipment on Aeroplane as we could. I have a very limited knowledge of recording, but the miracle of being able to capture sounds on magnetic tape - of electricity and these little magnetic particles - is amazing to me. You know?