Bandsplain - Neutral Milk Hotel with Mark Richardson

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Neutral Milk Hotel released only two studio albums in the mid-to-late 90s, On Avery Island and In An Aeroplane Over the Sea, but they’ve since been consecrated as quintessential indie rock classics. Emerging from the Elephant 6 musical collective, bandleader Jeff Mangum led this eccentric musical experiment that left much mystery, and a large cult following, in its wake. This week, Wall Street Journal’s rock and pop music critic and former editor-in-chief of Pitchfork Mark Richardson joins Yasi to explain Neutral Milk Hotel. Follow Mark Richardson on Twitter at @markrichardson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's with this band anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, Bansplain? Hello and welcome to Bandsplain. I am your host, Yossi Sallick. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to explain a cult band or iconic artist to me and to you. Today's episode is about Neutral Milk Hotel. If you've never heard Neutral Milk Hotel,

let me take you on a little aeroplane over the sea. This is what Neutral Milk Hotel sounds like. You guys, my guest today is Mark Richardson, the current rock and pop music critic at the Wall Street Journal. But maybe most importantly for our purposes, he was the editor-in-chief, an executive editor of pitchfork from 2011 to 2018, which makes him perhaps the most perfect guest

to talk about Neutral Milk Hotel, because Mark, is there a more pitchfork-ass band in the entire world than Neutral Milk Hotel? Yes or no? I don't think so. I think it's no, honestly. I had to weigh it in my head, and I was like, are there any other bands that take that mantle? And I really think it's Neutral Milk Hotel. So I could not be more honored and pleased to have you, who was once the captain of the pitchfork ship, here to talk to me about Neutral Milk Hotel. Oh, thank you so much. I'm really, really happy to be here and Stoke to talk you about this band. Okay. Well, we sort of already established why, but tell me a little bit about why you're maybe uniquely qualified to wax poetic about Neutral Milk Hotel. Sure. So I do go back pretty far with this band. I first heard Ninja Milk Hotel early in 1998 around the time. time of their second album in the airplane over the sea, picked it up within a month of it coming out and really fell in love with it. I would even say I was obsessed with it, and then I picked up

their first album shortly after that. That actually happened to be the first year that I was writing for Pitchfork. So some people don't know that Pitchfork's been around that long, but I started writing there in early 98. So I did not write about Gertfimilk Hotel at the time, but the first year-end list I filed in my life was the end of 1998. And Nutrimal Kotel was my favorite out in the year, so I voted that number one. But famously, where did it end up on that year's list? Famously, it ended up at number 85, I believe. I have the receipts, Mark. There's no having it. Okay. Yeah. You got to go to a way back machine to find that stuff. But that's right. And I have the way back machine, my friend. Go on. Yeah. Well, it's good. That's what every pitchfork writers fears that. But, um,

So, yeah, and then it was reissued in 2005, and I actually reviewed the reissue for Pitchfork, and I gave it a perfect 10. That was you. Yeah, so that was, so, you know, I've loved it for that album and this band for, you know, 24 years. And then I've actually written about them a couple other times. There was a 20th anniversary in 2018, and I wrote like an essay for Pitchfork about that. So it's kind of been a recurring thing in my life. You know, anniversaries come around. People ask about it.

And I've never stopped listening to it. And yeah, I'm still very into this band. I mean, again, could not have a more perfect person. It might surprise people or maybe it won't. I don't know. I fucking love normal Coachell. Okay. No, I genuinely, like to this day,

I definitely probably alarmed my neighbors when I took a shower this morning. and I was just scream singing, I am listening to hear where, like full volume in the shower. They probably thought I was having the stroke. It was amazing. I'm one of like the prototypical people who like was put on to airplane. Not in the 90s because I don't know why I didn't hear about it then. Probably because I moved away for high school and I was in Singapore and I didn't really have access to like spin magazine or anything.

But in college, which was like around 2001. one, I worked at a record store. And it's literally illegal to work at a record store and not be told about in a Trill Mill Hotel, which is part of the employee package or whatever. And so I fell in love with it then. But unlike you, I don't know why. I never went back to listen to the first album. It just honest, like, not never, but like not for like many years after. Again, this was like probably the time, it wasn't like I could just go like listen to it. I would have had to pay for it. And maybe I just like wasn't feeling up to pay. I was like, I have this one perfect neutral milk hotel record.

What do I care about the other one? So I didn't really listen to it later. But I quite like the other one too. But man, nothing comes close to aeroplane, must say. No, aeroplanes, it is perfect. It's a perfect record. Yeah. And we're going to get into it.

But this might be the most based episode of bandsplain that we've ever done. And we'll talk about why. Producer Dylan is saying that I'm trying to get this show canceled by singing. And I think that I have a gorgeous singing. voice. And you know what? Jeff Mangum would probably also think I had a gorgeous singing voice, given his, you know, just general predisposition about art and music and how anyone can do it regardless of talent or skill. So suck it, producer Dylan. I will sing two-headed boy whenever I want. So I'm really going to need your help because the backstory of Neutral Milk Hotel is the

backstory of Elephant Six, and it's extremely complicated. It's very awesome and cool, but there's a lot of players and there's just like a lot to get into. So let's just dive right in with one, Jeffreason. We don't know what his real name is. No one knows it's not been revealed. Let's say Jefferson. Mangum. That's right, Prudson.

And I said Jefferson. There's no proof that it's not Jefferson. It could be Jefferson. Jefferson, born October 24th, 1970. No surprise to me, a Scorpio in Rustin, Louisiana, which Rustin is going to be a big deal. Do you think, Mark, that people make like pilgrimages to Rustin, Louisiana to sort of lay flowers at the feet of Elephant Six? That wouldn't totally surprise me, although since, you know, it's a very kind of decentralized organization in a lot of ways. Right. It's more close. It was definitely, you know, born of that town. But I think when people think,

think of Elephant Six now, they might be more likely to think of Athens, Georgia. Athens, sure. Ginnies too, I'm sure. But yeah, Rustin's definitely where it all began. Small town, 20,000 population. I believe still around 20,000 population. I don't think the population's grown much since back in the, you know, 70s and 80s. So he met one Robert Schneider. We do know his name is Robert, who was born March 9, 1971 in South Africa, a Pisces. And they met in grade school because both their dads were professors at Louisiana Tech. Is that right?

Their elementary school was like on the campus. Yep. Yeah, both their dads were professors. So they were kind of, you know, of the university town. But, you know, not completely students at that point. But yeah, their parents were both professors. Okay. Now begins the most just heart-touching, gorgeous, brings tears to my eyes,

story of friendship that just continues on. So Robert was the weird foreign kid. People wouldn't talk to him. He didn't have any friends. You know, kids are mean. And Jeff was apparently just kind of an angel since birth because he was the only kid to ask him to play. He asked him to play wiffle ball. My heart. And then they got into heavy metal music together in like the fifth grade and they both got guitars, Jeff got a Stratocaster, and Robert got a flying V. I love that someone's parents would buy their like 10-year-old son, a flying V guitar. It's like so 80s. I know it's perfect. And then Robert meets another main player in this story. William Cullen Hart, born June 14, 1971, a Gemini, at Algebra Camp. That's right. They were at Algebra

camp to learn algebra. I don't know. What kind of horrible punishment is that from your parents? I mean, I thought my parents were mean because they sent me to Kuman after school, which is like after school math class. But an entire summer where you have to go learn algebra, horrifying. Terrible. Abuse. Anyways, they met there. Did you ever read this little story? I'm sure you've known probably even more than I do. I just read a couple of books. But there's a great little story about how Robert was trying to like impress a girl at algebra camp. And he was. was like, yeah, I'm a guitar player, babe. I don't know if that was the exact quote, but let's just imagine. And Will overheard him. And he was like, um, actually, I play guitar and I can blow this guy

out of the water. And then they became friends. And actually, it was true that Will was a better guitar player than Robert then, but this motivated Robert. And then he became this like incredible virtuoso, like prodigy guitar player within like a year. Men, right? Am I right? And they stayed competitive for the rest of their lives in terms of being songwriters. And they wanted to impress each other most of all. Not the girl from Algebra Camp, although she can take a little credit, early muse. So Jeff, Robert, and Will became fast friends,

a little trio of besties. And they went to their first concert together. Actually, I think Will had been to a few other concerts, but it was Jeff and Robert's first concert, which is Cheap Trick. And they loved it. Do you feel any, lingering cheap trick influence in Neutral Moatheel or in any of the Elephant Sixth bands.

Not in Neutral Moatel, but I wouldn't be surprised if Cheap Trick made their way into Robert Slater band Apples and Stereo a little bit. There's definitely like in the Elephant Six, the Asper in general, there was a big power pop component that Cheap Trick would certainly inform that to a degree. It's very cute. Apparently, Robert, like, caught the pick of the guitarist. I cannot remember right now. And kept it on him, like, for many, many, many years afterwards. That's great. Rick Nielsen. Rick Nielsen, yeah.

And then apparently the one day they were on a talk show together. I think it was maybe the daily show. And he told the story to Rick Nielsen. Rick Nielsen got to hear it. And I guess apparently it made him feel old. That's how Robert interpreted it. Okay. Okay.

Will Jeff and their friend, Ty Storms? We don't know where Ty Storms is now. Tie Storms, if you're out there, drop us a line, babe. I want to know what you're doing. They started their first band in middle school. It was called maggot. It was kind of a punk band. Jeff said in an interview with the San Francisco Weekly in 1996

that we would go over to Will's house, get really stoned, make noise, scream, and yell. Then we started writing pop songs. How do you feel like every band starts as a punk band in many stories? Definitely. Yeah, even if they sound nothing like it, it's always like something they have to pass through before they find their own sound.

And then some band stick with it. But yeah, like, you know, you wouldn't listen to the, to Nutrimal Coteel albums and say, this sounds like punk rock, although it wound up in there somewhere. I actually really feel the spiritual punkness of Nutrimalco Hotel.

And I think I really connected to that, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Okay, Magid is not a real band in any way, shape, or form, except that, you know, it gives them an excuse to sort of hang out and play music. But I did find this detail very interesting. Robert said in this great book called Endless Endless, a lo-fi history of the Elephant Six mystery by Adam Clare, you guys are interested in even more factual information. But Robert said, I remember sitting at the lunch table

with Jeff and Ty, and Jeff was saying how they were philosophically opposed to having bass. That's something that was sustained through many of his recordings. So since he was a wee lad, he didn't like the bass guitar. Right. That makes sense. I mean, it's a lot of, a lot of, a lot of fuzz, a lot of mid-range, but not a lot of low-end in that stuff, for sure. It's very interesting because I usually don't like things that don't have bass, because I love the bass guitar, but it worked for me.

I just want to say he did play shows and tour with a band. And the band was made up of Robert, Hillary, Sydney of Apples and Stereo, and Lisa Jansen. And they toured around that single and Hype City soundtrack, which I, I mistakenly thought was a demo, but I guess it was like a solo Jeff Mangum album. Is that right? Right. Yeah, it was on tape only.

I've actually never heard it, but I was looking at the track list and I've heard some songs from it. Yeah, it's right there on YouTube. It apparently was very different. Robert said that that version of Neutral Milk Hotel that had Hillary playing drums, she is super loud and a smashing drummer. She's smashing drums. That version of Neutral Milk Hotel, we were a loud noise band. Noisier than but similar to punk rock.

Just noting that in my building case for Neutral Moatel is a punk band. Yeah. Also a gorgeous little side note is that at their show in Boulder in 94 in attendance was one young Connor Oberst. That's it. I just want to put that there for later maybe. Maybe we'll revisit that fact. Okay. Now Bill Doss enters the chat. Born September 12th, 1968 of Virgo, grew up in Dubok, I believe is how you pronounce it, 10 miles north of Rustin. He met Robert and Jeff at the music store Haymakers, where Robert learned guitar and Jeff learned drums. Tragically, Bill Doss passed away, I think, about 10 years ago. Is that right?

Right. Mark, yeah. Yeah, a little bit somewhere in 2013, maybe, something like that, yeah. Yeah, but they met at this at Haymakers and they all started playing together. They thought Bill was very cool. Will said in that book that I just mentioned that Bill and Robert could actually play in tune instruments. Jeff and I couldn't broken string. Oh, well, we still got three. I like this duality of real musicians and just like flying by the seat of their pants. Boys. Okay. One more thing that I wanted to read because I found it. it very interesting. So this is around, you know, they're like, I guess, middle school, getting into high school. And they're starting to become the weird kids, right? The weird punk kids. They're like writing Sonic Youth on their sneakers, like doing the whole thing. And this is, again, a really small town in the South where it's like probably pretty mean jocks, like classic high school film.

And Jeff said in an interview in 1998 with Punger magazine, in school I was surrounded by racist, sexist jocks from an early age, my friends and I felt we didn't belong there. We all kind of saved ourselves from that place. When I was young, I must have made a conscious effort to stop talking that way. I think he's referring to a southern accent, because that's how those motherfuckers I hate talk. My lack of accent stems from that early rebellion. That was so interesting to me, the idea of like changing the way you speak to not have an association with the people whose values you don't hold. Yeah, no, for sure like I feel like him and his friends being outcast in this you know it's a rural area certainly surrounding there in a small town and not feeling like they fit in any way and then

basically wanting to build their own world that was something that existed separate from from what they were surrounded by so yeah I mean saying if I'm going to build my own world I don't want to speak like the people in this other world too I can kind of see it totally although I will say I think sometimes when his belt It's not totally gone like when he's less. You know, he's lessening. That's a bit of accent, too. Anyways, I won't yell it again.

Sorry, I produce you not. Okay, another very important part of this early story. KLPI, the Louisiana Tech College Radio Station. Man, remember when college radio stations were so important? You do because you're older than me. I don't as much. But it just sounds like what a magical, blissful time. Yeah.

Yeah, it was just a lifesaver. for so many people and not just listen to them and like, you know, hearing what's happening on underground music, but also there was a certain type of person that gravitated towards working at college radio. And a lot of those people ended up, you know, writing about music later too. But it's always like, are you a college radio person? Because many people who, you know, might have written about bands in college also spent a lot of time, you know, doing like 3am to 6 a.m. slots or whatever. So yeah, it's like absolutely central to like underground music story in North America for at least 25 years. I don't really know what's going on there now.

Mark, you absolutely right now sound like the 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. slot college radio DJ. It's giving. It was definitely giving 3am to 6 a.m. College Radio DJ. Were you one? Were you a college radio DJ? I was not actually. And I really feel like I missed out. But you could tell people you were and no one no one would push against that yeah that's true okay so will became a dj at klpi in 1987 while he was still in high school which i think was just so adorable and precocious and then of course all the friends would come and rifle through all the old weird records and like play albums they were really into daniel johnston big business monkey i know from really early on they were really into the minute men makes a lot of sense there's a lot of like spiritual similarities i

I feel like between the Minutemen and just like elephant six, like this like deep bonded brotherhood and then this like idea that everyone can and should make music. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we love it. So Jeff said about, this is sort of like echoing what you said. He said all through our childhood, we were completely flooded by underground music and we were able to perceive it any way we wanted because there was no scene, no zines, no clubs, no kids. It was just this music coming out of this crazy world that we really didn't understand because we only had our small southern town to compare it to. We found a lot of what seemed to be missing from our daily lives growing up in a very closed environment. So we had a deep appreciation for all kinds of music.

When we started making our own music, there was a very special magical quality to it. So yeah, just this idea of like creating their own universe, first taking in all these inputs that were like coming kind of like, he's saying like context free, right? which is an interesting way to experience music. It's just like a fun fact, a fun tid that I must share. Apparently, I did not know this. Maybe you knew this, Mark. For the first few years that MTV existed, local cable wouldn't carry it.

So the lads would go to Louisiana Tech Student Center because it had a satellite and a big projection TV and they would just hang out and watch MTV, like in the student center. This is how I learned about this show, which is, I guess, for once, I feel young, but IRS Records presents the cutting edge. Do you remember this show?

Yes, I do. LA is the place that's my mind ablaze. For me, it's a race through a cat and pick and mace for you to chase. I would kill to get all those back tapes. There's some of it on YouTube, and it's so fucking cool. It's like really young red hot chili peppers, really young R.E.M., like Tom Waits. It's amazing.

Like the guy from the flesh tones hosted it? Am I remembering that? That could be. MTV kind of had a reboot of an underground show every few years, but that was like, yeah, one of the early ones. I knew people who didn't grow up with MTV too and had to, you know, people had friends that elsewhere that would tape it onto VHS tapes

and then mail them to their friends so that they could watch it and so on. So being that age, it's you just wanted to live in front of it for sure. Yeah, there was a time where MTV wasn't playing 12 to, 20 hours a day of ridiculousness. And you guys will never get to experience that. Robert said it felt like pirate radio at the time. MTV was like a youth culture religion for the first half of the 1980s and felt really

legit in artsy. So it felt like going to a secret meeting place to worship Billy Idol. That was their church. That scans. Okay. So they start making tapes, right? And I think it's really important to like stress the fact that like tape technology, cassette tape technology is integral to the story of Elephant Six and Dussly Neutral Milk Hotel.

Absolutely, yeah. But they're making these tapes already as, you know, young lads and Rustin, but they haven't called it Elephant Six yet, right? Right. That happened later. That happened later. But we can kind of say that this was under the umbrella of Elephant Six because it was happening. What impact do you think this, like being able to tape things, being able to, I guess, pretty affordably tape and record and duplicate music had on, maybe not just Elephant Six and neutral Milko Hotel, but maybe just like rock music at large. Well, in the early 80s, Tascam, an electronic company, came out with a fairly affordable four track that was marketed pretty heavily and pretty popular. famously like Bruce Springsteen recorded a Nebraska on that. You know, he got a four track that year.

So it was like the idea of being able to record a cassette tape in a way that was pretty easy to use and sounded decent was a fairly new thing. And a four track cassette in the 80s, like you basically had to own like a real, a really real deck or something, some more sophisticated equipment. So like in the 80s, yeah, like the four track part of it. And then into the 90s, it was a pretty new idea that you could make records at home and multi-track them and bounce tapes. And if you were good at it, you could have a dozen parts and a song, which was the idea of having something that was that produced in a range that you made at home was a fairly new idea. So these guys were absolutely obsessed with that.

And recorded obsessively, you know, it's interesting to think we talked about punk rock. like these guys, what was interesting about their early days, and it kind of carried through a lot of their history, is they were very much record makers. Right. Whereas a lot of bands that start off as punk rock bands, they're like, we need to play shows. We want to get in front of people.

We want to play live. It's all about the live show. But these guys were obsessed with the Beatles, obsessed with Brian Wilson, and they wanted to make, they definitely played a lot of shows. and they, you know, played great shows too. But it was very much about records and record making and field recordings and manipulating tapes and just making weird stuff tinkering, you know, with these machines. Yeah, I feel that's so interesting.

I feel like it's like such the difference between the 80s and 90s, right? It's like, I think there's always this like question when we think of like 80s rock bands. Like, why were they always signing to labels or major labels or why was it? And it's like, there wasn't much option, right? It's like, who was going to pay for you to record? And you couldn't record otherwise. And there's all these, like, sort of small time albums that do happen. But it's like, they're all out of print.

You know, it were like, you know, somebody made it in this, like, shit-sounding studio, like, spot recorded it for you. And it sounds okay, I guess. So I think that is sort of like a really meaningful distinction in time that technology sort of, like, shifted things. And we'll get into it later, but I also found it so interesting that, like, I think Robert talked about this, but, like, the advent of CDs and sort of the, like, CDs becoming the main form of, you know, listenable music in the 90s made, like, all the vinyl records decrease in price and, like, made people to get rid of their vinyl collections. And so now the, like, used record stores were filling, and thrift shops and stuff were filling with, like, tons and tons of like older and obscure vinyl for really cheap. And that also probably sort of had like this massive impact on like the next generation of music. People were able to buy these records for like $2. I found that so interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely true. And I lived through that and I was, you know, like I started buying vinyl and Ernest in the mid to

late 90s. And at that point, the kind of vibe in a record store was, hey, sorry, we don't have this on CD, but we do have the album. and it's cheaper. You know, so it was like a used album. I have a copy of Sonic Youth Washing Machine that I paid five bucks for. It's in like perfect shape. It was very much about like, yeah, we're out of the CD, but we got this, you know. And getting a turntable wasn't actually that easy then.

So it was just, it was totally a different world. Yeah. And for a band like this that was so interested in history, they could just kind of accumulate all these weird records that people had tossed. Yeah. It's so cool. I mean, I guess I, like, had a small interaction with it because I was, I was like 12 or 13. I had a record player, maybe it was like my dad's old one or something.

Like, my dad was like, I don't know why you want this. But like, I remember going to a garage sale and finding like two replacements records. But I didn't understand how valuable. I bought them. I have them still. But like, I just had like just learned about the replacements. And I thought they were like some weird who cares band that no one cares about. You know, and I was just like, oh, please to meet me.

Like a dollar? No problem. I'm like throw, yeah, here you go. It's my allowance money. But like, I can't, you know, you can't really picture that now. But anyways, we're not quite there yet. We're still in the late 80s, early 90s. Okay. So Jeff said about this like sort of manic tape making, some of those early tapes are shit, but that was never the point. The four of us existed in our insular world. We were very supportive of each other and the love we had for each other was always really positive. I'd bang on a lamp, record my mom on an answering machine, play a tuba that I couldn't play.

then give the tape a ridiculous title, and they'd go home and listen to it. The next day Will would bring in a tape with his four-year-old brothers singing things like, I haven't found an effective way to ease my pain while he was pushing over a box of bottles. Like, Bim, what? Yeah. Yeah, it's very much sounds like playing with toys.

You know, it's like they have these recording devices around and just constantly capturing what's happening and finding ways to combine them that are making these, little documents of what's going on. It was a very, like, yeah, play-based activity. Yeah. I don't have, like, a comprehensive list of all of the, like, various tapes and groups, but there was one called Mr. Burton says hello.

Great name. Love it. There's one called Cranberry Lifecycle. That was kind of an important one, right? That's the one that evolved into. I was thinking of that as, like, the first real one. The first real one. You can, like, download Google.

like tapes that they've made and I have actually heard that music. Yeah, because that one is, that was Will's like project that I think maybe included Jeff and Bill. And then this is again, getting ahead, but evolved into being called synthetic flying machine. Yep, that's right. Which Jeff would play drums with coat hangers. And then later evolved into Olivia tremor control. But again, we're not there. And then Clay Bears, which sounds like a noise band.

Yeah, yeah, like noise and like free jazz kind of noise. Yeah. That's going to be a no from me, but I appreciate that they did that. I'm okay on that particularly. But there was a funny story where they like they played a show. Maybe at a pizza place or something. And the guy, like, after like 10 minutes. was like, you have to stop.

You have to get off stage. And they're like, well, it's just one note. And the guy was like, yeah, but it's a bad note. It's a bad note. You must get off the stage. People are not eating their pizza. We must sell pizzas. You're bumming everybody.

You're bumming out the hose is what he basically said. And then, of course, milk. That's right. That's the big one. That's the big one that was Jeff, Jeff's own little baby project. There's a bunch of demos that you can find online. I was sort of struck by Jeff's singing, which is so different in the early demos than what it ends up being. It's almost like, I want to think, like, Elliot Smithy maybe.

It's something very, like, tender and sweet, but not, it doesn't have that punky quality. I think that I'm kind of referring to in the last thing that I did earlier. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I always think of, you know, as we get deeper into talking about Elephant Six, Nutrimalco tells that by far the biggest band, you know, in that universe at this point. And he's a central figure in it, but he also sits just outside of it in some ways, in my opinion. Honestly, love everyone. I found that there must be at least one person that's going to get out of my nerves, but it always seems to

It is a pretty happy family. And I think his earliest recordings, including his first single, it sounds much more like classic Elephant Six in a way where it's very indebted to 60's psychedelic pop. And yeah, it's sweeter and it's very melodic. But you don't hear it and you say, like, where is this guy coming from? It sounds like another example of that, you know? I think this is really real. Let's hear everything is, even though we're a big.

ahead of it coming out just to give people an example we're talking about and then we'll go back and keep mapping how we got to everything is the seven inch that came out on shared all records in 1994 okay this is everything is you are listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments live together in gorgeous harmony only on spotify guess what you can also create your own music and talk show for free with anchor spotify's podcasting platform get started at anchor at anchor.fm slash music and talk that's anchor dot fm slash music and talk that was everything is beat happening ass head ass music it's really good but it's so different yeah it really is yeah great tune but you know it You can really hear it's definitely like guitar pop in a real classic way.

Lo-fi guitar pop, to be sure. Yeah, I love it. It actually starts with the field recording of he's interviewing some kid about what he's dressing us for Halloween. And there's something perfect about essentially his first single, you know, the first music that many people would have heard started off with something that was a random tape thing. And that it's with a kid because it's just like a,

what an introduction in Nutrimo could tell? It's perfect and gorgeous, I must say. Okay, so back before we released any music and we're still putting out tapes, I don't know the timeline. But at some point, one Julian Costa, born July 26, 1972 in New York, a Leo, does enter the chat. He is not from Rustin. I said he's from New York. He moved to Tampa, Florida, where he formed the band Chocolate USA in 1989. they would go on to put out a few records on the bar slash none record label.

But he became friends with the lads in Rustin. Is this just like touring stuff? He'd come through town. Like how did he become friends? Yeah. So in this period of time, Elephant Six in general gets a little bit more complicated because one, they moved to different areas. So, you know, Robert Schneider, he moved to Denver.

And, you know, he set up like a home studio in Denver. and he was based there for quite a while. And some of the Rustin gang had the idea of, hey, what if we moved to Athens, Georgia? Partly because it was known for its music scenes from the 80s, you know, R.M., Pilon, B-52s. And so it had a rep already, if you knew anything about underground music,

like Athens is a pretty cool place to be. So some of them had journeyed to Athens, and it's pretty hard to trace Jeff's, movement through this time because he was always a yeah he lived a lot of different places so he was never really based in one area for years and years but he definitely did his time in athens and um julian coaster who had been living in florida and he had his at his first band um had been going through Athens on tour and stopped by at the 40 watt and met some people there and so through them he got connected to other musicians in the area and then to Jeff.

So it was the Athens connection is how he got up to up with the elephant six people. Okay, got it. I don't know when this happens, but at some point, again, the movements are hard to trace. But some of the lads move back to Rustin for a while. And there is some time where Julian is visiting Rustin regularly. And I only bring this up to say that there is a quote from that elephant six book that just says, For Julian, visiting Weston really meant spending time in the countryside outside of town. There was a girl called Squashy, whose parents had a farm, rallied the Elephant Six crowd to host small music festivals and roam around the cow pastures.

Which, again, is just a really neutral milkass detail. Like Squashy, the farm, all of it. Just needed to mention it. So Athens, they're drawn to Athens. Will apparently moved to the Bahamas first, but that did not work out with his girlfriend. came back, then went to Athens, who was the first one. Robert, like you said, off in Denver, had done a brief stint as a choir director for a church, even though he had expressed to them when he was not Christian, and they were like, that's fine.

I just thought that was a little adorable 18 years old, and your job is that you're the traveling choir director of a church. Okay, so Jeff and Will had dropped out of Louisiana Tech. They had both gone there. They're in Athens. Julian joins them. Then they both leave. Julian leaves. They come back in like 1983.

Meanwhile, Robert, like you said, he just parks it in Denver. He goes to the University of Colorado Boulder. He sets up his studio for his band, which was called Apples. Clearly later became apples in stereo. Sometime in amongst here, I don't know when Elephant Six is minted as the name. Yeah. Yeah, somewhere in this period. I believe Will said it came from a painting.

I think it was a Max Ernst painting. That's right. The elephant slits. And he couldn't say that word. And neither honestly could I. And thusly, as Elephant Six is what it became. I love it. Thank God he couldn't pronounce it.

Now, this is around the time that... Jeff pops off to the West Coast, Seattle, shared all records, puts out everything is. Now, I read this on Wikipedia, so could be true, could be false. We don't know. But the apples in stereo had a lawyer named Brian McPherson. And he loved that seven-inch that Jeff had put out. And so he became Neutral Milk Hotel's lawyer. And he passed this angle on to Merge, who loved it. And that's how he ended up on Merge.

Don't get mad at me if this is not right. This is simply Wikipedia.com. But it sounds right. That sounds right to me too. But it's possible I got it from there as well. Yeah. Who knows? Brian McPherson, drop us along.

Okay, now we're back in Athens, we being Will, Jeff, and Bill, who is fresh out of the National Guard. And they play a synthetic flying machine, like we mentioned. Jeff, he's playing drums with coat haggers, babe. He is living the dream. Apparently it didn't last long because Jeff and Will Bickered a lot And Jeff really wanted to do his own thing, which was a neutral milk hotel

And he gave them the name Olivia Tremor Control, which was a song name of hits Right Producer Dylan has said that she does love Olivia Travemer Control I honestly have not spent a lot of time with Olivia Tremor Control or any of the other Elephant's six artists, I'll be honest with you guys, okay? I don't know a lot. I listened a little bit before this episode. And I was like, all right, cool stuff.

He made another neutral milk hotel demo called Hype City soundtrack. Good stuff. And then it's time to record on Avery Island. Let's talk a little bit about On Avery Island. Yes. The name references a public garden on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, where as a teen, Jeff had a spiritual experience involving an ancient statue of Buddha. This is important, you guys, because like I said before, this is the most based episode. of Vansplaine yet.

This man, Jeff, he had a connection. He had a connection with the heavens, with the universe. And it clearly dated back. Yes, you agree, Mark. Absolutely.

I feel like the spiritual and mystical and mythological parts of the story are really important. Hugely. I mean, if you ask me, the most important, there was a bunch of stuff in the book

about, like, how they recorded the guitars with what Mike, and I was like, who cares? Literally, who cares? Sorry, no offense to you, Robert. I love the outcome of what you did, but I could fucking care less

how you miced each string on the acoustic guitar. And you know what? I bet you he wouldn't care either. I think he would also say the spiritual part is the most important. Don't want to put words in his mouth, though. Robert, babe, drop his line. Okay, so Robert records on Avery Island

at his first home studio. There's a second home studio, which is in like some sort of fish warehouse that we're not at yet in Denver. I just want to read you this gorgeous little quote. This is when I was like really hooked in. So Robert, this is from the really good 33 and a third book about Airplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper. If you guys have not read it, it's a really good one. So Robert said, Jeff is my friend.

I love him and I wanted him to feel satisfied with what he did. That's always the case when I produced bands. But with Jeff, there was no artistic ambition on my part. I just wanted to sound like whatever would make him happy. I'm crying. I know, it's so beautiful. It's so tender and sweet. He's just like, yeah, that's my friend.

I love him and wanted to make it sound great because I love him and I want him to be happy. He also said, we were very closely connected at the time, and we still are, but we have our own lives now. He was my dear friend, and in a sense, I was trying to soothe him and make him feel confident and trying to do something great for him, as opposed to just doing something good. great for the sake of art. When I think about it, I don't know if there were any other records that were made like that. I don't know if there were either, honestly. I mean, you know Stephen Albini was not coming to the fucking recording session because he loved you and wanted to like, you know, help you fulfill your hopes, wishes, and dreams. Even one Richard Rubin, as much as he's a great

guru, I don't think that that was exactly his MO. Yeah. It's not that level. empathy or even close. I mean, these are, it's like your, this is your best friend since you're in the fourth grade since he rescued you

from social isolation and asked you to play wiffleball. And yeah, you're going to make him the most goddamn gorgeous beautiful record that he could ever

possibly have. So Jeff is just one person and on Avery Island Neutral Milk Hotel is just one person. This is pre there being a band, right? Yeah, so I did,

yeah, I was going to mention that that the first song we heard, everything is, that's literally Jeff playing every instrument. So he's drumming. He's doing everything. And on every island, he played most of the instruments, but Robert also played a bunch of instruments. But there was never a point where Robert was considered in the band.

He was just making the record with him. So, yeah, it was Jeff alone with some help from Robert. Yeah, he played organ and bass and did the horn arrangements on the song against sex. There's some great horn stuff on there, yeah. Yeah. And Gardenhead on a free album. But the actual person that recorded them was trombonist Rick Benjamin. Just to put some respect on Richard Benjamin's name.

Okay, Mark, did you know that Robert said the reason that they used horns for Neutral Milk Hotel was because they had played in California with the band The Eggs, the Teen Beat Band, who he says they were a huge influence on us. We thought they were the coolest band in the universe along with pavement. Did you know this? I did not know this, but I do know of eggs and I know they promoted themselves as the only indie pop band that use a song. horns or something like that. So horns are a very big part of their sound. I mean, love that. It's like you are dancing into ska territory,

like whether or not you want to, and that's fine. Because as far as I'm concerned, if you have horns, you're in some way a ska band spiritually. No, producer Dylan. Other genres do not use horns. Only, only ska. I am not familiar with jazz. Thanks for asking. Never heard of it. Okay.

I just have to report this because, and this is no shade to Jeff Mangum, who I have the most respected admiration for, but you know, these exalted indie rock men, there's always another side to some of the stories. And I just loved this little tidbit from Adam Clare's book where Lisa Jansen, who was apparently briefly Jeff's girlfriend, was talking about the On Avery Island recording and how Jeff was always talking about living in the closet. Remember he said the closet was haunted. and she said, one thing that's funny, she basically was like, I find it very funny, is when you read old interviews from that time, he always says I lived in a closet when I was recording on Avery Island. That is not true. He lived in my apartment with me for at least six months of that. Our relationship didn't last and he ended up moving into an apartment. It was like eight people living in this place at that point. I think he did occupy a closet for a little while, but it certainly wasn't the whole time he was recording. I just love that. I love the She's like, you know what, sir, this mythology that you were like, you know, walked 10 miles to, you know, school in the snow barefoot in your closet, you were sleeping in a gorgeous bed with me for six months. You don't even mention it. Yeah, it's always worthwhile to interrogate that kind of thing. Your average artist likes to self-methologize their early days.

So it's very, very Dylan-esque in some ways. Yeah, it feels like some girlfriend help you erasure, you know. because there's always there's always behind every indie rock man there's at least a string of 22 girlfriends who fed and bathed and clothed them i presume um okay um this for you dorcos out there this was recorded on a fostex four track reel to reel and they didn't have any money i just wanted to be very clear no one had any money they're sleeping on floors they're eating rice and beans and they're putting everything on a credit card to make this album it was pure I guess tell me a little about how you perceive this album. I mean, there's probably very few people on this earth who can say they heard this album before hearing Aeroplane. So I guess that's probably a whole different experience. But just like, pay me a little picture of like what this album is in and of itself. Yeah.

So I think especially if you hear Aeroplane first, it's hard not to listen to this record and think of it as in relationship to Aeroplane. I think there's very few people who would describe it as airplanes equal, but it does have some qualities to it that are unique to it. A lot of it's really the sound. It still sounds pretty lo-fi in a lot of places, a lot grungier, not grunge like the style, but, you know, dirty guitars. But it also sounds like the same, it sounds like the same guy, you know. His concerns are still in this kind of dreamy place.

And he's very much writing from his subconscious. And you can get that here. And I think he goes even further in that direction in the second record. Yeah. One of the big things is the idea of creating an album that's like kind of a suite where the songs flow into each other. And elements from one song appear three songs later. And the idea that it all fits together is this whole, this idea of all these interlocked songs that connected to each other. and created this, yeah, like, sweet-like experience.

They definitely started doing that here, and there's some pretty cool examples of that on this record. I'm a huge, huge fan of this record. To me, it only comes up short in comparison to what came next. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like a fool's errand to not consider albums by the same artist in some relation to each other. Isn't that, like, sort of, we would be out of fucking business over here, babe, if that was not allowed.

But, you know, that's obviously part of it. You know, they always say, right, like, who's they? I don't know, whatever. This is just a quote I heard. Can't attribute it. But that, you know, every artist has one story to tell. Maybe they say that only about novelists, but I think it's true of all artists. And they're just sort of telling that same story in different iterations, you know?

And that seems on some level kind of true here. On other levels, who the fuck knows what this story is, babe, that does. Jeff is telling it's he's channeling. It's not it's not his story maybe, but we'll get into that. Okay, well, why don't we hear a song off on every island to just kick us off and then we'll come and talk more about this album. Which song would you like to hear first? I think we got to start with track one, which is called song against sex. Okay, this is song against sex. That was song against sex. Listen, this song, it hits all the neutral milk hotel bingo as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, it's one of their best. Yeah. First of all, goddamn gorgeous, beautiful song, if it's not implied. This is a G.GBS for sure, certified. We have a reference to the Bible pretty immediately, who is kissing foreign fishes is likely a reference to the miracle of the seven loves and fishes. there is a bunch of shit that we don't know what he's talking about that sounds a bit like it was an acid trip there is we're addressing different people throughout the object of who we're talking to change shifts throughout

it has everything it's got all the stuff it's got some horns what else are we missing from the neutral milk hotel bingo card I mean it's got incredible sing song like the melody sounds like the first time you hear that song you think oh I've heard this before Totally. It's such a like, it sounds like some ancient sing-along melody, you know, it's like hard to, it really has that familiarity to it. And it also like, you know, it's pretty interesting to hear this back to back with everything is because it feels like, okay, now this is Nutrimal Kotel, as you said. And part of it too is just the concerns of, you know, what he's singing about.

And they only made two albums, but in some ways they just, as you were saying, You write one story, like they cover the same territory over and over, and a lot of that stuff is here. And there's always a lot of stuff about the body and feeling uncomfortable in your body and, you know, the vulnerability and sharing your body to somebody else. And like all that's in this song. And I think, like, you know, the way that he sings song gets sex, to some degree it's about also like, you know, a loss of innocence. And that's a repeated theme in this music of, you know, it's a lot of stuff about like childhood and people being forced into situations earlier than they should be and being forced to grow up earlier and they should. It's kind of like reverberations in that and there. And so it's like, yeah, kind of like lays it all out.

Yeah, totally. Okay. So he said in an interview in 1998 with Pungshure magazine, 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 find that to be really upsetting. I've known a lot of people that have been heavily damaged by some assholes drunken hard on, and that stuff really upsets me. It's not against sex itself.

I guess, like, he also mentioned at a show in 98 in San Francisco that the song was inspired by a friend, like a female friend. This is a song about it. Well, my name is Jennifer for one thing, and then it was also a lot of this thing. So that kind of ties back into what you were just saying. Right. Yeah, it's a really interesting song. I don't, which is weird because I usually do do this because I like words so much.

I don't spend a lot of time excavating the lyrics of a neutral milk hotel. And I think it's because I don't think it matters what he's saying. And not in a bad, like in like the same way, it doesn't matter what Stephen Malcolm is saying, right? Like there's a, there's a conveyed emotion. that's really important. And the words are like sometimes cool. Sometimes there's like one phrase that sticks with you and I think that one is important to you.

But past that it's like I don't know like we benefit much from like trying to like frenzically tear apart the lyrics to find meaning. I totally agree with you. I mean I think I think his songs are filled with really striking images. But there's definitely this, you know, since they are a cult band and they have. have really devoted fans, there's this desire to say like, oh, you know, is this a reference to this book that Jeff read or is the person he mentions here, you know, someone that he knew from his childhood or whatever. And this will be a lot more prevalent on the next record because

it's, it has some like clear historical situations that's about. But I don't know. I don't think it's so much about the grain of his voice and how he sings it and the presentation and the images, but the idea of like, it doesn't feel like something to be decoded to me. It does always feel like it's right there on the surface. You don't have to know if it's like, you know, that if he's referring to, I mean, to use the elephant, you know, a Maxxorin's painting if to use the elephant six logo idea. Like it's, yeah, it's like, that's, it's interesting, but it's not intrinsic to what the music is. Totally. There's like a genius annotation at the bottom of song against sex. It's like, these lyrics are referring to the, you know,

Norwegian Wood song by the Beatles. And it's like, is it though, or are you like really stretching, do you know what I mean? Like, I don't think so. Okay, so there's this, this like little thing that Jeff wrote. It's from the Neutral Milk Hotel fans. I didn't have this CD, so I don't know. But it sounds like they lifted it from maybe,

the liner notes of the CD because it's not from any interview or anything. So I'm assuming it was just like in the booklet because it's like describing the album. So he says, the album was recorded in Denver with Robert Schneider from the Apples and Stereo. Robert's a friend I met in second grade.

We must have been about eight years old at the time. It was January in Denver, freezing cold and snowing all over. I moved into a friend's house and was living in a closet and it was cold. Not only because of the weather, but because it was a haunted house. The closet I was living in was haunted. The person that lived in the house

kept having dreams of people having cocktail parties in my closet. There would always be these really beautiful women and really tacky fur coats drinking champagne and telling my friend that we should get the fuck out of their party because we were really pissing them off. So I lived in my closet and listened to a lot of John Coltrane and waited about a month to start recording. Robert and I would get stuck on something when we were recording and walk around and grab our heads and get really frustrated, go outside and have a cigarette, and go to the store, and then we'd suddenly hit on something and we'd jump up and down and hug each other.

The whole album just blurs in a beautiful way to me like a dream because I guess my whole life in the past three years has been geared towards the end, which is the album itself. It's sort of the culmination of the whole experience. Yeah, that's really nice. One other thing that I love about this song is that it starts with Robert Schneider's voice. Yeah.

You know, you hear that opening squeal of guitar, and then you always hear how fast Robert Schneider talks, and the first voice you hear is someone talking like 100 miles an hour. I know, like as far as the length of it and stuff and where you ended, it was exactly perfect. Totally. And he's basically saying, like, telling Jeff how amazing and perfect this song is and, like, coaching him about how to record it. So it's, like, his story and the whole collective story, it does really feel like it's about friendship and, like, something really pure about that.

And so the fact that the record starts with that is, I always found that very moving. It's so moving. Well, that's funny that you said that because what I was actually going to say is that, I really feel like Robert was a member of the band because I feel like there's so much evidence that like it was the alchemy of the songwriting and the recording that sometimes sort of built on the songwriting in so many different ways that created this like sort of magic that are these albums. I know he said in an interview that on Avery Island, Jeff was really anti some stuff. I won't get into but the recording of the acoustic guitar. He really wanted it just plugged right in to record. And so Robert was like fine, even though he didn't want to do that.

And also wouldn't allow his vocals to be doubled. But then that changes when we get to airplane, which also might have something to do with why airplane is better. One thing that has to do with it because it also just like sounds better. Yeah. I love them. I love their little friendship. That's just earnestness, like full earnest goes to algebra camp.

Okay, me personally, I fucking love when you'll find me now. Yeah, amazing. It sounds a wee bit Riem-ish to me. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Should we listen to it? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. This is where you'll find me now.

That was where you'll find me now. Goddamn gorgeous, beautiful song. I wanted to play that one because I think there's a contingent of people. Here's the thing. Neutral Mill Kotel possibly suffers a bit from Radiohead syndrome in that their fervent fan base does turn other people away from the band. And also probably the hand they played in creating, you know, Mumford and Sons and the Lumnors and stuff. Which me personally love huge jams from Mumford and Sons and the limineers. Okay. I cried watching the limineers at Coachella one year, full tears. That's really neither here nor there. But I don't want to play that song because that song, I feel, illustrates that, like, Jeff Mangum was just like a brilliant songwriter. And that's just a very straightforward, beautiful, you know, there's not like 6,000 horns,

where they don't have an accordion, we're not at the carnival. Like, it's just a gorgeous song. And that is also, that's also something that he was capable of doing. Yep, that's absolutely true. Understanding the appeal of that is pretty easy. and you know that one comes at there's this earlier song the record called Baby for Pre

that's kind of a snippet and it's just acoustic guitar Listering free all smiling and swollen eggs babies to breathe and that has a similar melody to this one so it's like that's another one of those callbacks in this record and then in between there's that kind of like noise drone track

you know within that section of music you're getting this like grinding, you know, noise track. Noise might be going a little far, but it's instrumental and it's very fuzzy. And then, yeah, this is just like the appeal that of it is very evident if you like indie rock. Which I do. I like indie rock. As do I. Talk to me a little bit about Gardenhead slash Leave Me Alone.

So one of the things that I really love about this song, and this is a little bit of an example of looking ahead to the next record in that, you know, the song that we just heard where you'll find me now, he's pretty muted and like I said, it's a great indie rock song and then, but there's a lot of stuff that he does on Aeroplane where he's kind of taking his voice into this realm that is, kind of makes people feel a little uncomfortable sometimes. When you talk about some of the reasons why people don't love this band, sometimes they're like, yeah, that's going a little too,

far in one direction for me where it's kind of like he leaves the melody you know he has a very powerful singing voice but he's not afraid to use it and i guess the only word is like wailing you know he can kind of wail and stop singing lyrics and um i feel like gardenhead is like an early example of that you know more than either song song and sex um and what we just heard are both fairly contained. But here's where he kind of hints it that like, you know, he can kind of like take flight and take his voice into this different place when he wants to. Yeah, I agree. Let's hear it. This is Gardenhead slash Leave Me Alone. That was Gardenhead slash Leave Me Alone. This song, not to completely go against what I said earlier, but that's my right on this show as a person who

has no consistency. There's lyrics on this. song that are like some of my favorite neutral milk hotel lyrics and it's him saying I just want to dance in your tangles to give me some reason to move but to take on the world at all angles requires a strength I can't use so good. Me, sobbing,

sobbing emoji. Just boring. Yeah, that phrase dance in your tangles. I feel like he's the first person that's ever used that phrase and it's so evocative. It feels right to me. I'm not going to fact check it but I love it. I love every moment of it.

We can't have a conversation about on Avri Island without talking about Naomi. Yes. Mark, what is Naomi about? What is it about? So, you know, absolutely one of my favorite songs on here. And I think, like, this also has some really interesting lyrics in it. There's at least one line in here that it's almost surprising that it's in this song, which is, I'm smelling Naomi's perfume. It tastes like shit.

And it's like, that's a very, like, non-Jepf Mangum lyric. And so it's like, that's the kind of thing you probably would iron out for the next record. But yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful song. And I don't actually know if I know what it's about. I mean, if you have anything like specific. Well, allegedly, allegedly. And I say that three times, allegedly. So lawyers don't come after me.

It was written about Naomi Yang from the band Galaxy 500. Okay. Not that they had a real relationship. Apparently, it was like just an imaginary thing, which, you know, I only bring up because once we get into aeroplane, I think these like imagination exercises, you know, are sort of, I read it, and we'll get into it later, but I can't remember if it was the last interview he did, which was the with Pitchfork. Yeah, I think it was where he talks about how he does active imagination, which all my Carl Junga heads up. out there will know what active imagination is. It's very cool. I also do it. Me and Jeff Mangum together actively imagining in different places. But hearing him say that he did, that made so much sense to me because I'm like, oh, so much of his songwriting feels like it comes from that sort of

liminal space between being awake and dreaming. And we haven't talked about it yet, but he very famously had very bad night tremors and would sleepwalk because he was just like a bad sleeper who had a very rich, I think, a sleeping imagination. Yeah, absolutely. Like his lyrics seem to come from a dream world. And I think what's so amazing about it is that he trusts that and just goes with it. You know, it's like a lot of artists would like have an idea like that and be like, yeah, it's, you know, I don't know about this. That's weird. Yeah. But he's just like, yep, that's what's going in the song. And then he's definitely artful and he shapes it, but he completely has faith that whatever churns up in his subconscious is going to be interesting in a song.

And, you know, he happened to be right. But to me, what makes his music so fearless is he doesn't question and he just does it. 100%. Well, let's hear Naomi, because it's a goddamn gorgeous beautiful song and we need to hear it. Sure. This is Naomi. That was Naomi. God damn gorgeous, beautiful song.

Imagine someone wrote a song like this about you called Mark. Yeah. I'm watching Naomi full bloom. I'm hoping she will explode into one billion tastes and tunes. I know it. It's great. It's so good. It's so good.

I have had the great fortune of having two songs written about me. One is very beautiful and one is kind of mean, to be honest. But you know what? When you're a muse, babe, I can't control the artistic output. They can't give up control. Yeah. It's simply a God's plan. Here's a question I wanted to ask you, and I'm not just here to remind you again that you're

older than me, but just because you're older than me. No, I'm fine. What was the vibe around Merge records in 1996? Like, obviously, like, you know, today, everyone knows, you know, the standing of Merge. But it had been around, you know, several years, right? Like eight years or something by then? Yeah, for sure. I think it was very prominent indie rock label at the time for sure, you know, the home of Superchunk, of course.

But, you know, like, I mean, for a very long time, the big three, you know, Matador, Sub-Bop and Merge. And Merge never really had in the 90s that kind of like crossover band in the way that pavement would have been. Orlis Fair or, you know, in Sub-Bop, obviously they were Nirvana. Nirvana and many others, or a few others. So they didn't quite have that pipeline to the majors kind of vibe. But yeah, it was a very highly respected indie rock label. And, you know, there's a real kind of regional sense to a lot of these labels. So like that part of a country and like a band that was a little bit further from the south,

totally makes sense that they would gravitate toward it in the way that, you know, a Chicago band might gravitate towards Direc City or something like that. So, yeah, it was definitely there, but, like, their huge, like, breakthroughs superstar bands came later. Okay. Yeah. Well, famously, because of Nutrimalco Hotel, their biggest band came, but we don't want to get. Right. Again, too ahead of ourselves.

They got this album reviewed, right? So the Village Voice, I couldn't find the actual write-up, but I do know that it was number 35 in the Pazzenjop poll of 1996, respectable, you know. Yeah, the fact that it was on the radar and enough people had heard it was definitely something. Eric Wisebarred in spin. Eric Wise Bard. I'm a little talking to you to do about this. July 1996. A lo-fi fiesta, but is the world ready for guided by voices imitators?

How dare? Yeah. How dare? Yeah. Yeah, like, that was the thing is, like, they were a little bit hard to contextualize in some ways because this idea of big fans of 60s music who make lo-fi records, there was a lot of that going on. Sure. And to a degree, Nutrimoke Hotel fits that. But what's really special about them for anyone who cares deeply, it's not that they're like a really good lo-fi 60s band.

You know what I mean? Sure. It's like it goes way beyond that. And if you're not tuned into the part of what makes them special, I can see how, you know, they might just be another example of that. Yeah, and I think, like, in Eric Wiseport's defense, guided boy voices had already been around. And if on Avery Island was the only neutral milk hotel that ever existed, we would not be having this conversation. You know, so it's easy to look back with 2020 hindsight, as they say.

Producer Dillon has uncovered a later review in the NME in 2008 that says Every vaguely alternative kid worth their salt knows a well-placed neutral milk hotel reference can get them into the pants of an impressionable sixth formers everywhere Once again, these people are speaking British, and I don't know what that means. I don't know what a six-former is. Are they 17? Are they 12? What age is this? Producer-Dillan? That's when you're 17-18. Okay, that makes me feel. much more comfortable because here's sixth grade is very young. I was 11 in the sixth grade. And then I was like, this is disgusting. I don't know. Me. How dare? Anyways, this band and more specifically main songwriter, Jeff Mangum, has a much more enduring legacy than awkward teenage sex.

I just thought that was kind of funny. I wanted to read it. Okay. Sasha Geffen wrote in 2019 in the pitchfork Sunday review about Avery Island and producer-Dlellan pulled this good paragraph that's sort of like the comparison of Avery to Aeroplane. And Sasha wrote, Aeroplane's thematic ambitions can make it feel bigger than any one person. It's an album about death and loss and evil and about how human beings keep searching for the good in ourselves, despite our long history of being awful to each other. On every island's scope is narrower.

Mangum sings about himself and the people he knows. Instead of mountaintops and oceans, he sets his songs in bedrooms and public parks. His characters smoke cigarettes and hate themselves for being horny. They break up and hook up and urine for each other like teenagers. They fall asleep on other people's floors, listening to the rain, hit the streets outside. I thought that was a really astute observation. That was me. I mean, Sasha's an incredible critic and great peace, and that's so dead on.

Aeroplane is just something fucking else, you know? And it's like it surpasses being great into just being something uncategorizable. But I like that that might be something to do with it, right? That it's like cosmic in its scope of what is being handled. Yeah. And also the confidence level of Jeff Mangum has increased sort of like exponentially when you get to airplane as compared to Avery Island. Absolutely. Okay.

Let's talk about what happens after Avery Island is delivered and goes to the airplane. in the world. Merge, being a label who does make money, as part of the reason for existing, I think did expect Nutriamil Hotel to, you know, do things like Guantor and stuff like that. And so it was time to make a band because there was no band. Can you tell me a little about how the lineup that became neutral milk hotel shaped up? Yeah. So Scott Spillane, who plays horn that all these i should say all the there's three other people in the band and along with jeff they all play you know multiple instruments live jeff plays mostly are all guitar but the rest of them kind of switch instruments and people play different things um but scott spulane he was actually a rusting guy

and he was a little bit older than jeff and robert and will and bill so he was about five years older than them. So they met him through the radio station there where he was involved with that. So they went back a ways with him. There's a funny story when Jeff was like, okay, now I have to put together a band because I put this album out. You know, he had played shows before, but with just, you know, either solo or with people here and there. But when it came time to put together band, when he did connect with Scots Blaine, he was working, making pizzas at Cumbies Pizza. In Austin, right? And so, you. You know, and he was like, yeah, come be in our band.

And he had to think about it, but then it ended up doing that. And so he played horns in the band. He played guitar. He's actually said that he played horns in high school, but he knew how to play trumpet and he could play some tuba, but he never played in a band in any way until joining Neutral Hotel. And he's played horn in bands ever since. So it's kind of like, we have horns on a record.

You know how to play. You do that. And so Julian Coaster, he had met in Athens when he was there. And, of course, he had a lot of musical experience. He played bass. He played guitar. He played accordion. He played Saw, which will come in on the next album.

Which, do you know that it came to him in a dream? Okay, right. Julian, he had a dream that there was an instrument that made music that was a saw. And I think he was a teenager in high school. And then he went and woke up and was like, what is this craziness? And then he came to find out that that was real. And then he started playing it. this band, just magic all around.

It was probably beamed to him by Jeff somehow. That's what I'm saying. So once he connected with Julian, Julian actually knew this guy at Jeremy Barnes, who was younger than any of them. And just in his, when Julian had been touring with his first band at one of his shows, he'd met this guy who he turned out to be a great drummer. So when Julian joined, he said,

I know a guy that can play drums, and he played other instruments as well. So they came together. first to tour after on Avery Island came out. Yeah, quick note for my astrology heads at home, Scott and Jeremy, both Libras, just letting you know. I did love that they moved to New York to sort of like rehearse or be a band before they went on tour and they spent all their time unclear if it was just practicing at Julian's grandma's house or living at Julian's grandma's house. Yeah, it sounded like they spent some time living there, kind of, yeah.

I love this. And Julian's grandma, apparently, one cool-ass bitch. Her name was Marie St. Angelo Casso. She was super supportive of music and her grandson. She, I think, told some story where she remembered, like, during the Depression or something, like a musician could come to the courtyard and play the accordion and people would throw down coins. And so it was, you know, a recession-proof job as far as she was concerned. You could always make money.

And so she let this man Scott who played rudimentary tuba in high school spent eight hours a day fucking hammering away on the horns in her house. She must have been hard of hearing. I have to imagine the only way that this could have possibly worked out of she was hard of hearing. I bring all that up, A, because it's adorable and charming, but B, because it sounds like a lot of that time at Julian's grandma's house yielded a lot of the song writing of Aeroplane over the C. Yeah, Jeff was wearing songs and then they could work out arrangements since they were spending so much time together. And another interesting tidbit about her is they described her as a pack rat. So there was all sorts of, yeah, hoarder, yeah. So there was all sorts of old stuff around and, you know, something that'll become even more apparent on the next record.

But like, Neutral Mokotel has a very interesting relationship with like history and like old things and antiquated. technology and, you know, it's like the artwork, you know, for the releases. It's like old kitsch paintings that have been manipulated and they dress like a late 19th century farmer or whatever. So it's like to me it kind of underscores their whole thing of like creating their own world and not really wanting to be part of this one. Right. Cosplay. If you guys. And so I think grandma's house had it, you know, it was a good, was a good setting for that to kind of like take place. Big impact on the barn core aesthetic that would soon form. You noted this already that they all switched instruments, but in the great book of Elephant Six lore, it was noted that

this was Julian's idea and he sort of encouraged everybody to like pick up an instrument they didn't play and get into it. I love the spirit of anyone can do anything. Yeah, for sure. Okay. So the first show However, with this lineup, was April 28, 1996. They played a showcase at Brownies for a booking agent. And coincidentally, this showcase also included their old pals Olivia Tremor Control. How cute. And they played songs off Avary Island, but also songs that would end up on aeroplane. And then they had an eight-person insane jam at the end with everybody.

Now, I bring this up because Neil Strauss, he wrote, In the densely populated world of rock music, great things can happen when pop perfectionism is mixed with a restless sense of experimentation. That's how seminal albums like the Beatles, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band, or the Beach Boys Pet Sounds come about. It's also at the heart of one of the most interesting rock collectives to emerge this decade, Elephant Six, a group of Louisiana-bred bands that includes Olivia Tramor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel, both of which performed at Brownies on Monday night.

Neutral Milk Hotel, which opened the show, consisted of four. four musicians who in some songs played as many as eight instruments. The arrangements were eccentric. Sparser songs consisted of just an acoustic guitar accompanied by a musical saw, a melodica, a French horn, or a banjo played with a violin, bow. But the melodies glided by like classic British invasion pop. This is very true. This is the magic of Neutral Mill Hotel.

They took this steampunk-ass philosophy. They took the saw, the washboard, whatever, and they somehow still made gorgeous pop music with it. Yeah. I love it. All that to say is it's like a sort of a breathlessly positive review of Eleventh Six and Nutri Molec Hotel, which I thought was very cool to show up, pop up in the New York Times pre-airroplane. Okay. Tour starts July 1st, 1996 in San Francisco. Three days later, Jeff plays a solo set at Aquarius Records, where he did begin the set with Oak Humley. Now they all move back to Athens.

tour is over. It's time to live in Athens in a big cheap house. Here's just a few cute things I wanted to bring up about this time in Athens about Jeff. Jeff's favorite place to sing in this big cheap house in Athens was in the bathroom. In his room, apparently one of his roommates would eaves dropped to see what he was listening to in his room. The only mainstream music he listened to was one song, don't let it bring you down by Neil Young. And he would play and sing along to it. Otherwise, he just listened to a bunch of Pierre Henry,

ethnographic records that were put out by Folkways, electronic music, and the Minutemen. He also drank 1,000 million cups of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, blasted SIGs all night because he didn't want to go to sleep, just working on songs. I love this. Just putting us in the headspace of what Jeff was doing, staying up all night, drinking Dunkin' Donuts coffee,

smoking a ton of cigs, going through his old tapes because he probably has, to date, he probably has like 16 more albums of songs on all these tapes from, you know, various times. And he's working and reworking them into songs. Around this time, I need to mention because we'll talk about it later. He plays a show at a place called Jittery Joe's Coffee Shop. Okay. Hello, everybody.

We haven't mentioned Lance Bings yet, but Lance Bings, acclaimed filmmaker, Lance Bings. Lance Bings, shout out Lynn's bings, did live in Athens and he did curate a little string of shows here at Jittery Joe's Coffee Shop and this was the first public hometown

performance of the songs that would end up on Airplane Over the Sea. And Lance recorded it and later, much later it does come out as an album but this is when it happened was you know, whatever, 96, 97. Have you listened to this Jittery Joe's album? I

I have. I do have a vinyl copy of that one. Yeah, of course you do. Of course you do. It's great because he always kind of has that same quality that I love on aeroplane. You know, he doesn't hold back. He's really just like... Yeah, it's very unhinged. It's unhinged. It's unhinged. It's unfiltered. It's just, it's really pure. and I think going back to what you said earlier, which we'll hear much more when we get to aeroplane, that's off-putting for people in the same way that it's off-putting for people when you're really earnest or you're, again, we've said it a thousand times on the show, but like it's the 90s, you know? Like we're coming out of like the most irony-drenched decade of our lived experience. And this man is sitting here singing about Jesus Christ in a full.

belt, and people were like, that's weird. For sure. It's on comfy. The whole time I've been a big fan of Nutrimo Kotel, but especially since I've started writing about their music, I've always written about it from the perspective. I mean, it's some of my favorite music that's ever been made, but I've always been written about it aware that a lot of people

really don't like it. So somehow the polarizing nature of it has always been kind of, in the mix for me as I've thought about it. I know so many music fans who love indie rock, love music from the 90s, you know, love things that are often considered in neutral hotel orbit. But they're like, oh, man, I hate that stuff, you know.

And when you think about, like, so many seminal artists pavement or Elliot Smith or people from that era, not too many people say, like, I absolutely hate that. You know, it's like, they might not be big fans, but it's like, well, if you like indie rock, probably going to think pavement's pretty good. Right. But there are a lot of people.

Likely, yeah. Yeah. But there's a lot of people that big music fans that are completely turned off by what he does. So that's always been interesting to me. Mark, it's very clear as day. It's because Nutriamilk Hotel is not cool. Yeah. They're just not.

And they didn't want to be or care about it. Or like, if you want to be cool, you're certainly not getting on stage with that beard, A of all. And B, the fact. saw and the, you know, tuba or whatever. These are not traditionally cool instruments. This is not a traditionally cool presentation. If you want to be cool, you do not scream saying, I love you, Jesus Christ. These are not things that were cool. And so, you know, I get why people are just like, ugh, that. Also, at the time, I'm sure that there wasn't a lot of like, you know, because they hadn't been enshrined in time and held up to this level. We talked about it on the

Radiohead episode, too, they saw, again, same situation where people are like, I don't care about that fan because people have been shoving it down their throats. But also, it's like, I'll say it again, they had a hand in creating some music that people really don't like. Like the offshoots of what the gates of hell, if you will, that Newtrimal Hotel opened right up, a lot of people don't like it. They don't want it. They wanted to go back. Yeah. Oh, name names, but you know what I'm talking about.

Yeah. And once it's like two generations away, it's actually some of my least favorite music. So I do understand that part of it for sure. Okay. So I want to just read this quick quote from Lance Bings that was in the 33 and a third book, kind of talking. about, again, like to contrast the perception of Neutralville Hotel now, in real time, someone who is undeniably cool, Lance Bings, witnessed this. And he said about that jittery Joe's show, that was definitely the moment where it seemed apparent that it wasn't just a good van that was

happening. It was like having Van Morrison at his peak of Astral Weeks going on, an entire new poetic language of imagery that wasn't contrived and didn't rely on the same sort of whining or confessional singer-songwriter thing that had been happening at that point. Here was something new that was emotional and direct. Show me the lie. Boy, that's dead on. Yeah. Honestly, I used to always bring up Astral Weeks when I would try to explain to people why this album was great.

And I didn't know he'd made that connection as well. Maybe it's obvious. You and Lance B. Yeah. Same brain. It wasn't obvious to me and I liked that comparison. Yeah. So, Lance Be.

also sent this tape, I mean, pre it being released, obviously, many years later, he made a bunch of copies of the tape and sent it to Elliot Smith and Michael Stipe and Ian Mackay and Jim Cohen, who he said, all the people I was fond of in different parts of the country who are culturally significant to me. Do you know of any, like, I couldn't find any evidence on the interweb of Ian McKay or. or Elliot Smith talking much about neutral muckelton, although I know Elliot Smith was a fan. That I did know. Do you have any stories about what maybe these early tapes making their way to these luminaries of various rock genres? I mean, certainly like Michael Stipe has been very kind to the Elephant Sixth world over the years, right? He has spoken about Nutriamil Hotel in particular. Although I can't like pull up a quote or anything, but I feel like that's pretty well.

document it. I think he talked about them in pitchfork in the, what's the thing called where it's like 510, 15, 40. It has a name. Or the music of my life or something? Yeah, 510, 15, 20, exactly. But yeah, no, I have not heard of Elliot Smith talking about them. Definitely not E. Mackay. So, you know, I always think of that period, like the mid to late 90s is a lot of stuff kind of fell into a hole because I've had everyone up in a blog somewhere. Sure. It's long gone. Mark, should we talk a little bit about the songwriting process of Jeff Mangum on aeroplane over the sea?

Yeah, let's do that. If you'll allow me, I have a string of quotes from Jeff himself. Would you allow me to read them to you and to everyone? Yes, I'd actually, I'd like that. Okay. So he said in 1998 to exclaim, magazine. This new album is more involved with the band that formed after on Avery Island. There are more people, more playing live, more sharing of musical experiences with people.

But basically, I sit in the bathroom and sculpt songs in my head. Then I present them to the band, and songs just converge from there. I might write a 12-minute song, and that song might get broken up into different pieces, because I'll be singing one song, and then I'll be singing another song, and then realize that they fit together and get really happy. So I say, this is how it's supposed to be. That song becomes that and other songs take on shapes. Some get left by the wayside because different songs take on different themes. Certain themes work together. I'll struggle with these different parts and songs and take them to the band and ask them what they think works. Jeff Mangum writing songs in the bathroom. I love it. He did say multiple times that his favorite place to sing was in the bathroom. I guess that's because of the acoustics.

Yeah. You can imagine, you know, when he hits those notes on Oak Comley or something and he's in that bathroom. That must have been quite a sound. Yeah, but do you want to do it to illustrate for the people? I don't, you know, this is, I don't want to hurt this microphone. I'm not sure what the dynamic range is on this. I thought this was really interesting, speaking of the bathroom. He said to alternative press in 1998, when I wrote aeroplane, I finally had a room of my own, no Virginia Woolf, to work in at all hours of the day with the door. is shut. We sort of hinted at this earlier, but Jeff Mangum is like a super nomadic person. And I probably remains to this day, not a plant, settle down kind of guy. And so prior to this, he had literally been sleeping on couches and floors and, you know, here and there, not really having his own space

in any way, shape, or form. And having like one room that was your own that you could like hole up in. And as he said, I'd sit there listening to shortwave radio and my records, Captain B. Beefheart, Pierre Henry, Bulgarian music, Hungarian gypsy music. The stability let me go deeper into my head and let the subconscious take over. There's such an obsessive nature to these new songs. A few of them really freaked me out. It took my housemates to say, that's not too weird. But yeah, I was really struck by that idea that, like, he was able to sort of dig deeper,

maybe musically because he, for the first time, maybe since he was, like, living with his parents in high school had a solid space of his own to create with him. Yeah, absolutely. And definitely the fact that he identified that as a path into allowing his subconscious to take over, whether it's like having more quiet space and allowing that to bubble up. I mean, I feel like, you know,

the subconscious is all over this record and it feels like a direct transmission sometimes. A hundred percent. Okay. this is just file it under the most adorbs. Robert said, and then we'll get into the actual recording of aeroplane because I think this is a nice dovetail. So once again, Jeff packed up and went to Denver to record with Robert and the whole band. So Robert said in, again, endless endless, the gorgeous book, he said, our entire social scene was based around the myth of things like

smile, which we talked about earlier, this kind of greatness that was. was unachieved. We believe that going out our way, maybe we could hit it. I would wake him up every morning. He was sleeping on a mattress in one of the rooms in our house in Denver. I would go in and be like, Jeff, my man, hey, it's time to go to the studio. He would wake up and I would say, hey, good morning, my friend. We're going to go make a classic album. It became a refrain for the album. He'd be like, are we at first? But then he'd be like, as it was going on, we are? I don't mean to sound cocky about it. You can do stuff like that on accident and you can also do it on purpose. Robert is a wise motherfucker, I must say. I know. Yeah, what a guy to have in your corner.

It's got to give you a lot of confidence, you know, like this guy's not just knows what's the way around a studio, knows how to write an arrangement, but, you know, he's such a, such a rock of, uh, friendship. Literally waking up every day, good morning, my friend. We're going to make a classic album today every day. I love it. It's so cute. Okay. So let's talk about the recording of aeroplane. We touched on this earlier, but like what do you think maybe the benefits or like what was yielded from having now not just Robert and Jeff, but Robert, Jeff and then the three Neutral-Mal Co-Tel band members? involved in the process of making this album.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, like, there's elements of how the arrangements were on Avery Island that carried over and that kind of planted a seed for what New Tramolko Tell was, but this whole idea of the band as this kind of, you know, ramshackle Salvation Army band with weird instruments and bagpipe type instruments and all coming together around these songs. that this is really the place that that happens. And, you know, it's pretty hard to imagine anything remotely like that happening with the way that they record. Yeah. Much bound by the limitations between the two of them. But I feel like this is the Neutrimoak Hotel Sound. Jeff often talked

about being a fan of free jazz, 60s free jazz, this band in particular Liberation Music Orchestra, made a great record in the early 70s. Charlie Hayden, the bass player, was the leader of that band. And a lot of the guys in Elephant Six were kind of obsessed with this record, and Jeff was especially, and they covered a song from it in concert, often called Song for Che about Che Guevara. If you hear that record, this sound of this, it's a large band, and it's kind of half-free jazz,

but it's also very, like, sing-song, full arrangements. You can really see how that informs songs. of the sound of the full band stuff on this record, especially when there's like these sophisticated horn arrangements. So, and then this also has the starkest and most, you know, spare Nutrilo Co-Tel songs in existence where it's just Jeff and Qatar. So it kind of has like all these extremes in it. Yeah, like the best of all the worlds. Yeah, there was like a really good quote from Jeremy in the book that he said. He's kind of talking about the ten between like Robert's imposed control and the new band's like sort of more chaotic approach to creativity.

And he was like, it took a while for these two sort of separate creative identities to merge. And when they did, things really expanded. I don't think Robert was prepared for the band and the level of input we wanted to give in the studio. And we weren't really prepared for Robert's ideas about our songs. Yes, they were really Jeff's songs. But the rest of us felt very close to them. so close that they became ours as well. Adding Robert completely took them to the next level. He produced the record, but I think he was also a member of the band.

Gorgeous. Yeah, I felt it must have been, I mean, it seems again, like, and maybe it's just from all the rhetoric that we've read from Robert about, like, being his cheerleader and like, good morning, my friend, we're going to make a classic record. And I'm just here to make him feel confident. Like, it seems like Jeff Mangum is an artist as like someone who really benefits from having this sort of like, I mean, you can expand it to just elephant six in general, but like this sort of nucleus around him that like, you know, kind of, I don't want to say like cages him in, but like provides sort of like walls for his vision to bounce off of so it takes like the exact right shape, you know? And like maybe the missing element was.

it's Robert, but then also these band members who are so invested and also who did help sort of usher along the creation of the songs, maybe not the writing of them, but working them out. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. And I think, like, the world of this album is very much one where about human connection in all these different ways, like across time and, you know, romantic love and friendship and, you know, love with. with people that aren't around anymore. And I feel like having the sense of other people in the room and they're with you and they're playing, it's like so important to what this record is. So if this were really like another solo thing, it just wouldn't come across.

You know, it's like it needs that like feel of a collective coming together for this thing. Totally, totally. I think Robert said in the book also that like Jeff was like so social and sociable that like throughout the recording of the album like tons of random people. people also like came to town, came by, like picked up a tambourine or whatever. And like, you know, it was not even just these five people. It was like another 50 people were involved in making the album, which is, again, heartwarming for me personally.

Everyone sort of psychologically being together and then separately musically creating these little worlds. Okay, one last thing I'll say before we like sort of dive into like the content of the album is I found this also very interesting. He said in that same interview with Exclaim, that one thing that was different for this album was that we performed a lot of these songs live in front of people before we recorded them, which is really nice. When I write a song, I know what I'm saying and what I'm feeling when it arrives,

but I'm not sure if other people will get the same emotional impact. So getting that feedback from an audience helps me gauge what's coming across and reevaluate what I'm doing and saying. Because of that, the record has taken on a really different shape. That I thought was so interesting, right? Because we talked about how he was touring, they were touring and he was playing a lot of these aeroplane songs. And it would probably be fun for a person who has a lot more free time than I do to take all the bootleg live shows and sort of track the, you know, metamorphosis of those songs. Yeah, for sure. Let's talk briefly about the themes of this album.

Let's get it out of the way. Yeah. Did Jeff Mangum get himself a copy of a diary of a young girl, maybe a couple of years before this album was recorded? Yeah, well, so that's like, if you know one thing about this album, that's probably what you know. You're like, oh, you know the band name, the name of the album, and that it has something to do with Anne Frank. Right. You know, like, the story goes that he actually picked it up around the time, not directly before writing these. songs, but maybe up to a year before. And he said he bought it in a used bookstore in Athens.

And he described in quite a few interviews in 1997 and 98 about being, you know, not having read it, a lot of people read it in school, as I think I did. I might have read it in middle school or so. But, you know, he hadn't read it before. He picked it up. And he describes, you know, for three days, he was basically just inconsolable and crying, reading this book. And he knew where it was going. And when he got there, it was just, like, completely devastating to him.

It definitely looms large. It's going way too far to say this is like a concept album about Holocaust or about Anne Frank. That's just not true. But it's almost like a texture. There are references to her life and certainly references to that 1929, 1945,

which was the years that she was alive. I mean, to me, it's most interesting because it's just so unusual. That's what I mean about like fearlessness and letting his subconscious take over. Like he was so gripped by this. He's like, yeah, I'm just going to like work this into my songs. And some people would have said, maybe that's not a great idea for any number of reasons. But he was just like, no, that's what I'm doing.

So and, you know, that's, to me it's really amazing. You know, it's not like I listen to this album and think of Anne Frank per se, but it's definitely something that'll come up as we listen to these songs. Yeah. I mean, I think you made a really good point that I think a lot of people maybe who don't know anything about it just, you know, they're like, that guy, they made that album about Anne Frank. But it's like, this album is like definitely not about Anne Frank in any sort of direct or linear way. Jeff Mangum was apparently just not a big reader. And he said this to Puncture magazine. Right before recording on Avery Island, I was walking around in Rustin waiting to go to Denver to record.

I don't consider myself to be a very educated person because I've spent a lot of my life in dreams. And I was walking around wondering, if I knew the history of the world, would everything make more sense to me or would I just lose my mind? And I came to the conclusion that I'd probably just lose my mind. The next day, I went into a bookstore and walked to a wall in the back, and there was the diary of Anne Frank. I'd never given it any thought in my entire life. I spent two days reading it and then completely flipped out. And the interviewer was like, so you proved your thesis. And he said, yeah, I spent about three days.

day's crying and was just completely flipped out. When I was reading the book, she was 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. And so here I am as deep as you can go in someone's head, in some ways deeper than you can go with even someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash. And that was something that completely blew my mind. The references to her on the record, like ghost refers to her being born. And I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine. And somehow I'd have the ability to move

through time and space freely and save Anne Frank. Do you think that's embarrassing? Just like feels like this was like a person that was like too pure for this world. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess if you like spend a lot of your time sort of like daydreaming or like in your own head or just like having this like we talked a lot about like creating their own world of this group of friends it's pretty jarring to learn of the myriad of atrocities that exist in the world I mean he he found out about one there's a lot there's a lot more probably to but there's not diaries about them but just to be so you know I don't know so and the thing is like it's not I would almost theorize that like the whole thing with the subconscious, right?

It's like we'll get into it with this record, but it's not like Jeff Mingham lived like a completely perfect and charmed life before this and didn't have any traumatic experiences or his own, you know, personal day-to-day life things that were hard. It just sounds like it took something so just like overwhelmingly horrible to digest to almost knock that other stuff out of him too. know, like his own personal experiences with horrible things. Right. I don't know. I don't know if that's what happened or, I mean, who can only Jeff Mangum can know, but it does feel sort of like those two were like interconnected throughout the album. Because that's like, that's really what the album's about, right?

It's like some parts of it refer to Anne Frank. A lot of parts of it refer to what seems like his personal life or friends of his personal lives. He did say in an interview that like 95% of the album is either experiences that I've had or experiences that friends have had or historical figures. It's all real stuff. Right. So, you know, it all sounds pretty like insane and dreamlike, but it's all referencing real things. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There's like a, you know, it feels like a black and white film or something or like a dream. But for all that, like there are plenty of moments and snapshots where it feels like your own memory, you know, and that you can easily like, honestly from the first song on down where you can like pretty easy to trace it to some experience you might, the listener might have had. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the first song. Why don't we play the first song? In fact, this is the King of Carrot Flowers part one. That was the King of Carat Flowers part one.

that's right you know it god damn gorgeous beautiful song undeniable how could anyone not like how could you not be moved i just got like huge chills listening to it i mean i swear to god like i it's when i hear those opening chords it's just like it's just so transformative to me yeah literally same honestly like wow it's interesting because i don't know about you i don't want to make any presumptions about you in your life in 1998 but when i picked up this record in whatever 2001 or 2002. I was extremely depressed. I was an extremely depressed person.

And it's just really interesting. I think some of the like incredible beauty of this album is that like almost wherever you're at mentally or like mental health wise or like in relation to your life and world, it can speak to you. Like, you know, now when I hear it. I just hear, I just hear God. Like I hear like this like it profound sort of like spiritual and just also like profound human thing in it.

And it like really moves me in a really positive way. But when I was super depressed, it was like a solace for me because it like helped me feel sad. I was like, okay, here we are. I'm putting on the sad song to feel more sad, gorgeous. Yeah, there's such a mix of despair and hope in it that it's easy to like. tune in to one component or the other, depending on where you are when you pick it up. Yeah, 100%.

So this king of carrot flowers, who is he? We don't know. Carrot flowers are old. It's a very contusing first line. When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers. When a carrot flowers, it's an old carrot. So how are you young? I don't know.

That's something I stole from a genius commenter, who I think was splitting hairs a bit. But I did. I felt like I needed to mention it. It took me many years to realize that the tower tumbling through the trees was a tarot reference. It wasn't until I got really into tarot that I was like, oh, yeah, tower tumbling through the trees, gorgeous. Yeah, I learned that much later. I think I probably learned it from the Adam's book, actually, if I think it's in there.

Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, well, as a tarot aficionado, me and producer, and we think about these things. Yeah, just like, again, like, when we're. we talk about like oh is this album about anne frank okay no this this song is not an and frank to be seen it's who knows but there's this very real familial dynamic being discussed that is like both like i think probably like in i don't know in like feeling so familiar to a lot of people but then also has these like extremely specific details like so southern goth like how mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder.

Yeah, Southern Gothic is exactly it. So that's what the parents are doing, and that's what the adults are doing. And then, you know, the children obviously witness this, but then they steal away and, like, you know, explore something beautiful, which is, like, you know, their own bodies. And there's something about that contrast between, like, the world of the adults is, you know, corrupt and, if not corrupt, at least like, you know, it's a place of violence. And then, yeah, the kids are still are trying to like make something out of it and escape that and like do their own thing. So it's a really nice scene setter for the whole record because like that feels like a quintessential Naturnal Cotel theme of the world is a horrible place. So let's let's withdraw into this and make our own or understand it in our own way or something like that.

Totally. No, totally. Like or like let's commit. ourselves like doubly to finding the beauty within it and and exploring the beauty within it, you know, because that still exists. Just take, I'm just processing. I'm just processing this. You know, one last thing I'll throw in there. And I know you said you were less interested in parsing. You know, Robert Schneier gets very nerdy about all of the studio settings and how you record a

guitars, but like one thing about this record is that, you know, it is mentioned that there's a lot of fuss around instruments because it's, they push, you know, the levels to a degree that there's a lot of like, there's light analog distortion on a lot of things. But it's also like a weirdly, it's a very, like in terms of dynamic range and compression, it's a very, very, very loud in your face record, which is part of what gives it its quality. Punk. So like, you know, Robert Schneider, like, had cool like 60s analog compression devices and he you know they recorded the tape but he was very conscious of like trying to like push the limit of like what they could get on there and um you know it's it definitely has a very unique sound to it yeah it really still to this day i feel like

you don't not a lot of things are a lot of things sound like this as many imitators if i'm or if i'm being generous people that were inspired by um They don't sound like this. The albums, like, quality-wise, don't sound like this. Yeah, no, it's very much its own sound. And, you know, it sounds very different from the first Intramal Coel Records. Totally. This particular song, Jim and Robert doubled Jeff's vocals.

Jim McIntyre, I believe is his name. And Robert sang harmony and played Air Organ. And they also doubled Jeff's guitar parts. So I feel like there's, like, a thickness to the sound. that really adds to it. Yeah, and it's so like, that's what I said, it's like impossible to ignore when that guitar part comes in. I mean, it's like, it's so far from being background music.

I mean, I love a lot of music that you throw in the background. This is like 180 degrees opposite that. It just refuses to go on the background. Yeah, and there's something which we can point to it more when we get to two-headed boy and also haul in 1945, but I think it's here from the very beginning. There's like a desperate sense of urgency in Jeff Mangum's guitar playing.

Like I don't know how else to say it. It literally is like truly desperado. Like we just like, like it almost sounds like, are you going to hurt your, are your fingers bleeding? Like how hard are you hitting those strings? Yeah, for sure. It's like it's way faster and harder than it seems like it needs to be. But then the songs actually do require that it be

that intense. I love it. It's one of my favorite things about neutral milk hotel because it is like the sonic equivalent of what to me the emotion of the songs also is because there is this also like plaintive like yearnty desperation in all the songs too. And I love that you can hear it. It's like the true, the chaotic energy of it is really palpable both through the guitar and through like the feeling that it's evoking. Yeah, for sure. Another component of that too is like, Like, he's, he's constantly, like, singing like he's trying to fit in, not constantly, but often singing as if he's trying to cram in as many words as possible. And it's like, there's so much to say. And it's only a 30-minute record. So you got to, like, do everything you can to get it in there. It's almost like speaking in tongues, literally.

Yeah. This is getting a bit ahead to the cursed creative loafing article that comes out in 2003, which we'll talk about when we get there. but I just want to mention that the writer of that article did hunt down Jeff's father, James, to talk about this song. And he said, sounds pretty bad on that record, doesn't it? His mother and I didn't get along and we divorced with Jeff was 14. But the kids never got caught in between us as far as our fighting was concerned. They always just came number one, no matter how badly we fought. But some of the album was autobiographical. Some of it I don't understand.

He starts talking about it. Well, I looked for a thousand ways to die or something like that. I didn't know that he interpreted it that way. The way I interpreted the record, he was on my side, so to speak, but sympathetic. Right. I really hate that this man went and found Jeff's dad. That must have been an awkward interview saying like, hey, can I talk to you about King of Care Flowers? Yeah, if I had to talk about this song that your son wrote that seems to indicate that you were suicidal.

We have to just talk now about the King of Carat Flowers Parts 2 and 3 because they're really important. We can't not talk about them. Okay, this is the King of Carrot Flowers, Parts 2 and 3. That was the King of Carrot Flowers, Parts 2 and 3. Gorgeous, as producer Jolin has said, a real running through the field music. And yes, that's correct. Let's just get this.

Let's get this out of the way. Let's talk about Jesus Christ and how he loves him. In the, like, booklet of this album, I actually really loved this, that apparently the whole thing is just the lyrics unbroken of every song with like no song like no delineation of which song is which, just lyrics, lyrics, lyrics. But when it gets to this song, the lyrics are not there and it's replaced by this little message from Jeff that says, a song for an old friend and a song for a new friend and now a

song for Jesus Christ. 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 contain a white light within them that I see as eternal. I love it. I love it so much. And then it just goes back to the title of the book that we've been talking about too. Endless, endless.

Yeah, he doesn't really elaborate on what he means by endless, unless. But I think that any spiritual or seeking person can sort of extrapolate what that means. We've hinted at it or talked about it a bit, but like you can speak more to this. This is very bold to, in the 90s, on an indie rock album, make a passionate declaration of your love for Jesus Christ. This was not commonly happening. Is that right? Yeah, no. It was not.

No, definitely. You know, if you can pinpoint one place where people who are like not in a Nurtramal Hotel, the first time they heard that, they're probably like, yeah, okay, that's not for me. And some people never look back, you know. It's not just that he's saying, I love you Jesus Christ, but of course it's the way that he's singing it, which is so over the top and like he's possessed. And the first thing, most people who heard that,

it's thought is like, oh, is this like a Christian, it's like two extremes. Like, is this a Christian band or if you knew nothing about it? Like, is this some kind of like parody?

Right. Like is he being ironic? Yeah, is he being ironic? But the weird thing is like, for it to be that effusive of an expression, and so, you know, perform with such intensity, it's really, it's just not one thing, which is hard to, like, convey. I mean, like, he definitely did grow up religious to a degree.

He talked a lot about Christian summer camp, which I think we touched on here, and, like, time that he would have gone to Christian summer camp. And I'm pretty close to his age, actually. So, like, late 70s, early 80s. And I did go to YMCA camps, which I never really thought of Christian summer camps. But, you know, there was definitely like kind of like a hippie idea of Jesus that was around then. Yeah. That was like a friendlier, like, you know, good vibes type figure. So whether or not that was in the mix, I don't know.

But yeah, it's like it's so bold, but it's also resists anyone interpretation, I think. I love that. I love good vibes, Jesus. No penance, just vibes. Jesus Christ. No, I think you're absolutely right. Jeff has talked. He went to that church camp every summer from the ages of 11 to 17.

He said this in this one zine called Mommy and I are one. Great zine name. It was like, hey, God's groovy. Have a smoke. And let's like listen to Kat Stevens and get all freaked out. But it was like, good freaked out. It was really amazing. Marijuana and Jesus Christ and the Minutemen were like my childhood.

That was me growing up. I love that. And then he told Punger magazine, everything was very open. We talked about sexuality freely. It wasn't really hippie. It was just weird. You could spill your guts. all over the place. So perhaps this is where he started to learn this way of, you know,

being open about his feelings and thoughts. People were leaping and freaking out. It wasn't so much a God trip as an emotional trip. Even if you were 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. Which is like, this sounds like this this camp sounds amazing yeah right and i have to say to him like nope that was hippie he's like it wasn't hippie as weird he's like no that sounds like hippie to me but right yeah i don't know i don't i don't i don't know what's uh i don't know what the vibe was at these uh christian camps but it sounds pretty sick um but he did i think he like also clarified in that same puncture magazine

interview that like he's like he's like I'm not saying I love you Christianity it's kind of crazy that he would he would have to say that but you know some people don't they don't hear what they they don't hear the the thing he said I'm not saying I love all the fucked up terrible shit that people have done in the name of God and I'm not preaching belief in Christ it's just expression I'm just expressing something I might not even understand it's a song of confusion it's a song of hope it's a song that says this whole world is a big dream and who knows what's going to happen this man just Yeah, it fits.

What an interesting. Yeah, and I love that song. So everyone. It is great. And then we could also point out that the up and over part, I guess it's never been officially said, but if this is King of Carrot Flowers parts two and three, I assume two is the Jesus Christ part and three is the up and over part.

But I'm not sure about that. Regardless, the up and over part is actually an adaptation of a song that he'd written quite a few years earlier. and that actually was on the Ipe City tape. Yeah. Okay. Don't put you on there because you don't really vibrate with the pinino. Yeah, that sounds cool.

He also released it as part of a single, but it had been around for a while. So when he mentioned, like, his songwriting of, like, getting things down, having these pieces, seeing how they fit together. Like, he definitely wasn't above saying, you know, saying, oh, I got this great song from four years ago that I think would fit perfectly here. So it did. Yeah. That seems like an ongoing, like, theme with him, right? And it's like there was all this like hiding in the bathroom, chugging Dunkin' Donuts, Blasting Sigs, was like the working and reworking of like all these like sort of different little amazing parts that came to him,

however they came to him and like rifling through the mind of being like, oh, there's something that would fit good here. Oh yeah, I have this little bridge. Someone in the book said that like they recognized a bridge from when he was like 14 years old. in a song on aeroplane. So it goes back. It goes deep. Man, it's going to be hard to not want to play like every song on here. Yeah.

We're really not known for being judicious here on being on this plane. I don't know if you're familiar with our approach, which is more is more. In that vein, we should hear, Bruce or Dillon just said, I don't love you, judicious Christ. And honestly, it's like a toss-up whether or not. fired or wired. I'm kind of wired. Kind of gorgeous. Let's hear in the aeroplane over the sea, since we're hurtling through in order, because this is also an important song and I love it. Here is in the aeroplane over the sea, the titular track. That was in the aeroplane over the sea.

God damn gorgeous, beautiful song. Honestly, structurally, maybe one of the most normally structured songs, would you agree? Yeah, I would say so. You know, I did notice, I think it's their most popular song. And I think if you play one song and you're maybe, if there are casual fans and you like one song, I feel like you're very likely to like that one. That is so interesting. I wouldn't think that. I would think it would be King of Carat Flowers.

Yeah. You know, I think partly like this is so clearly a love song too. Right. Totally. There's definitely a lot of subtext, but if you're just kind of catching the lyrics as they go, you're like, it's kind of a dreamy love song. I actually have heard that played at a wedding by a woman playing guitar, like right before the ceremony. So that's so pretty. Yeah. I have a running list of favorite Jeff Mangum lyrics, but I mean, this is probably many people's in their favorite list, but just like it's such a simple sentiment, but can't believe how strange it is to be any. at all. Yeah. I got the show. I was just saying it. My armare is standing up.

And it's like, it's not just the sentiment. It's the way it's delivered, right? With this like true sense of like wonder. I know. Oh, it's so good. I mean, it's definitely one of the, his defining, you know, lyrics. And it's also one of those things where like, if you hear that and feel it, you know exactly what he's talking about.

Totally. If you've ever done a little mushrooms, for example. Yeah, exactly. It's hard. It's hard to, like, bring that up in casual conversation because people are like, huh? But it's definitely like, yeah, if you're high or, you know, like, it's such a perfectly efficient line that captures that feeling. And it's kind of like, yeah, it's sort of like if you know, you know, kind of thing. It's like, if you think like that, you know exactly why it brings that up.

Yeah. He actually talked a bit about it in that Pungster magazine interview. this is a really long interview. The interview asked, they said, there's a real joy and wonder to your work. It has elements of the outlook of a six-year-old. The way a kid might look at a car going by and still be weirded out that such a thing even exists. This is distilled for me in the line off-airplane that goes, how strange it is to be anything at all. Is that your philosophy in a nutshell? And Jeff said, it's been a really strange process because I was a very religious person growing up. The church told me how things are, and I took things in that way, and it was all very simple. As I've gotten older, the more I don't understand, the more amazed I am, I usually wake up every morning completely freaked out that I'm in my body. Like usually whatever dream I'm having has something to do with being totally freaked out that I'm in my body. And I usually wake up with a shock. And then I relax, forget about it, go make a cup of coffee. And I wish I could say something about how I'm completely freaked out about even being here without sounding really silly.

truly just a man who sounded more comfortable in the non-reality state that we are able to occupy through sleeping or active imagination or drugs. Yeah. He doesn't sound like he's going to go to business school next year and, you know, like get a job in an office or something. He clearly had such a rich dream world and to the point that it was like night terrors and talked to sleep. So I can see that being jolting to like if that's the place that it's so real to you when you wake up and you're like, what's this shit? Yeah, absolutely. You know, right when I got Aeroplane, which I think was in a month or so after it came out on the newsstand was that Punker article. And it's really long and it's really good.

This guy, Mike McConicle wrote it. And that really framed like I was already listening to and loving the album. When I read that piece, it really like laid it out there. And, like, that was my introduction to who he was as a person. That's awesome. I don't think I ever read one single interview with him until this week. Because by the time I came across the album, there was no more interviews with him. He wasn't doing them anymore.

Oh, yeah, totally. He was retired. And there were, in 98, there were quite a few. And all these print magazines are long gone, too. Yeah, you can't find them. I mean, there's some of them quoted in Endless Endless, because I'm sure Adam Clare went. to the librarian fired up the microfiche or whatever, however you find those things that don't exist anymore, but you can't find them online. I tried. That's right. We will play two-headed

boy next because it comes next and I'm not leaving this podcast without playing two-headed boy over my fucking dead body. Okay, this is two-headed boy. That was two-headed boy. Goddam. Gorgeous, beautiful song. I love it so much. It's impossible to pick, but if I had to say that might be my favorite. song on here, but I don't know. I know. It's a real Sophie's choice. I feel like I'm torn between that one and Holland, 1945. Just depends on my hood. Do I want to scream? Right. In the shower? Yeah, exactly. Also, Hallow in 1945 has some screaming moments. I really catch myself just walking around. I am lastening to hear where you are. Just yell it for no reason. Also, I am,

you know, now I'm a little boy in Spain. Playing cannons. He doesn't say I am, but that's what I say. Yeah, this is just, this is like a prime example. I think what we were talking about earlier of this like sense of urgency. Like this song has got to get out. It needs to come out and he's going to break his fingers and go horse in his voice, but it's coming up. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that guitar is just like, it's so overstrunged in them.

Yeah, and then the way he sings it, it's. It's really something. When that guitar comes into, I've got to say I got chills again. It's amazing how the power it still has. It's such an interesting stylistic choice to yell. You know? Like, you could have just saying it normal. Like, it's not that the song demands a yelling there.

Or maybe it does. Maybe I don't understand music too well. But, like, I can't imagine the song without that because it's like, he is such a master of building and releasing tension, I guess. Like, it's like that whole, like, it's building all this tension. And then it's just like this gorgeous release when he just screams his head off about how he's listening to hear where you are. Also the lyrics. Yeah.

The two-headed boy is tapping on the glass. Oh, yeah. I know, I can hear you as you tap on the jar. It's also like, that's like the loneliest sound I've ever heard in my life. You know, it's like picturing whatever this poor boy. boy with two heads in a jar and he's trying to communicate in some way. So he's tapping on the jar. It's like, that's pretty heavy stuff, you know. And so I was think of like when he's yelling, I'm listening to here where you are, like, he's either like literally or metaphorically very far away.

So he's got to like, he's got to scream it to be to be heard because they're trying to like make some kind of connection. It's so good. It did come up for me in therapy last week, where I did make a parallel between how you can feel you're feeling around in your life to come upon you know what you're looking for much like how he's it's tapping on the glass inside your brain and you just have to listen to hear where it is um that's more about me really than it is about jeff manga but i'm just saying how universal yeah this no absolutely as much as any song in the album this one feels like a little black and white film too like i always think of it as like a 30 these Lon Cheney monster movie or something where you go into a mad professor's laboratory and

there's living things in jars and he's talking about pulleys and weights and there's all these primitive tools for doing horrible things and yeah it's like it all takes place within that world okay this is very interesting because there is a museum in san francisco museum museum mechanic. Okay. The Mouet Mechanique, excuse my bad French accent, it's now at the Fisherman's Wharf, but it didn't used to be. I think it used to be like in a house or a building or something. And Neutral Milk Hotel would go there all the time. And have you been there, Mark? You know, I have not, but I remember it when I lived there. And it was definitely a place that people went. It's like, it's truly like what you're describing of how two-headed boy is a little black and white film. It's like that, like, it's just, filled with like funny weird little arcade games from like the turn of the century that like you could imagine having like such similar imagery to I mean both the cover of the album and like what sort of works its way into this like carnivalesque like 1800s carnival feeling and that's kind of

you know two-headed boy to me I think of like the freak show that would go around. It's really freaked me out right now because producer Dylan literally messaged me a freak show the moment it came out of my mouth. And I'm like unwell. We literally need time apart. So yeah, like I'm just like picturing that like the freak show. Producer Dylan, two-headed host, producer Dylan, you're fired. I'm trying to do my job here. I'm trying to make some art and you are distracting me.

Yes. So anyways, to say back to the two-headed boy, yeah, I just, I can see like this cons this fascination with revisiting museum mechanic over and over sort of like infiltrating the mind of Jeff Mangum and like these old-timey images coming. Because like what like what I kept thinking about given what we learned about like the high school experience and stuff is like, you know, maybe like the two-headed boy is also. So like a stand-in for Jeff as himself, right? It's like an isolate, like feeling, feeling like a freak in high school, but then also feeling maybe like these feelings about the world make you a freak. He says in that particular puncture interview, and there's a couple others, he's so tentative, right?

In his answers, you can tell he feels like a freak saying the things he's saying. And he's constantly, is that embarrassing? Is that weird? You know, like, it's really so touching. Yeah, it's probably like the first time he's ever shared these things with someone outside of his circle. And like even with them, he had to say, like, is this weird? Is this, is this going too far? And they're like, no, Jeff, it's great. We love you. And then for the first time he's talking to these like journalists and trying to explain what these songs are and he's

catching himself saying like, man, maybe they think this sounds really crazy. Yeah. And some of it did. But that's okay. Nothing wrong with that. A hard part for me to reconcile. And this is just a personal thing is I don't picture the two-headed boy having feet, but then it's time for him to put on his Sunday issues and then I can't picture it because I'm like nobody doesn't have feet. It's just a floating two heads in a glass, but maybe it's a whole body. Yeah. That's, I don't know, that's neither here nor there. I just needed to, I needed to talk about it with a like-minded person. The song also has some of my favorite lyrics, which are, we will take off our clothes and they'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine. It's so good. It's amazing. And, you know,

it's like, it's almost like this, there's all these old-timey, the pullies and weights, and then like all of a sudden, like this, in a way, the spine is like another machine in that, you know, it's like the way that all of these physical selves and objects have these, I don't know, it's somehow it's like all fitting together. Yeah. The genius annotators seem to think this song is the most about Anne Frank. I tend to think the genius annotators are deeply. unwell, so we're not going to take

their word for it. I don't hear it. I don't see it. No. That, you know, it was more a background thing for me on this one. Like, there was nothing specifically that made me think of that in this. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not saying it's not, though. I just had never quite had that experience with it. I don't presume to know.

It's not, none of my business. Okay. On the album next comes the full. which is a very horn-driven song. It's a Scott composition. How do you feel about The Fool? Well, I think it's amazing. I think it's like, you know, when we talk about,

we're talking about the sound of this album as being like the mature sound of Nutrimo Kotel. And this kind of instrumental passage is really what we're talking about where like it can go from this one guy beating the shit out of his guitar to, you know, that's really nicely arranged like, you know, breath. band, Salvation Army band kind of thing. So I think it's great and it fits perfectly in the album as like a bridge between songs. It's not one that I would put on. Honestly, I pretty much always listen to

this album start to finish. It's pretty rare that I'll just like play one song from it. So it works perfectly in the context of the album. Yeah, I agree. Also, we haven't really talked about it, but the album has like an exquisite pacing. Yeah. And that really lends itself to putting it on, right? You know, some albums you're like, when is the good song coming? Or like, when is the one

I like coming. When can I sing to the good one? But this one just like, it's like banger, banger, banger, banger, oh, you need a little break, babe, after two-headed boy, I've broken your whole spirit. Don't worry. We have a little reprieve with this little horn moment. And guess what? Strap in, bitch, Holland, 1945 is coming. I hope you had enough of a rest. Let's hear a haul in 1945. That was Holland, 1945. That damn gorgeous, beautiful song. Mark, take it away. Yeah, amazing. I mean, that's like, um, So we were talking about, you know, undercurrents and allusions to Anne Frank. And it's definitely a big part of what this song's all about. Not exclusively about that period of history or anything, but it definitely centers on that.

But then there's also a lot of surreal touches to it. Totally. And I think, like, you know, one of the things he talks about in these interviews is he felt so powerless having read this book. And he felt this very strong desire to save her somehow. and wanting to build a time machine, which comes up again later in the record. So I always thought of, like, the way that this jumps around in time,

this song and also ghost later in the record. It's like, it's kind of like a fulfillment of his dream of wanting to have that time machine to be able to save somebody from, you know, from death. So, yeah, it's like it's jumping around and there's weird imagery, you know, playing piano. What's the, what's the,

that lyric theorem. Now she's a little boy in Spain playing pianos filled with flames. That's a reincarnation moment. Also, I believe it's a reference to a Girozki film, Fando Elyse. Okay. Yeah. I have not seen it. I'm not that, no letterboxed, okay, over here, sorry. Right. So yeah, I mean, it's, and then it's like, you know, it's really fast. It's definitely like a pop song in its way. Totally. Totally. You know, so the last line of the song, it's so sad to see the world agree that they'd rather see your face covered in flies. Basically, like, you know, you could look at that. It's very much like a little kid's perception of the terrible things that happen in the world, but on the one hand, but like the same token,

it's like you get so numb to suffering and you get so numb to all the terrible things that can happen in the world. So it's like, he's really looking at it from this perspective of not being numb and actually seeing it for what it is. And like how, how does, you know, the universe allow this to happen? How does people allow this to happen? So there's something like really beautiful about that, even though if you're to talk about World War II and, you know, it's like you could talk about that from the perspective of history and how, you know, what happened in World War I and in between and, you know, this guy who fought in World War I was, you know, anti-Semi, this happened. But so it's like There's a December song.

Yeah, exactly. That's a December song, but like for him, it's like, how, why? This shouldn't be, you know? Yeah. So there's something really amazing about that. Yeah, it's really like fist at the sky. Yeah. The genius annotator, honestly, God bless them, really ran circles to justify, you know,

the song starts, the only girl I've ever loved was born with roses in her eyes, but then they buried her alive. And Frank was not buried alive. and Frank died of typhus, which is fine. This is art. We are, this is a really jumping off point. But the genius annotation says, the only girl he's ever loved, parentheses, and Frank, was born beauty surrounding her and her mind,

expressed in the roses metaphor. But then the war came and took her, bearing her alive in a way, because the Holocaust didn't let her live her whole life, as it should have been. It killed her from the start. Genius alienator. Thank you for, thank you for weighing in. Yeah, I don't know. This song, it's just gorgeous. It just has like breakneck pace. It's like you said, kind of a pop song. It's just so beautiful. It's so sad and it's so beautiful. Also the last line being I'd rather keep white roses in their eyes. Very interesting thing that there was a white rose movement, which was an anti-Nazi student group in Munich in the 40s. But Jeff had never heard of that when he wrote the song.

Right. Which is like a little god. A little bit of God there. A little bit of God there's something. God made his way. Yeah, like some kind of Carl Jung, collective unconscious idea floating in there. That's right. That's right.

What song would you like to hear next? Well, one possibility would be Ghost. We could kind of go to a couple different directions with it. Ghost actually has a lot in common with Holland, 1945, just a little bit in terms of its arrangement in terms of being upbeat. That's also like one of my absolute favorite songs in there. And I almost feel like there's an instrumental directly after it, and I kind of think of them as one long song. And then many people's favorite song in this record is O'Comley. Show me those people.

Okay. Well, it's not my favorite. You know, I think it works in the context of the record, but that's an eight-minute song. And so I didn't think that we'd play that initially, but unless you were the one of the people that was your favorite song. Don't threaten me with a good time, Mark. Okay. Which one do you want to hear first? I'd say let's hear ghost.

Okay. This is Mark's favorite song, ghost. That was ghost. Just got to say, excellent use of DDDDDD here. Yeah. Also used in O'Cumley. Speaking of those things that we, is that are not a D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D, and O'Cumly, there is. Yeah, you're right.

Yeah, he's definitely like, there's places where words fail. And so he knows out an ad lib, some sounds in there. I loved it because it felt like it was like two little things that, you know, connected the album together. Okay, talk to me about Ghost, your favorite song on the record. So I think of it as a companion to Holland, 1945, in a lot of ways, because it mentions 1929, the year of Anne Frank's birth. It's kind of like jumps through time, and there's an image of a girl jumping from a burning apartment building in New York City. and there's kind of a suggestion that it's her in some way. It's almost like seeing a fast-forwarded film or something

where it's like there's all these images popping out and these things are related and they're connected, but you're not really sure how. The way that it just builds so gradually, you were talking before, about how he's so good at building and releasing tension. And the end of this song, when it just kind of builds into this huge explosion,

it's like every instrument they used in the album that happens to the very last. part of this song and it almost sounds like the final chord of a day in the life by the Beatles. It also has some of my favorite lyrics on here. It just is a lyric about the passing of time and thinking of time disappearing. The morning paper blow into a hole where no one can escape. The day's disappearing and death is always there at the end. That's just so good. So yeah, I just, this one just like never fails to blow me away. Yeah. Then the last thing was, you know, singing about

now she knows she'll never be afraid and it's like what more can you wish for a kid that other than they're not going to be afraid of something

it's like you know it's like if you want to protect someone that's the greatest gift you can give somebody is like making them feel not afraid

so just a very beautiful song yeah I mean I think like we've said like Anne Frank and the story of Anne Frank it was almost like a jumping off point for like these sort of like

grander or more deeper, more universal ideas that were coming to Jeff that he was sort of grappling with. And to me, ghost is like truly a meditation on death, right? It's meditation on like the transient nature of life and the acceptance that comes with like, that we're all going to die. And we don't have to be afraid that there's the part about the burning building in New York. and I think I read something that Julian said that they did actually experience seeing a building burned out in New York, and he always thinks about that when he hears the song.

Jeff told Pungure magazine, when I started writing Ghost, it's like the 10th track, the song that goes, and then he sings it, ghost goes, I know he lived within me, because we thought we had a ghost living in the house, living in the bathroom. So I locked the door and started trying to sing to the ghost in the bathroom. But then that was sort of like singing about the ghost that we thought was constantly whistling in the bathroom. the other room that kept waking me up. And then a ghost that may or may not live within myself. And it also ended up being more of a reference to Anne Frank. And a lot of the songs on this record are about Anne Frank. Once again, didn't really answer the question. There was lots of ghosts.

He was singing to all of them. One of them might include Anne Frank amongst the other ghosts that he was talking to. All right. Before we move on from aeroplane and talk about the post-eraplane years. Let's hear Ocomley. Like, I'm not afraid of playing an eight-minute song. People Yeah, that sounds good. They can listen. This is what they came here to do. This is O'Cumley. That was O'Cumley. I must say, when I listen to O'Cumley, I don't ever feel like it's like annoyingly long or any. You know, I'm never like, ugh, when is this over? You know, it feels the the right link for the song. It definitely fits perfectly in the album as we talked about pacing. Yeah, you know, this comes right before a ghost.

We played them in the opposite order. But it's like right after that, you're just shocked right back to life. This song was recorded in a single take by Jeff himself, which is pretty incredible considering that it's eight minutes long. And there is a rumor. So at the end, if you listen closely, you can hear someone yell. Holy shit at the end of the track. It was rumored to be Robert just marveling that Jeff did this in one take.

But that is not true. That has been disproven. It is actually Scott, who is marveling that he himself finally hit the write notes on his trumpet. Right. Which I like better, honestly. Yeah. That little story better.

We're not going to play the song that just talks about semen staining the mountain tops, but I just want you to know that that exists on here also. It's called Communist Daughter. Go ahead and give it a listen for yourself. Can never get those lyrics out of my mind because I'm just like, what does this mean? Yeah. Why are you making me think about this? I don't like it.

But it's there and you can't unknow it and you can't. take it away. Life is full of beauty and gross stuff also. Okay, Mark, again, you were present. You were sentient. You had your grubby mitts on your own copy of Airplane Over the Sea. What do you remember the buzz being amongst the rock and roll community, of which you were a part? Yeah. I definitely remember a lot of word of mouth. Seeing a lot of zine covers like the, you know, puncture and magnet. And, you know, as I mentioned, Pitchfork existed then,

but it was definitely had nowhere near the reach of a puncture even or a magnet for sure. So I mentioned I lived in San Francisco at this time when this album came out. And I had a friend who saw a Nutrimal Hotel play in Seattle. And he said it was my best show we'd ever seen. And he also had a premonition. He's like, you've got to see it now because this is a real. rare opportunity, you know, if you don't know, it'll come again. I remember him saying that. And I did not go to that show. Mark! I know. Something was going on. It might even been that night

when he called me. I don't remember. But I know I can remember those kinds of conversations happening with people because they were kind of making their way around the country and that tour. And then shortly after that, they toured in Europe. But they were definitely building. The record made a good splash, but I think the shows that they played really like drove home that this was a pretty an amazing thing. And partly just because it was just an unusual thing to have a stage filled with instruments and there's, you know, guys with with horns and, you know, someone's going up and playing this, you know, some kind of like ancient panpipe thing and they're all swapping instruments. And then add that to like the intensity song. So like as they wound around the country,

it definitely was building that year. And I can remember talking to people about it and hearing about it. There wasn't really much internet to speak of then. So it's not like now we identify buzz so much with social media. But then it was like... You mean the kids in the AOL chat rooms were in a blaze with the social talk? Whatever versions of those things existed, message boards certainly did. But it was like, yeah, it just didn't have the same resonance.

But I remember hearing then that like, oh, he played this set of Aquarius records. and like, you know, some people have a CDR of that or whatever. Shout out CDRs. Yeah, but like, yeah, so it was definitely like, as the year went on, it was like, it was known among people who followed this music. This is something pretty special for sure. Yeah, it might surprise people, but I think we haven't talked about it, but the live shows were like literally insane.

Like, they were chaotic. Jeff would go flying into the drum kit. Apparently people, like, were afraid to talk to them out. after because they thought they were like demented people like possessed like just really you know but with taken with the spirit playing these just like sort of raucous shows which it might not be what people would have expected if they listened to aeroplane right yeah exactly yeah it definitely like amped it up from what they say okay so the buzz is happening you know people are talking the streets is talking not the aOL chat rooms definitely the magazines that did still exist when we had a print

publication industry. Pitchfork did give a smooth 144 words to their review of this album, which is insane, considering you personally for Pitchfork have probably written 6,000 words about Neutral LocoTel. Yeah, this point I have. Okay. I liked this little note because I'm sure you saw this, but like, I don't know when this was within the last decade.

merge released their initial order form for the ordering of the albums for Aeroplane, and they were only making 7,000 copies in the beginning, the master release. They were like, okay, 5,500 CDs and 1,600 vinyl. It sold a lot more than that. Yeah. A lot more. 393,000 copies. I wonder when that is counting from.

Anyways, not important. Kind of important, but not that important. Okay. Let's talk about the reviews. Entertainment Weekly, once again, must take this moment. I know everyone's fucking sick of me marveling over this, but I just always marvel over the incredible music coverage of Entertainment Weekly. They were so fucking weirdly cool.

It's like, okay, Meg Ryan's on the cover, babe, and then flip in, and here's a little thing about Neutral Milk Hotel. Like, what an insane time. I know. We'll never go back there, the Golden Age. They gave it a B-plus. They said, This Georgia Quartet's second album blends

buzzing indie rock guitars, beautifully arranged horns, and oddball instrumentation. What's a zanzifophone? I don't know what a zanzif. Oh, yeah, because they were using all those old-time instruments. But hey, anyone can make off-the-wall sounds.

It's Milkman Jeff Mangums. I don't like that they call them Milkman. It's annoying. Jeff Mangum's bouncy bouncy bouncy pop melodies on songs like Ghost that make in the airplane over the sea take off. Too bad this almost great album is weighed down by a couple of lifeless acoustic warblers. This person did not like Oakumley. Yeah, guaranteed.

Spin gave it a 7 out of 10. It's as if bandleader Jeff Mangum concocted the whole thing alone in his car in the middle of nowhere, his connection to the outside world limited to faraway oldies, Paul Harvey, and a bunch of old-time religion on AM radio. contemplating the meaning of life barely keeps him awake. So he cracks the window and begins to howl about anything that pops into his head. Okay. That's pretty provocative image.

Yeah, I like it. Again, this was a time where you could write a review like that. Not so much anymore, babe. Rolling Stone gave it three stars, which does seem a little low. Yeah. Because I'll upset it once and I'll say it again. Three stars from Rolling Stone means they wish you were never born. It means that it's a CD that plays clearly in the CD,

player and then music does come out of it. So I'm a little surprised that it was solo. The guy says, actually, I don't know if it was a guy because I don't have written down here who I have to presume that nine times out of ten probably was a man, so I'm just going to go say I'm right on that. He sings loudly straining the limits of an affectless voice, which is really crazy. Producer Dylan also noted this. I feel like his voice is absolutely affected. It's all affect. It's all affect. This person needs to get their ears checked. His lyrics. His lyrics. His lyrics. The lyrics carry the innocent piety of the early beats with semi-religious visions and a pre-electronic age feel. Medicines, Sunday shoes, holy rattlesnakes, and the above-mentioned king of carrot flowers.

Called it thin-blooded wool-gathering stuff. Rolling Stone did then in 2020 rank it 376 on their 500 best albums of all time. And they said the Louisiana band nearly pulled off an indie rock pet sounds. It's interesting how that changed from this man's affidavit. reckless voice and it's annoying to damn near pulled off of that sounds jeff mangum cut through the irony of the seinfeld pavement era that's kind of true we haven't really talked about that yeah producer dylan thank you for pointing that out people are always asking like why did this album become so big so much after the fact i think you know a great part of it is the people love a myth and the myth making

of jeff mangum when he was like bye bye and completely just disappeared off the face of the earth does make people more interested in something. But I also, I do feel like the world was not quite ready for this level of like earnestness. You know, that was not the vibe of the 90s. And even when Grunge gave way to, you know, whatever, it gave way to alt rock and even pop punk, even pop punk, you know, pop punk was joking. They were always like, well, jk. And Alt Rock was still positioned in irony. It was just like a little lighter fare, but it was still ironic. So it just didn't seem like there was like space or appetite, right?

Mark, for something so earnest. If you think about Indian alternative rock in the 90s, yeah, it was very at a step with what, in terms of its attitude, but also like its subject matter, you know, there wasn't really the idea of having the setting for your album be this kind of non-defined, past or dream world. Like bands didn't withdraw in that way then. You know, it was very much about like being aware of living in this moment, you know, like right here right now, Jesus Jones posted that or something.

I don't know. It was like, yeah, but it was like this idea of, I don't know, when I think of like most of the other bands that I can think of from that time, like, yeah, it was very much about music that existed in that moment where this very much was not that. Yeah, I mean, you know, 1998 is Elliot Smith's XO comes out that year. PJ Harvey is this desire. Beck's mutations.

The Goo Goo Goo Dolls dizzy up the girl. That's right. We did slide that year. Thank God. And I've been sliding every year since. But again, just pointing out not really like the total vibe of what was happening. That's the same year silver Jews put out American water and built a spill, put out Carrie the Zero.

There's like a huge, you know, wave of this sort of like, what would you call that? Is this just like indie rock has fully like risen up out of, you know, what was, I guess what was post punk and grunge? Yeah, indie rock with major label budgets, I guess. That's right. Not in the case of Drag City. But yeah, like, yeah, what was left after a certain percentage of it broke off and became like alternative rock. And then what was left would kind of like continue the indie. the rock thread. These are bands that never would have, you know, signed to Atlantic and made, you know,

tried to make a crossover modern rock album or whatever. Right. And the majors did try to sign them. Yeah, yeah. They did. I mean, actually like Bill to Spill, you know, signed for Warner Brothers, but but they never sounded, they still sounded like Bill to Spill, you know. Yeah. Jeff Mangum, ear plugs, okay. The artwork is absolutely uncool now, for sure. There's no doubt about it. it is absolutely just stunningly uncool. But was it uncool in 1998? Like when you came across this album and you saw this like old-timey-ass fucking scene with the lady and the bass drum as a head, were you like sick?

Yeah. You know, it's also been like meme to death, you know, like the artwork. Wasn't there the Paris Hilton meme of her holding the CD? That's my absolute favorite one, like picturing Paris Hilton, just like smashing King of carrot flowers. I really liked it at the time. I don't remember it being called out as being unusual. But I do think, like, for people that weren't fans of the band,

it was like they'd captured why they didn't like it. So it was very, like, of a piece with who the band was. So I guess in that regard, I would say it was uncool. But it was also like drew the people who cared about it even closer to it. That makes sense. That's like an effective artwork. It was made by Chris Bihmer. who was the staff designer for REM.

Yeah, that's pretty awesome. They must have connected to Athens. Yeah, pretty cool. He was a fan, I think. Okay, it did do well. Like, I mean, they toured for this album, and I read something, so we haven't really mentioned,

but Laura Carter, who was Jeff's girlfriend at the time, also toured with them, and she would sort of, like, play the hybrid role of sound person and also playing a couple of instruments on stage at the tail end of the show. So she would have to help the sound person

and understand like, okay, the fucking ukulele is going to come in hot here, babe, okay? The, what is it, Zanzaphone needs two mics or whatever. She had to tell the person because probably unique and then she would hop on. Yeah. She sort of recalled like it just happening really fast, like with money. Like they were all of a sudden making thousands of dollars a night on merch. And it was just like, what's happening? The shows were just getting more and more packed.

And I guess that is because of what you said, right? word of mouth. It's just people were telling friends and then someone would call their friend who unlike you did attend the show. Yeah. Exactly. I know. I mean, people always say, what's the one show of your grit? And that's always my number one. Mine is Maddador 21. Okay. Yeah. Well, that would have been amazing. I blew it. I'll never forget myself. Could have been the best weekend of my life. But no. I didn't go. Okay. So they go on this tour. They tour the U.S. and Europe. This was an interesting thing that I learned from Endless Endless

was that in Europe they mostly opened for Sparkle Horse who were apparently kind of mean to them. Yeah. Which is like, how could you be mean to these sweet, lovely lads? Producer Jillen says she could see Sparkle Horse being mean. I don't know. We don't know Sparkle Horse. Julian said that was a weird scene. We were being held in restraint the whole time by their people.

I think they regretted bringing us on tour and they realized it pretty soon. But then they were into it for six weeks. So they were putting up with us. But they were making our lives pretty miserable. We get to these places where we had been before and filled the room with excited people. And we were playing the same room. But a lot of people who wanted to see us couldn't because it was full of their crowd. And we had to play a half an hour and would get yelled at if we went crazy at all, which we always did.

Every time we played a really good show, they yell at us for something and threatened to kick us off the tour. Do you feel like they were annoyed about being upstaged? Probably. I mean, you know, it's like there wasn't really a way to do the neutral criminal cartel show in a small, modest way. So like, they're spilling instruments all over the stage. And it had to seem like they thought they were the main event. So I could see that having something to do with it. I could see Mark Linkus being like, get your fucking xylophone the fuck off of here. I'm going to fall down. I don't know. He didn't say this is fanfic on my part. Okay, so they get back from this, like, crazy tour, Laura said in that creative loafing article about, I mean, like you kind of pointed out, there was a ton of press around Neutraloamloch hotel around this album. And Laura said, you know, of Jeff, he's as self-conscious about what anyone says about him as Madonna. He would obsessively surf the email and follow every chat room. And when people would say stuff about him, it would really upset him. It was personal like they're saying this and it's not true.

Right. That doesn't surprise me for some reason. I shouldn't need to do him dirty like that by like telling everyone. I know. It's like seem unnecessary. None of us. We all Google ourselves, Laura. Jesus, come on. He's only human. Okay. So they get back after the aeroplane tour in 19, I guess that was only in 1998. So they get back in like mid-October. And then it's clear something's wrong, right? Like, by all accounts, like, I think Jeff got really physically sick from all the touring.

He seemed a little off. He conspicuously turned down. Because, like, while they were in Athens, they would all play shows with each other, right? Even off tour, it's like, elf powers playing. Come play a little set and open. But he kept saying no to all of those offers. And then on December 5th, here's, now we're embarking mark on the timeline. The timeline of Jeff Ming.

The timeline before the hiatus. and then I'm an actor. So December 5th, 1998, he played a solo acoustic set at a birthday party for the aforementioned Chris Bilheimer,

the artist of the album. This is the last time he played a song that wasn't released publicly, I think. Right. Have you listened to it? It was called Little Bird.

Little Bird? Yeah, Little Bird. Yeah, I have heard it. It sounds pretty fucked up. Lance Bangs said that instantly after he heard it because he was there. Instantly, I was conscious that this is much more fucked up, and he's dealing with heavier, more disturbing imagery, and this is not playful psychedelia.

It was so striking and so intense, and you can see the strain in his facial expressions as he's delivering the lines. It was so moving and so intense. And having lived through experiences like that myself, it was really striking and upsetting and triggering. It was such a powerful song, and it goes into that drone at the end, and then it's done. I was shaken. There's a bootleg of this. We'll clip it here, and you can listen to the whole thing online. It took your baby brother. Here are some of the lyrics. It sounds like it's about, in some ways about the horrible death of Matthew Shepard had happened, the gay bashing hate crime. And I think it was, you know, this song was sort of partly inspired by, inspired as might not be the right work, but, you know, came about from the processing of that information.

So here are some of the lyrics. Did you know the burning hell it took your baby brother? Did you see how far he fell and how he made us suffer? Another boy in town at night, he took him for his lover, and deep in sin they held each other. So I took a hammer and nearly beat his little brains in, knowing God in heaven would have never could forgive him. So I took a hammer and I nearly beat his brains in. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Pridzieland said it's hard to hear.

It's super hard to hear. I can't imagine what it must have been like to hear live, like be sitting in that room. And it was mostly people he knew in friends, right? So I bring this up not to bum everybody out, but just because, I think it's important to note because I think part of when people are piecing together, like, why did Jeff Mangum retreat from being a public musician right at the, like, pinnacle of his career? A lot of what he's talked about is that the songs that were coming to him post-Aroplane were like this, like really, really difficult, painful emotional songs. So I just wanted to point to that. Okay.

1998 New Year's Eve. Jeff gets up at the 40-Walk Club. Apparently super early in the evening to the point that like almost nobody was there. It was a show that was Elf Power, the music tapes, which I think is Julian's other band, and Corinne Tucker of Slater Kinney. So he got up really early with Scott and Julian and played Engine. O sister and in the aeroplane over the sea. And that was the last formal, quote-unquote, appearance of Neutral Moat Hotel involving multiple band members until 2011, basically.

End of 1998. So New Year's Eve. He's very sick. He doesn't want to tell his bandmates. He didn't want to play anymore. He's become increasingly withdrawn. This detail really sad in me. This is from the endless, endless book. Scott said that he would go over and just be like, hey, like, let's not play in neutral milk hotel songs. Let's just play music like we used to, but Jeff was like not down. And then in 99, REM offered Neutral Milk Hotel the opening slot on their Atlanta dates, and they said no, or Jeff said no, which would have been pretty huge. And then also in 1999, he does an interview with Spin Magazine. I couldn't find the entire interview, but it's excerpted in endless endless, where he said, I may not make another record for another decade. There's no point

in making a career out of this. So the writing's on the wall, babe. Somewhere around this time, and I don't know when it was, and tell me if I'm too early, he does make some other music, Karina Peng. What do you know about Karina Peng? Yes. So, like, yeah, that was like a name that he used for, like, basically a Tade Collage project. And during this kind of the first couple of years after Nutrimoatel, and beginning with the

overlap at the very end of their run, like, yeah, he was. was always interested in tape music and he started making more tape music. And he didn't release this stuff. But yeah, like he was really interested in how, you know, in making tape collages and there's an interview somewhere where he's describing how he could spend a week on a collage and it makes 20 seconds worth of music or something like that. And so that seemed like it was occupying some of his time during this period. Yeah. I mean, I think what became kind of clear once we get to present day or at least to 2011, is that Jeff Mangum never stopped making music or at least stopped performing music. He just wasn't doing anything publicly, but it, you know,

all accounts point that like this man was still making music. Okay, 2001 January, Jeff and Laura took a trip down to New Zealand. We have not mentioned yet one huge influence on Jeff and the whole Elephant Six crew, which was Tall Dwarfs. Right. I feel like Flying Nun records was also like a huge influence in general on Elephant Six. Like they were like big fans and, you know, Flying Nun was kind of a collective as well, right? Right. So Jeff and Laura go to New Zealand.

They're hanging out with Chris Knox, who's a singer-songwriter from Tall Dwarfs. They play a show with him. At King's Arms, a small bar in Auckland, all three of them were barefoot. It should be noted. Chris played some of his songs. And then Jeff played a bunch of his songs with Laura. playing accordion and clarinet. He played a bunch of songs from Airplane, a few songs, Avery Island, and everything is, and then a couple of covers. John Lennon's mother and the Paris

sisters, I love how you love me. Laura said looking back that it was like a special flawless show. Like it was amazing. Also, this is just a neutral milk hotel ass detail. The show was not billed as Jeff Mangum or Neutral Milk Hotel. It was billed as Walking Wall of Beards. And Jeff did explain during the set that that was the name of a company in the 1900s that manufactured devices that would produce an inaudible sound that caused all of the loose hairs in the vicinity, beard hairs and pubic hairs, etc., to form a wall and walk around.

That's not a real thing. Yeah, that's him all the way. Yeah. So I guess early in the set, this show is sort of like important, A, because it doesn't really play much after this, but also because he sort of had a conversation with the crowd, and he told them that, you know, he hadn't played a show in a while and he has no immediate plans to play another, and that he's had a little bit of a nervous breakdown. And he said, it was a very wonderful thing to have happened to me,

and I mean that sincerely. It was a really good thing after a while. At first, it was a real drag, but then I learned a lot. And someone in the audience yelled, where can I get one? And Jeff said, I'll let you borrow mine. I think I'm almost done with it, so I'll let you have it. tender. So Jeff had a hard time. Jeff had a rough time post post-airplane, seemingly confirming that he had sort of a nervous breakdown, was very, both physically and mentally dealing with a lot of stuff, emerged from this cocoon, went to New Zealand, played a show with one of his heroes. Then some music comes out. What orange twin field works volume on? Orange Twin Field Works volume on. Yeah, right. This is the Bulgarian music festival.

Tell me a little bit about this. Yeah, so, and I actually remember when this came out because it was like people knew of Orange Twin as having an elephant's sex association. And it's actually, I guess it's Laura Carter's label, and they're still active. Right. He took a trip with a friend to some kind of, yeah, music festival of Bulgarian choir music. And while he was there, he recorded a lot of shows and people singing in streets and various places. And then he came home and basically created, it's kind of like a collage edit of what he recorded there.

So it's not really a strict. And I was actually listened to it this past week. And it's honestly like really amazing. It's like beautiful music. So yeah, he created this collage. And then when it came out, it was kind of like just people seeing the title and knowing that he was involved and he recorded it at first it was like oh is this new music from jeff so i just remember that like making its way around the internet and so on but then yeah it was it turned out it was just this

this field recording yeah it's interesting i love the little story of orange twin which is like they just were trying to buy a farm this like collective this like sort of artist collective trying to buy a farm and then they accidentally became a record label because they had to sell stuff to buy the farm some athens asked shit for you um Okay, and then live at Jittery Joe's came out also in 2001 in August. You know, I guess there was a hunger for New Trumel and Coddle stuff. And I have to presume Jeff signed off on that or also wouldn't have come out. And he didn't seem to care.

I mean, there was like 6,000 bootlegs of everything on the internet already. So he toured a little in 2001 in the fall with the band circulatory system and also the band the instruments, which were sort of like Elephant Six adjacent bands. through the East Coast, I think just playing instruments with them. The instruments went on to score a film by Astra Taylor, who then became Jeff Mangum's wife. So I have to presume that's how the connection happened. Okay, I didn't know that. I mean, I didn't know that connection. I did my little red string. My red stringing, and that's, I mean, who knows? I don't know if that's, but that that is one connection. Okay. Now we've gotten to the very last interview he ever did

for pitchfork. Now, were you at pitchfork during this time? I, you know, I was a big contributor then, but I was not on staff or anything like that. So I just read this like anybody else. I'm so curious how this came about because Marcy Fehrman, who did the interview, she wasn't really a journalist, right? Yeah, I don't think so. She met Jeff in yoga class, did not know who he was, was not familiar with Neutralc Hotel. They just kind of became friends. And then she did this, like, pretty amazing interview. Yeah. Anyways, I don't know.

I don't know. Thank God. It did because it's very, I'm going to read some of it. That's right. You thought I wasn't, but I'm going to. Okay, she asks him, does your music stem from dreams and visions sometimes? And he said, yes, I spent a lot of time practicing active imagination. This is where I learned that information before I go to sleep.

What I'm feeling will manifest as images through active imagination. And then I go to sleep and those play out even more in my dreams. I've always been interested in recording other people's dreams. A lot of people are. You heard the montage piece. I'm trying to create a dream world with the montage. It's like when you look at a da-da or surrealist montage. I just love taking fragments from everyday reality and recombining them.

Everything in the natural world is so amazing, but because we're used to seeing it one way, we take it for granted. We can see an ant hill or a roach or a flower or anything, but we have this frame where our mind recognizes an ant hill and then moves on, without taking the opportunity to have the sense of awe that we could have if we really looked at it. The montage is about taking pieces of reality and rearranging them, creating new frames to make you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way. It's basically taking pieces of everyday reality and rearranging them to show people the magic

that is inherent in all of these things already. I just found that really interesting because it seems really connected to his approach, like almost what we were talking about in the song in the aeroplane over the sea, right? but it's just like now he's getting real technical with it. He's like, instead of me singing about it to you, what I'm going to do is just make you see it somehow with these like found sound montages. Yeah, for sure.

And he's very articulate about it. It's clearly something he's done a lot of thinking about. It's like a very lucid and coherent explanation of what he's talking about. But yeah, in that you can certainly hear that kind of idea in his music. Okay, so there's a question where, she asked them, is this reframing process something you use in your songwriting in general? Do the songs come out of fragments? And he goes, yeah, I usually create tunes that are fragmented. I think the

biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished polished product. Especially nowadays, it's so easy to have a library of 2000 CDs, books, and records, so many things. We're used to having all these finished works of art in our life that seem to arise out of nothing. I think that so much of the creative process is a fragmentary one. and then it's about just allowing your intuition to put it together for you. It's funny how you create something and you think you're going in a million different directions. And then the thing you end up with is the thing that you wanted to create your whole life. But you're just as surprised by it as anybody else.

I need this whole paragraph tattooed on myself. I know. It's like that's pretty good stuff off the cuff, you know? It's like it. But it's so like it is so stymieing to think like, oh, but I got to make a, I got to make a, I kind of make it the whole song. I have to make the whole song and it has to be perfect. Or like I have to write the book.

It has to be the whole book. I have to do it. When like I guess really what he's saying is that it's, it is all wool gathering, right? And it's like then at the end it's like a magical surprise that you're like, oh, it's a thing. Right. It sneaks up on you. She asked him if there's going to be another neutral milk hotel album. He says, I don't know.

It would be nice. But sometimes I kind of doubt it. I just feel like these windows open up for something to be honest and they don't stay open for very long. I guess my path feels sort of different now. I was so moved by this. This is not a common story. You, I mean, hello and welcome to bands, but not a common story. Like, we, you know, we're doing bands. They're like, you're on your 16th album, babe. And like, again, far be it for me to say you should stop. But like, your window certainly closed long ago. But, you know, for whatever reason. And you can tell. You can tell sometimes when bands, their heart's not in it. You know, it's not for the art, they're just like going through the motions. And just to have this like self-awareness and also just this like faith. Like it really is faith, right? It's the faith that like, okay, even if I don't do

this, I have value as an artist and I have value as a person. And whatever I do is also valuable after this, even if it's not like the next hot thing or whatever. Yeah, it's so hard to get to that place. I mean, I don't know if he had a lot of therapy in those years or what, but it's like, Like, yeah, when you put your whole life into something for years and then you get that kind of recognition and people coming up in the street saying they love you for what you've done, to step away from that, you would have to wonder like, okay, what am I now? You know, but he seems, he seemed at that moment pretty comfortable with it. Yeah, I don't know. I just was like, damn, this often happens with bandsband. Like I said, I talked about in therapy.

be like often whatever comes up in the meat of the episode is a mirror for my own psychology and also producer dillins and maybe everybody's i hope you're all experiencing that out here and i do like to think about these things it just it's so rare in our you know girl boss capitalist world that anybody would do this i mean nobody did you know that that's what makes him so special, right? It's like, that's why people are obsessed and became obsessed in this myth at Rosa. It is really rare. Like, no one, I mean, even the other elephant six people who I think share a lot of the same philosophy and like didn't, none of them wanted to be rock stars. None of them like were in it for the money or anything like that. They all approached it in sort of different ways. But like, I mean,

he just really was like, could have and then was like, I'm good. Yeah. See you. I'll be at the Bulgarian throat singing festival. you need me. Yeah, no, I totally agree. But let me ask you a question. Yeah. Totally makes sense when he's in that interview, but do you take him completely at his word? Like, it's hard to know, you know what I mean? Like, he said that on that day, but I always wonder, like, suppose imagining myself in his situation, I can imagine the fear that it would accompany making another record too. When you make this like, when he made aeroplane, he didn't expect that anybody would ever hear it. You know, they pressed 5,000 copies and that would have been a solid indie rock record that's what his last record sold and then it

became so popular and like and i'm sure he felt the like you know adoration from the audience and at some point he must sat down and said like okay i'm going to write more songs and then like maybe he's like i don't know if i can make anything that good again you know what i mean i mean it's just an idea let's just pure speculation of my part but that's that's probably what i would have been thinking in his situation you know no I mean, you raise a good point. I think maybe the point is that like, and I'm foreshadowing a, I'm going to a squirrel, I'm foreshadowing a thing he says when he finally responds to the creative loafing stalker

where he's like, I'm not an idea. I'm a person. And I think that's what's interesting here, right? It's like it's probably a combination of all of these things. Like it's the purity of like not wanting to continue a thing that may. maybe isn't giving him the satisfaction or that he feels the windows closed, there's probably also some fear around, you know, having to hit that same benchmark. There's the thing around the songs that are coming out of me are really fucking brutal and maybe I need to like examine my

relationship. This is something he also says in this interview. She asked him, you said he went through a time when you weren't writing or felt like you couldn't sing anymore. Then he says, I went through a period after airplane when a lot of the basic assumptions I held about reality started crumbling. I think that before then I had an intuitive innocence that guided me, and that was a very good thing to a certain point. But then I realized that to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I had just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people at a younger age than I have begin to question

some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it. This is kind of what we were talking about when like the Anne Frank book blew his fucking mind, right? It was because of this. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And it relates back to earlier discussion of like he, you know, and his band and Elephant Six wanted to create this own, their own, they're like rejecting the world around them and saying we're going to create our own world.

And then what he's describing also sounds like after Nurtramalquatel, he's like, now I got to live in this world. And living in this world, I can't really write songs the way I did because then it was just in my head, in this dream space. And, you know, he kind of had to cut yourself off from reality and rational thought to do that. If he's going to be living, you know, reading the news and seeing what's going on. And, you know, it's like you can see how he couldn't really go back to that place too. Yeah, and just I could see how it would be like overwhelmed with like even you've pushed off these like, it reminds me of like how you know people say there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. It's like you can do and say whatever you want, but you have to live in this world because this is the world we live in.

We live in a material world and these are the parameters of the world. And at some point you have to grapple with that and come to terms with it and then figure out how you live an honorable or ethical life. But you can't live that honorable and ethical life. outside of the world. You have to live it within the world. And that's where it's so fucking challenging. That's right. We've gotten real deep here on the podcast today. She goes, well, how did these realizations make it difficult to create songs? And he said, the songs were what I stood for. It was a representation of the platform of my mind that I stood on. And if the platform of the mind is crumbling, then the songs go with it. Also, I think that the difficult thing after aeroplane was that when we

started doing the Elephant Sixth thing, we just had a very utopian vision that we could overcome anything through music. The music wasn't just there for entertainment. We were trying to create some sort of change. We had a desire to transform our lives and the listener's lives. I guess I had this idea that if we created our dreams, we could live happily ever after. So when so many of our dreams had come true, and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain, I saw their pain from a different perspective and realize that I can't just sing my way out of all this suffering. I have to try to understand human nature and myself and the nature of suffering and a lot of these other issues on a deeper level. When I realized that a lot of my understanding these issues was

on a pretty flimsy platform, that's when the platform started to give way. He talks a lot about how he like, and he's sort of looting to it here and he said that later in the interview that like he really wanted to like heal people through his music. Like that was the like main thing. And and you know what? He did. Like I think that's sure. Right. Like there's no denying that he absolutely did. But perhaps like he thought of it in a different way or wanted to see it on a different level or maybe it took too long to realize what that level of healing was. It's ironic because it's like it's just a scale and scope thing, right? But you are making the world better, right?

It's just not ever going to be enough. Like it's not going to defeat capitalism. She did ask, I think, something really interesting, which was like, did you not being able to write songs have anything to do with the success of aeroplane? Because I think a lot of people like kind of think that, right? It was like, oh, it got too big. It got too successful and it freaked him out. And that there were so many people listening to what you might do. What he said was, no, I don't really worry about that. It was just very strange timing to get in over my head. I don't know how it happens. It does seem like it was probably correlated again. I don't want to

burst the bubble. It was like nobody in the world cared and then everything just sort of exploded and then I just sort of dropped off the face of the earth. In my mind and everything, everywhere else. And then I come out of this fog and there are all these amazing, nice people who come to see us play with circulatory system. And they're also sweet and intelligent and nice to talk to. It blows my mind. I do feel like it's so important not to take that for granted, that opportunity to share your ideas with intelligent, beautiful people. Now let's read real quickly, just because it's so fucking Jeff Mangum, his vision that he mentions in this. Because I love it so much. She asks, you know, she's like, oh, you have visions and dreams.

Like, do you remember any? And he was like, yeah, I had a vision about a year ago that really had an impact on me. Well, I was lying in bed slowly coming out of sleeping, and this voice in my head told me to go back in to not quite wake up yet, but to just stay in that in between place. So I did. I slipped back down and stayed in the halfway point. Then I was standing on the ocean. I saw a blur come around from my right side to my left. It was a hand putting something next to me.

When I looked closer, I saw what the hand had put there was a little sea turtle. I looked up to see who had put it there, and there was this little boy looking at me smiling. I picked up the sea turtle and put it in my hand, and it turned into a butterfly. And then it turned into a black spider. It kept turning into a butterfly, a spider, a butterfly, a spider. It would pulsate between the two. I put my hands around it to grasp it and blood ran out of my hands and fell into the sand. Then, as I let go of it, the blood rose up from the sand and turned again into the butterfly spider.

It hovered about a foot above my hand and turned into a little ball of light. So that whole sequence repeated two or three times. It would land back in my hand, turned into a creature, and when I tried to hold it, it would crush again into blood. And when I would let go, the blood would rise back up and turn into a ball of light. And Marcy says, do you know what it means? And he said, yes, I pretty much understood it right away. I didn't have to analyze it afterwards. The butterfly and the spider represented two opposing sides.

All the things that I love and consider to be beautiful and gentle and wonderful, and all the things that threatened me, the things about life that I can't come to terms with because they don't. fit into my nice happy picture of the way I want the world to be. It kept morphing back and forth to show me that they're both one and the same. They're dependent on one another to exist. When I tried to grasp it either what I love or what I hate, I destroyed the very ability of being able to really penetrate the essence of either. By trying to understand it, I would just crush it. But when I let go and let it be what it was, it would turn into light to show me that both sides come from the same source. I think the vision was trying to tell me to just live and be joyful and stop creating these

internal wars over all the pain that is within myself and that I see all around me. Huge. Pretty heavy. Massive vision. Huge, massive vision. It's not like reinventing the wheel per se, but I just, it is so like, I just like thinking about him going through this, like, all this thought process and sort of landing in this place where he's like, well, just got to keep going.

Can't try to understand it too much. You know, back slowly away, not try to understand it too much. Okay. Summer and fall of 2001, he goes back to being a radio DJ at WFMU. He did he's under the name Jefferson. So perhaps that is his real name, not Jefferson. I still like to think it's Jefferson and maybe Jefferson was just a fun play on Jefferson, so people couldn't find him. What do you think, Mark? I like your version. I just thought that was, it's kind of cool that like, all of this is like sort of showing his like toe dipping way of like coming back. It's so slow, right? It's like, first I will DJ under a pseudonym at a college radio station where I play bizarre music and sometimes slip in my own sound collages over. And he did do the three to six AM shift.

Right. And then we've gotten to the part of the story that I do hate. we must talk about, which is the insane article on Creative Loafing. Tell me all about Creative Loafing. Creative Loafing was a legitimate publication. It was a series of Alt Weeklys that were in different towns, and the Alt Weekly era was coming. It was winding down at that time. But there were definitely many towns that had two or three Alt Weeklies, and for some of these towns, one of them was Creative Loafing. It just really blows my mind, knocks my socks off, that this was a...

It's true live journalism, if you will. It's like maybe we all went too far in the other direction where like you need to talk about your own personal life and the piece of journalism to like such an alarming degree of oversharing. Yeah. And then also that he hunted down this man who very clearly was minding his business not wanting to, he had turned down the interview request. Do you feel that neutral milk hotel fans would have been like this if he hadn't retreated? Because this is only a couple years later. Yeah, that's a good question. There's no doubting that by going away, you know, sometimes because people die,

but sometimes because they kind of disappear, you develop this mystique around you. And I feel like, especially in this period, so like, let's say, you know, right after the stop performing and at 98, and people didn't hear from for a. couple years. I think people kind of drew lines between a few different things. One was the interest that Jeff and people in his orbit had and, you know, musicians who were mentally ill, you know, Sid Barrett or Brian Wilson or whatever. And then, you know, there's like this subconscious link that people make between mental illness and genius sometimes, you know, which is, it's just kind of, whether it's a media creation.

or whatever. And then there was this, you know, Jeff always talking about visions and sometimes what he would describe in interviews is like, that sounds like an hallucination. Not just like you woke up from a dream, but you're actually hallucinating. So he was pretty open about like his mind working differently. And then when he disappeared and he mentioned a nervous breakdown, I think there was this thing of like, okay, like he had a breakdown and maybe he's, so then it became, potentially became like this tragic figure, like, you know, in some people's minds of like, and then that like built up this myth around him even more, you know. So this guy who wrote this piece, I reread it in the last week and it really

made me sick to read it. I hate to say it. It was like. It's really invasive. It like it sort of gave me the same feelings of like when I watched Pam and Tommy, for example, just like the blatant disregard for the humanity of a person because you perceive that they owe you something because they have some measure of celebrity. It kind of puts that whole idea just like in the clearest terms possible of people thinking that you and I both talked about. I don't know, it's just, it's an interesting thing because it's obviously limited to this internal hotel or this article, but this idea of I'm so emotionally invested in this music that they, and you become so emotionally invested in the creator.

Yeah. And not being able to separate that, like, they're a person just, like, living their life and doing their thing. And your relationship is with this music. It's not with this person. But those lines can learn. Or with this podcaster, for those of you. Exactly.

I wish an editor or somebody along the way would have said, like, hey, man, you know, this isn't going to work. That didn't happen for whatever reason. So I'm sympathetic to, um, I have compassion for the writer. It's clear he just was so profoundly connected to this music and it helped him so much that it sort of throughout rhyme and reason, I guess, too, that he needed to get an answer. And he does get an answer. He gets an email back from Jeff says, I'm flattered it.

You want to talk to me. But I have to say no. I wish you the very best in everything you do. But please do not contact my family. I think my dad was caught off guard by you and maybe even a little intrigued at first, but now he is left wondering how a perfect stranger could know about his painful past. I don't wish to revisit the past either. I kept trying outlining, this is the guy saying it, I kept trying outlining for him my reasons for writing about him, but he didn't budge. Please, he wrote, I'm not an idea.

I'm a person who obviously wants to be left alone. If my music has meant anything to you, then you'll respect that. Since it's my life and my story, I think I should have a little say as to when it's told. I haven't been given that right. And the guy says, he's wrong, of course. It's not just his story. It's splains and carters. It's mine too. That was the part where I was like, oh, you know, sir, this is not correct. Yeah. Okay. We got to, we're got to, this is when I'm like, maybe you were right to go away. Maybe you should hide forever. Okay, we have to get to the end of this, and I don't want to dwell. I'm going to do a real rapid fire timeline. Two, 2005, merge, reissues, Aeroplane, this is a big deal.

You can tell me also, but it re-indvigorates the interest in this album. I suppose it probably had been out of print. I don't know. Yeah, it's a good question. I've always kind of wondered about the particulars of this reissue because it certainly didn't come with any extras or like, you know, how we think of a reissue

with B-Sides. It was just, it seemed like more of a repressing, but they probably took this opportunity to say, like, this thing's really selling and, you know, let's talk to some of our artists about how much this band meant to them and make a big deal out of it because it came with this whole package of quotes from, you know, merge artists who were like, you know, this band is why I wanted to make music, etc. So it definitely went beyond your usual repressing. Yeah, it was smart. So this, you know, reinvigorates some interest in Neutral Milk Hotel. There's a hoax in 2006 on the Elephant Six message. boards where someone pretends to be Jeff. I'm talking about a neutral Montcotele album. Robert comes and debunks this and then I wish I could read it, but it's too long. But it's a very, this like very sweet message where he like implores people to like honor Jeff's life by making

their own art. That's like all that they would want is like people to make something beautiful and put it in the world. 2007, apples in stereo puts out new magnetic wonder on Elijah Woods label. Jeff plays on this album, which is why I mentioned it. 2008. Elephant Six organizes the holiday surprise tour. So a bunch of the people from a bunch of the bands go on this tour and they just, you know, take the stage playing each other's songs. Jeff does pop up a few times during this holiday surprise tour and plays engine at a few of the shows accompanied by Julian. 2009. Jeff contributes a song to the Chris Knox tribute album.

It is a cover of the song, Sign the Dotted Line. and through fog and rain and see if we can find the same way out. May 2010, there's a Chris Knox benefit show at Le Pousson Rouge in New York City, and he plays a set of acoustic neutral milk hotel songs. This is kind of a big deal because nothing has really happened since 1998, I guess, 2001, if you want to count the New Zealand show. So it's been a good nine years. Brooklyn Vegan writes it up, they say,

people were crying, like in the audience. Like, people were singing along and some people were crying. Like, it was this big of a deal. There is a video of this show that was illegally filmed. In general, just I'll quickly breeze through it. But this sounds like a real cool thing to have been at. Sharon Vanettin performed. Claudia from Magnetic Fields performed a song. All sorts of amazing stuff happened at this thing. Okay. December 2010, he plays an unannounced show at a Brooklyn. loft. Jeff Mangum was like, oh, hipsters? I birthed you. Bitch, okay? You think I'm not going to play a show unannounced at a Brooklyn loft? That's right. I'm your father. He didn't say any of that. So Pitchfork did write up this unannounced show with the set list. So you can go look at that and see what he played. It was

about 75 people. This I don't understand. So I had to ask you, April of 2011, Robert puts out and invents a new instrument. It's called the teletron that you play with your mind. You know, that is not ringing a bell, I'm afraid. Okay. Well, maybe you blocked it out because it's so unhinged. He said it's a circuit bent Mattel mind flex toy that enables you to play a Moog synthesizer by varying your thoughts. I bring this up because Jeff Mangum wrote an original teletron composition to accompany this. Okay. So put that a little music. Then in August of 2011, Jeff plays a small East Coast tour by himself. Did you go to any of this? So I saw him in Spain. I saw him at the prima vera festival in Barcelona.

He played a theater there as part of the festival, and it was incredibly good. That's so great. Yeah, he starts playing festivals. Like, I think he played a set at Altamara's parties, which Portis had curated, in 2011. And then this I really loved also in 2011 October. There was like a hoax announcement that Radiohead was going to play at Zuccotti Park for the Occupy Wall Street protesters. And then it was clear that that was not happening. But Jeff Mangum did pop up and play a little, you know, acoustic set, starting with the cover of the minute men's themselves.

Gorgeous choice. All these men who work at the land should evaluate themselves and make a stand. and then some aeroplane songs. He curates an entire all tomorrow's parties and headlines it. So we're really back. We're back in the mix. 2012, we're fully fucking back, baby.

We're playing Coachella. Jeff Solo, Coachella. Guess what? I was at Coachella 2012. Guess what? I missed it. I was probably on a bunch of mushrooms running around not seeing Jeff Mangum.

And I regret it. I'm very sorry. I had a great time, though. Dr. Sir Dylan has included some information. here that he apparently rescued a girl who had passed out in the crowd. He said that he was at a show once where someone was being taken away in an ambulance and the lead singer kept going and he thought to himself then, you're an asshole. So he stopped and made sure they helped her.

A fantastic man. Okay. October 2013, Neutral Milk Hotel plays their first full band show together since the hiatus. Apparently, it is revealed in Endless Endless that, before he even started touring solo, he had reconvened the band to start rehearsing. So that was always a plan. This man played 102 solo shows, though, before 2013 in that little lead-up. This is when I went and saw them.

2014, the Hollywood Bowl. Nice. Incredible. Daniel Johnson and the breeders opened up. My friend Arley was like, hey, I got these free tickets to this. Do you want to come? I was like, 1,000% yes. I'm just thinking Hollywood Bowl.

Yeah, we're going to be like right up in the back. Great. It's going to be a gorgeous night. I bring a nice bag of Doritos and I go to the 7-Eleven, get myself the large big gulp of Diet Coke. And then we have our tickets and we're going. They're like, no, no, you're further down. You're further down.

We're further down. We were literally in the very front row in the dead center. I couldn't eat my chips, babe. They can see you. Kim Deal could literally make eye contact with me. I can't just be eating Doritos while she's performing while Jeff Mangum's up there singing his heart out, fucking two-headed boy. and I'm just chomping on Cool Ranch Doritos, it was not, it was not allowed.

And I was so hungry. So hungry. But it was a gorgeous, it was such a beautiful experience. I will note that they did not allow the video. Okay. So in Hollywood Bowl, if you're not in the front row, you're not going to see. People could only hear, which I guess was, it would have been fine too. And so I guess you don't really need to see, but I felt very doubly bled.

less to be in a position where I could both see in here. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I saw I saw him in Portugal. I went to prima vera there. And, you know, they're huge in Europe. Like, I mean, they're really beloved in UK, Spain, and Portugal in particular. But then they headline the Pitchfork Festival. And so I got to see that actually from on the stage. I'm surprised they didn't have them the Pitchfork Festival every year. I know. It felt very fortunate that year, though. And they also turned off the video for that. So, you know, because they had the screens on the side. So, yeah, you had to get up close. Well, I'll just say before I wrap this up about this part, there's a bunch of musings about

this tour. I mean, and here's the thing. A lot of people have speculated, like, well, what the fuck? Like, you made this whole stand and did all this stuff just to turn around and sell the fuck out and play Coachella. And it's like, truly, like, my takeaway from it is A, artists should make money for the amazing work that they do, so fuck off with that. But B, like, it was so specific, right? Like, they came and played 25 countries and 41 states of America. And it was almost like as if, like, I know how much people have wanted this. And, like, I want to come and give you this gift. Like, you have ample opportunity now. I'm playing every country and every state. Come see it. But it's not happening again. And it didn't. It never. That was. was it. It's never happened again. And it really, and I know maybe I'm contributing to the myth of Jeff Mangum, but it really like felt that way. And there was a lot of musings in this book where like, you know, Laura Carter talks about like how poor they were in the first tour and like their horns were all fucked up and like now everything sounds good. And they keep saying that like Jeff was really

made sure that they played a super faithful perfect set to the album, which is not how they used to play. And it's because that's what people wanted, you know. And she said she was like, back then we just made up the parts. Now you're recreating a part that is so memorized by your audience that it's like the national anthem to them. And it's true, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I was amazed at how well they rendered everything.

And it was, it felt very carefully and tightly arranged for sure. And I definitely remember like they're being chatter about, I mean, it's kind of the same thing when the pavement gets together. of just like, oh, why don't you make a new album tour or whatever? But I don't know. Like, I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea of giving the fans what they want. And especially when it's such a, I mean, yeah, such a rare opportunity for people.

So I was completely in favor of it. I loved it. I don't care. I hope you made $60 million. Great. You deserve it. Okay. Before we wrap up the show, I think we should talk about,

the legacy, the legacy of New Jemolnik Hotel. Tell me just briefly, what bands do you think would not exist without New Jumel Hotel? Like, who do you think are their like their direct sons? So, I mean, I do think Bright Eyes, you know, we talked about him being at that early show. Yeah, and especially like his early music. I mean, when I first heard of Bright Eyes, it was somebody saying, And I was like, yeah, it's kind of like Nutrimal Hotel. And like that was, and I was like, all right, I'll check that out. And I do like some of his music. It's been a week drinking the sunlight of Winneca, California,

where they understand the weight of human hearts. Beirut, for sure. Well, it's been a long time, long time. You know, I always thought like Beirut, that band hasn't made a record a long time either. But, you know, Arcade Fire, like, there's many things. about their early presentation that brought that to mind. Certainly a much more like stadium ready version of that. Right. You know, they've spoken about it.

Their album, about how much they wanted to be on Merge Records. And so that was very clear. And then I would round out like the first generation with December is for sure. It took me 15 years to swallow all my tears. You know, people really love that band and It really had like tangled literary quality of, you know, the past and how they put things together and the old-timey thing. It was definitely a much more like studied and novelistic approach to it rather than this kind of like intuitive and dreamlike approach. But yeah, those four really stick out to me. There's probably some others.

The thing about Neutral Monk Hotel is that I realize that people have lumped them in this category in their minds. but yeah, did they look kind of weird? Yeah, did Scott have a beard that is, you don't see much in day-to-day life? Absolutely. But they didn't dress. They weren't wearing like, you know, Sepia photo suits. Like, Jeff would just wear like a, it was the 90s. So we'd wear like a thrift store sweater and some pants.

It was quite normal. Like they weren't in costume. But I feel like it sort of, you know, it got out of hand with some of the other pans. Again, I'm not going to name names. Yeah, I think they had a pretty profound effect on the bands that you mentioned for good or for bad. But, like, yeah, definitely Beirut. And then we talked about the limineers and the Mumford and Sons, which I love. Hey-ho, gorgeous song.

And also, like, made its way into pop culture a lot. Like, my favorite example being April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation. Who is Jeff Mengham? The guy from Neutralmole Cotele. Oh. Who obviously is a Gen X white man who loves Neutral Moly Cotel. who is using his character to speak about it. But I like to imagine that it's her,

and she very vocally almost breaks up with her fiancé because he doesn't realize that Neutral Milk Hotel is her favorite band. I loved that moment. Yeah, that was great. To round it out, there is also a cover band called Neutral Uco Hotel that does play all the songs on ukulele. Speaking of people really profoundly affected by a Neutral Milk Hotel, We did round up a bunch of fans, not the one that we found on Reddit who did make a post speculating what Jeff Mangum's opening chess move would be.

We didn't ask that person, but we did get some other great people. So would you like to hear what they had to say, Mark? Yeah, that would be great. Okay. I love No Too Melco Hotel because they are noisy and scratchy without being like hardcore punk or anything like that. They're all so sad, which I like. I like that a man plays a Saul. I did not like them at first.

I actually used to refer to them as neutral shit butthole to my buddy because this girl and her art school buddies used to run around the dorms and they would sing at a top volume. And they would do air horns and everything. And it was so intense. And at first I was like, okay, there's some energy here. And it brought those with eccentric taste together. and felt like the best kept secret.

It was relatable and strange with a quick wit. The greatest thing that Neutral Milk Hotel ever did or that Jeff Mangum ever wrote was the lyric, I can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all. Fun fact about that lyric is that it's actually on a Cards Against Humanity card. And I just saw it and I took it and I carried around my phone camera. because I think it's just that important. When I started to listen in,

I was like, these melodies are not on any other album. Like the backbone, when it's just him and the acoustic, the melodies are original. And that's when I knew there was something there after all. The lyricism from the beginning of the band to the end of it just stays consistent and it hits. It's actually a record that I very rarely listen to because I find it very special and sacred.

I don't think it's something to put on in the background of a party, but something to listen to intently when you need it in your life. It makes me want to cry. Actually, I have cried thinking about that, how strange it is. And it's beautiful and it's surreal and it's profound and it's wonderful. And it's all of those things and life is the same way. I'm not a very religious or spiritual person. I can border on cynical.

I spend a lot of time defending off depression or anxiety. But when I listen to in the airplane over the sea from start to finish, which is the only way to listen to it, in my opinion, I find myself willing to believe in God or reincarnation in all sorts of things. I think actually it's so much about the song writing and the lyricism. I mean, it is lo-fi. I don't know if it's inherently ever about the melody. or the rhythm or the instrumentals,

as it is about the story that's being told. And the story is often this fantastic extended metaphor or allegory, and you end up just feeling totally enraptured. Some part of me believes that Jeff Mangum was channeling something outside of himself when he created it. It's like he was possessed by a spirit who used his voice to speak some great truth about existence to us, and then it exited his body. That's my theory anyway

as to why there was never another neutral milk hotel album after this. And it's so perfect that we never really needed anything else. Sometimes I get really bummed out after I hear these fan voices because I think I have like original thoughts and then it's just like exactly what we said

just like parrot did back to us. Oh, that was amazing. Wow. I mean, that was, I could listen to that for like an hour. I'm not kidding. We'll compile you the unedited cut. I'm just like cack. picturing someone throwing

aeroplane on at a party. Yeah. I am lasting. Just like you're like, I'm just trying to have a drink. This man is screaming at me. And also, as always, God bless, there's always one fan who clearly wrote their monologue as like a TED talk

and delivers it. And I love them for it. It's so sweet and tender. Those are our people, Mark. Even the Cards Against Humanity guy. that's also our people. You love to meet someone else that passionate about this band.

I thought you were going to say you love to meet someone else who carries that particular card against humanity in their wallet. And I was just to be like, damn. That was news to me. I'm going to have to do some googly about that. Well, Mark, thank you so incredibly much for coming on the program

and going on this neutral milk hotel aeroplane over the sea with me. I feel like we really, we really went on a journey. Yeah, thank you so much. It was so fun and like it's so great to connect about this band in particular.

Like it's certainly the most I've ever talked to one person about this band in my life. Is it because people are like, okay, thank you. Shut up. After a little while, they're like, hey, let's talk about something else.

So, you know, I'm very grateful. Even you worked at pitchfork. That's saying something. Even at the pitchfork offices, they were like, Mark, wrap it up, babe. Yeah, it was a pretty mixed. It was always mixed. It was always some people were like, yeah, I never really got into them. Well, again, thank you. You were truly the perfect guest. Would you like to choose one last song to leave our listeners with at the end of the episode?

Yeah, I think it's very appropriate to close with Two-Headed Boy Part 2. And of course, you want to listen to all the way through. And you have to listen until the very last bit where he stops playing the song and he lays down his guitar and maybe laid down his guitar for the last time. I guess we'll see. Well, definitely, definitely on recorded music. That's not a bootleg. Yeah, he's picking up many times on stage. And then I want you guys to picture me laying down my microphone at the end of this recording, just as profoundly. All right, come back next Thursday for a new episode of Bansplain and this is two-headed boy part two. If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bansplaine, only on Spotify.

Our guest today was Mark Richardson. Follow him on Twitter at Mark Richardson. Huge, huge thanks to the Neutral Milk Hotel mega fans you heard on this episode. Nick Eckerson, Travis Hare, Ryan Kelly, Sophie Nunberg, Barrett Smith, and Cameron Northworthy. Van Slein is a Spotify original show. This episode was produced by my communist daughter, producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, edited by Michael Hardman and Matthew Chalely, with help from Casey Simonson, Shannon Cornynett, and Kelly Kyle. Executive producers for Bansclane are Gina Delvac and me, Yossi Salick. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Costantino and Jennifer Clayman, and graciously recorded by Carlos Delagarza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDenna,

Dana Meyerson, Jessica Hopper, and Mood Powder. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of BandSplain. Only on Spotify. Hell yeah, accordion solo. Is that an accordion? What's happening? What's solo? Tuba?