Song Exploder - Grizzly Bear - Four Cypresses

Episode Date: August 3, 2017

Between 2004 and 2012, Grizzly Bear put out four critically-acclaimed albums. Their newest album is called Painted Ruins, and it features this song, Four Cypresses. In this episode, two members of the band, Chris Taylor and Daniel Rossen, tell the story of how the song came together. songexploder.net/grizzly-bear Song Exploder listener survey: surveynerds.com/songexploder

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Between 2004 and 2012, the band Grizzly Bear put out four critically acclaimed albums. Their newest album is called Painted Ruins, and it features this song, Four Cypresses. And in this episode, two of the members of the band, Chris Taylor and Daniel Rossin, tell the story of how the song came together. This is Daniel Rossin. My name's Chris Taylor. And there's Ed Roasty, and there's Chris Bear, who plays drums.

He plays a lot of things. We like to play a lot of different instruments. None of us really like to get stuck in one corner. Chris Bear was up in my place upstate, and we were trying this approach where he would just put down a bunch of different drum feels, kind of improvising different drum feels over the same progression. He played this, like, rollicking drum groove that almost felt like he was very disorienting and we didn't really, you couldn't almost feel where one was in the beat.

It was just kind of like this rolling, strange thing. He kept messing around with it, and from that drum idea, he developed this very kind of stable, almost like metronomic part on a little keyboard that starts the song. The very first moment of the song is, I guess, kind of a wrong note. He was doing this, like, just this Tom feel, that thumping room drum recording that you hear. Another thing that makes the song even more,

disorienting is the drum group it comes in I think not even on one comes in on a different beat the way it develops within the first minute of the song it's you don't really quite understand what's going to happen the whole thing is a you know crazy improvised mess feels chaotic Chris Bear just put down this like series of bass notes on a whorlitzer so he was playing the whorlitzer part at the same time as he was playing this little dx 100 keyboard Everything that opens the tune is like the first things that he, Chris, played on his own. Initially, it was a pretty bare-bones kind of idea, but I just found it really trance-like. Seems like it's just sort of slowly pulling you in.

It had a very satisfying, like, slow pace to it, and nothing else we were doing really felt like that at the time. So it sat in this form for, like, six or seven months like that. Nobody really knew quite how to approach it, but we knew that we liked it. I don't live here anymore, but eventually, like, I started coming out to L.A. for writing trips, and the next spring, we opened it up again. We were just kind of talking about it in Chris's studio, and that's when we laid that basic chord progression with the little roll-on-string synth and that basic guitar part. Leaving something with so many unknowns for so long is we don't do that too often.

It was kind of nice to do it, actually, to kind of just let some of these songs develop very, very slowly over time, which is challenging because it can be kind of frustrating to not know what it's supposed to be, too. We're like, I really want this to be something, but if it's not going to reveal itself, then I'm just going to throw it away, you know. But something about that little progression of his, we kind of just kept coming back to it. We usually, as we're like coming up with the part, we're also just recording it. And like, that's very intentional. Like, let's make sure that the song is good before we even, like, decide it's a song. I think it just felt better to not put that pressure on it. It was like, we're just working.

on ideas here with no assumption that we were using any of this. It was on the way to being a song, but kind of needed someone to sing on it to really turn into an actual song. I actually initially really thought Ed was going to do this tune, but it never really clicked for him. So I took a version of it home with me that night after we had opened it up again. I kept finding my way to staying in these pretty depressing rentals in LA. That night I came back. That night I came back and there was a guy sleeping in the driveway.

I don't know exactly what his story was, but he clearly was just like trying to stay out of the heat and get some rest. When I got up the next morning, I was like thinking about the song and I was thinking about this dude that was probably still out there. And like I got up and I was sitting on the ground trying vaguely to meditate and failing and like looking at the window and thinking about us looking out at the same scene for Cypresses in the neighbor's yard. thinking about some kind of connection between totally unrelated experiences. The basis of the lyric, that's where that came from, and the idea of displacement and homelessness, really. Trying to connect with someone else's experience and trying to find a shared experience

with someone that's having a much worse time than I am. I actually didn't have anything to work with. I just had my laptop and I think I used garage band or something to just record a vocal part like straight into the computer speaker. Staring into the wall, tangled up in a pile it's early make no sound.

I don't like sitting down and writing lyrics. I prefer when they just happen. And often when they just happen, they're extremely literal or it's like whatever's right in front of my face, which doesn't always work. But it kind of worked this time. When I can,

I really prefer to be able to develop the melody and the lyrics kind of at the same time as one process, one thought. Because the chord progression was so repetitive. I felt like this needs a melody that kind of keeps moving and growing and changing, but still like, you know, grounding and soulful, but isn't another series of repeating notes. Like something kind of just keeps moving along and along and along.

And I brought it back to the guys. It's like, I think I got something. And that's always really exciting. He recorded and we were both like, whoa, like this is, it felt like a new. way of approaching a melody for Dan. At least it was just, it felt like refreshing. We were immediately very into it. And it's always like really cool too because it means like a car now has some wheels, like it's going to go out of the garage now a little bit, that it wasn't just going to be like a

vibe. It was going to be a song. And that's like, that's always a really, really exciting moment. The band took the work they'd done in Los Angeles and brought it to all air studios in upstate New York. The attitude of all the sections was kind of determined by the time we got upstate. And it was just a matter of executing it. To kind of settle up all those questions before actually going into record, made the recording process itself just really fun. Then it was just a painting. It was like choose your favorite sounding thing in the room that you can imagine

and make it sound as good as you can because we already know the part. You know, the Warlitzer has like a kind of more like mid-rangey singing kind of quality to it. But wanted to add some weight. with a giant sub-y synth. And the bass guitar. Kind of creeps in slowly. And then the bass veers off of the initial bass line thing and does its own kind of chordal part.

That's like riffing off the guitar part. It's like the guitar part and the bass part. Do this kind of like arpeggiating thing together. They're kind of interacting with each other. I also very poorly play cello. He studied in doing it, but I can piece it together. So that was something that I recorded in my place. I'm personally a really big fan of dance cello playing,

even though it's not classical, but it's got a feel to it that I find charming. I think it's kind of better that it sounds a little rough around the edges. Kind of okay that it doesn't sound great. It's got a little more human in that way. Chris Bear often messes around with pedal steel, and he was trying to see if he could play the whole core progression all at once on a pedal steel,

and it was kind of impossible, and he doesn't really play pedal steel. but we were like tuning it around and then it was like what if you cut the chord progression up into two separate stages so that it goes like you do one chord and you play the other one

and you play the other one so it's like almost chimes in like call and response so he played the whole line and two separate parts kind of call in response thing and then he added on top of that he built this like stack of ascending fourths

on a profit it just kind of triggers this weird afterglow almost like after you release the note it sort of like opens a filter that like this sort of wheezy crystalline sound kind of creeps out in the kind of release of the sound. There's also an electrified Celeste with like a tremolo function. I played out this just very simple little top notes of the chord. And then I took all those sounds. The pedal steel,

the Celeste, and the Prophet synthesizer. And built like a stereophonic structure and so that things would go up and then out and sort of balloon working. I remember it feeling like waves of ecstasy. This sort of wave of like, whoa, just wow, like taking in all of it. I think that's like one of our favorite moments on the whole record. It just was such a strange combination of elements. It was very unexpected. But we kind of knew that like, well, it has to leave this place that it's in.

It can't just continue rollicking in the same way. You're like, okay, well, we have this first part. And then the second part should sort of erupt. Watching Chris playing drums is something to behold. He's just such an incredibly talented drummer, and it's like Christmas a little bit. It's like, you know, wow, you gift. And so we're sort of like making big, broad strokes

in terms of general energy direction. We have a really open, mood board like this feel. But we had no idea what it was going to be. There was some unresolved questions of how to balance the energy of some of the parts. There's this section of repetitive clavonets. And then kind of moving around it are these electric guitar parts. And there's this like biting, di-distorted electric guitar part. And it just felt too much like heavy metal or something. Intense in a fun way, but it was a little bit over the top. Chris really tried to help. helped me like shape the guitar part.

So it wasn't so repetitive and so relentless. It was like kind of relentless in its initial format. So solving this section was kind of a finish line. And then I think a process that I know Dan and I both really enjoy is like when there's a big pile of stuff and you're just like, okay, this is kind of amorphous brick of weight. What can we lose? It's really fun to like just whack things out and be like, nope, you don't make the cut. I don't know.

It's just, it's cleansing. You have these bands that are really actually just one person driving the whole ship. And what's exciting to me about this band is that it's really a band still. There isn't a leader in that sense. Or just there's no one calling all the shots. Like we are really democratic in that way as much as you really can be. With the four people having opinions on stuff, you have a lot to work with there. And really define the collective voice of a band.

I feel like it's great privilege. to be able to like, I can't wait to hear what, you know, Chris is going to do with this or vice versa, like being able to look forward to everybody's kind of unique perspective. It's a really exciting, lucky thing. Here's four cypresses by Grizzly Bear in its entirety. It's at SongExploder.net for a link to buy this track and to learn more about Grizzly Bear. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length.

And this is the first one that'll be out under, my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists,

and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenland, Lily and the producer Phil Winerobe.

I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuckus, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Kleeon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band.

The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts made possible by the Knight Foundation and listeners like you.

Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder, and you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at SongExploder.net, or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rushi Kesh Your Way. Thanks for listening.