[music]

Alison Stewart: Time for more music. This Friday will mark the 25th anniversary since the release of an influential indie rock album that Stereogum has called, "A myth and a genre unto itself." For another installment of our album anniversary series, Silver Liner Notes, here's Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

[music]

What a beautiful face

I have found in this place

That is circling all around the sun

What a beautiful dream

That could flash on the screen

In a blink of an eye and be gone from me

Soft and sweet

Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

And one day we will die

And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea

But for now we are young

Let us lay in the sun

And count every beautiful thing we can see

Love to be

In the arms of all I'm keeping here with me

Alison Stewart: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was released on February 10th, 1998. It was the second and so far, final album from Neutral Milk Hotel, a Lo-Fi, psychedelic folk band from Ruston, Louisiana. In the last 25 years, the record has become a, "Polarizing, cult classic," in the words of Pitchfork who reviewed it's 2005 re-release with a perfect 10. Later this month, on February 24th, Merge Records will put out a box set called The Collected Works Of Neutral Milk Hotel. The collection features Aeroplane as well as earlier releases, including a live album Jeff Mangum-- I can never say that right, Mangum, made with the help of his roommate, Lance Bangs, a music video director and filmmaker.

Bangs is also a producer of The Elephant 6 Recording Company, a film that premiered at DOC NYC last year about the music collective that Neutral Milk Hotel helped put on the map. Lance Bangs joins me now. Hi, Lance.

Lance Bangs: Hello, good morning.

Alison Stewart: Along with executive producer of the documentary, Rob Hatch-Miller. Hi, Rob.

Rob Hatch-Miller: Hi, thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, when did you first hear In the Aeroplane Over the Sea? What's your relationship with the album and Neutral Milk Hotel? Do you love it? Was it not your favorite? Call and let us know. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, is our phone number. Our social media is @AllOfItWNYC. Lance, you first met Jeff, lead singer and songwriter of Neutral Milk Hotel when you were living in Athens, Georgia, 1990s.

Lance Bangs: Correct, yes.

Alison Stewart: What was your first impression?

Lance Bangs: I was really struck by Jeff right away. He and some of his high school friends moved from Ruston, Louisiana to Athens, Georgia in 1993. There was a restaurant called Free Aleros. It was a Mexican restaurant that these guys started performing combinations of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals while people were just trying to order food or get something to eat. It wasn't a regular full-time music venue with a PA.

Athens was a very fertile place for bands and musicians to find outlets to perform at even if it wasn't a traditional music venue with ticketed audience and lighting and all that sort of thing. They stood out right away because there is a humanity and strangeness to Jeff's writing that felt like young people making something that was more interesting to me than what I thought of his 60s psychedelia. I had a strong bias against baby boomers and USA Today articles about it. "It's the this anniversary of the Beach Boys," or whatever. The fact that these were young, strange kids that had come from a small town of Ruston, Louisiana and were making compelling, new music was exciting to me.

I followed what Jeff was doing. That group was called Synthetic Flying Machine, and they made some handmade cassettes, and they would make really beautiful flyers that they drew. A lot of Jeff and Will Cullen Hart's drawings would be on those flyers. Then Jeff eventually scattered and left Athens and started travelling around the Pacific Northwest in Chicago and Colorado, and recording some of the early music that became Neutral Milk Hotel.

Alison Stewart: Rob, what do you remember the first time you heard Neutral Milk Hotel?

Rob Hatch-Miller: I was definitely in high school. It's the late 90s, and it's one of, if not the most touchstone album for me as a kid in the late 90s like finishing high school, going off to college. I think it's an album that really connects strongly with young people. Even up till now I'm constantly hearing about friends, 16 year olds that are discovering this band and just becoming obsessed with it. It's something that was almost sacred to me as a teenager.

Alison Stewart: Calls are starting to come in. Let's talk to Lucas, calling in from Centerport, Long Island. Hi, Lucas. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Lucas: Hey, how you doing?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Lucas: Yes, I discovered these guys late during college, so probably around 2007. Once I did, these guys are just phenomenal. This album was phenomenal. I could listen to it from start to finish. Get me through the late nights in architecture school. Then I was fortunate enough to see them play Brooklyn back some years ago when they did that reunion show.

Alison Stewart: Do you have a favorite track?

Lucas: No, the entire album. Yes, I'll listen to all their old stuff as well just non-stop.

Alison Stewart: All right, well, I'm just going to play this one for you. King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. One from Neutral Milk Hotel.

[music]

When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers

And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees

In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your feet

And your mum would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder

And dad would throw the garbage all across the floor

As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for

And this is the room, one afternoon I knew I could love you

And from above you how I sank into your soul

Into that secret place where no one dares to go

Alison Stewart: That's King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One from Neutral Milk Hotel. We have another installment of our Silver Liner Notes Series, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, came out in 1998. My guests are Lance Bangs, the filmmaker and Rob Hatch-Miller, executive producer of the doc, The Elephant 6 Recording Company. Lance, it's interesting if you go back and look at the reviews, they are mixed.

Lance Bangs: Yes.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] When and why do you think this album started as sort of an indie rock release with mixed reviews to becoming a real cult classic?

Lance Bangs: It was on a really wonderful record label called Merge Records based out of North Carolina. At that time of 1997, '98, a lot of the music publications that covered American releases, like Rolling Stone and Spin, were treating it like it was the death of rock. They would move down to being excited about what they called Electronica. They were doing cover stories about Moby and The Chemical Brothers.

There was a sense that this sort of indie rock stuff was passé or that was early '90s Nirvana stuff and now we've moved on to dance music. They made a record that was very singular and distinct to them, but they used instruments that were not common. They used this plastic electronic saxophone thing that makes a bizarre sound. They used a singing saw where you're moving a bow over an actual physical saw for cutting logs and making these ghostly changing notes and sounds, and there were horn arrangements. It wasn't something that sounded like the rock and roll that was going on prior to that that was now considered passé.

I think that lyrically, there's some very strong imagery in Jeff's writing that if you connect with it and you're at maybe an early adult, it makes sense and is surreal, but completely compelling. If you're, I don't know, more guarded or grumpy, you might be like, "Ugh, this is insufferable," and mis-characterize it or think that it's twee ukulele, Mumford & Sons kind of stuff in a way that some people were dismissive based on that knee-jerk response. That's my memory of how people were divided about it at the time.

Alison Stewart: Excellent memory. Listeners, when did you first hear In the Aeroplane Over the Sea? What's your relationship with the album and Neutral Milk Hotel? Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Suzanne from Brooklyn is calling in. Hi Suzanne.

Suzanne: Oh, hi there. Thanks for taking my call. This is such a fun album, one of my favorites.

Alison Stewart: Tell us why. Tell us your story.

Suzanne: Yes, so it was about 2001 when I was working in a record shop in my hometown in Connecticut. My boss really wanted to play In the Aeroplane Over the Sea for me, and he couldn't find it. It was like, when we were doing something like clean out, I think we were moving the big cassette rack out when we finally got rid of all the cassettes in the place. Then we found it behind there and then another coworker confessed that he had thrown it, chucked it clear across the room like a frisbee because he couldn't take my boss listening to it anymore. [chuckles] In the end, we were really happy we recovered it and it swiftly became one of my favorite albums too.

Alison Stewart: Suzanne, that is a fantastic story. Thank you so much for sharing it. Rob, the documentary Elephant 6 Recording Company tells the story of the collective from which Neutral Milk Hotel emerged. It began in Ruston, Louisiana eventually spread out to Georgia and Colorado, featuring bands like The Apples in Stereo and of Montreal. Rob, how is the story of Elephant 6 important to understanding the legacy of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea?

Rob Hatch-Miller: It's absolutely crucial because as Lance referenced, these bands were all intertwined and they talk about the Elephant 6 Recording Company as if it was one big band where there's a rotating crew of different people taking on lead vocals and songwriting, and the band name changes when the singer-songwriter changes. All these bands really started as a group of four friends in Ruston, Louisiana. It was Robert Schneider, who went on to found The apples in Stereo and also produced and engineered most of the Elephant 6 releases by Neutral Milk Hotel and everyone else.

Then of course Jeff with Neutral Milk Hotel and Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, who started The Olivia Tremor Control who depending on the day is probably my favorite of the Elephant 6 bands. They were probably the most relatable to late 60s psychedelia, like Beatles kind of a sound, way more experimental than that. Neutral Milk Hotel was connected to all these groups. Off of Neutral Milk Hotel, there's all these other offshoot bands like The Gerbils, which is Scott Spillane, who was the horn player in Neutral Milk Hotel. He had his own side band.

Then Julian Koster, who played Singing Saw and lots of other instruments has another band called The Music Tapes. It's an art collective, and there's really nothing like it, just like Neutral Milk Hotel, and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is singular. There's no other real phenomenon I can think of like the Elephant 6 Recording Company, which is what makes it such a compelling story.

There's a great oral history book that came out about it last year, Endless Endless by Adam Clair. Tells the story of all these amazing bands, some very well-known like Neutral Milk Hotel, and lots of smaller ones. Then, our film traces the same story celebrating this group of friends that against all odds made this Lo-Fi home-recorded music that shook up the world.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip from the documentary Elephant 6 Recording Company featuring other members of Elephant 6 talking about hearing the album and early versions of the songs.

Speaker 5: We would hear the sessions quite a bit. They had a story, they had a whole complete idea.

Speaker 6: When some of the songs, In the Aeroplane were being recorded, I think Oh Comely it is, he did the whole thing in one take.

Speaker 7: When we finished, we had a CD party, everybody come over the house and listen to the record.

Speaker 8: Within 120 seconds everything went silent. I remember he said, "I really want Will to go in and do some cool electronic stuff on it", but Will was like, "No, this is the record."

Alison Stewart: We're talking about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel on our Silver Liner Notes series. Let's talk to Arusha calling in from Bushwick. Hi Arusha.

Arusha: Hi there. I just wanted to express that from the moment I heard this, actually when it came out, I remember my partner and I just were frozen in awe. Even now while I'm listening to you on the radio playing [chuckles] I can't do anything, but sit and listen to it, because it fills my heart and it feels like immediate chemistry. I think a lot of music fans know that about this record. It is so unique and it is beyond what even the artist and the people who recorded it made it.

At the time, in the late 90s and early 2000s, that was the lore, it was beyond Jeff and he went a little crazy or whatever. I to this day cannot think of one album that affects me in the same way that this one does. It's so simple.

Alison Stewart: Arusha, thank you for calling in. We got a tweet In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has remained one of the most powerful records I've ever heard in my life. I can't do anything else when I hear the notes, it grips my heart. Also, wanted to bring in Peter, I believe on line one. Hi Peter.

Peter: Hi. Wow, what a pleasure Alison and Lance, and Rob. I love your work with Tom Scharpling. I love this record. I remember when that record came out with that, I guess it was when Pitchfork covered it and there was this talk about the, I don't know, it was mysticism of what his influence is, like what the record is supposed to be about. There was this Anne Frank thing tied up with it and I became totally obsessed with it, and stopped listening to Emo for like 10 minutes to listen to that thing.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]. Let's get in Lance. Tell us about the Diary of Anne Frank reference.

Lance Bangs: Jeff definitely when he was 26 years old, was writing and arranging these songs. That was late 1996, early 1997 when he put most of this material together. At the time there was dreams that he was having and almost lucid dreams where he would sleepwalk or walk around. He was having a sense that Anne Frank or a figure very similar to Anne Frank and their family was reaching out to him for help.

He felt, in the absence of having a time machine, how do I help them, and how do I build a time machine if that would allow me to help them? Really took on a sense of emotionally investing and trying to ease this suffering and this terrible thing that was going on, or had already gone on. It's a historical event, and that ended up in some of the imagery of multiple songs on the record. The most explicit is probably Holland, 1945, which might be one that you would play during this conversation.

Alison Stewart: We have it queued up, ready to go.

Lance Bangs: Great. I think once listeners-- because it's not completely explicit, but once listeners who were deeply connected with the record emotionally started to try and decipher some of the imagery or lyrics that started to emerge. This was, I don't know if I would say, pre-internet, but I think that a lot of people didn't have-- it's pre-Twitter, pre-places that people could discuss what they were getting out of lyrics or songs that easily. There were some message boards and forums that people started to get together and try and decipher what is going on. There is some Anne Frank imagery that does emerge from it.

There's other imagery that's more personal to Jeff of people that were in his life or friends. Emotionally intense people who had really gotten a lot out of this record started showing up at our house or our doorway in Athens, Georgia once the record had been out for a bit. To me, I would get weirded out or have a sense of defensiveness if someone was on the front porch who really, really needed to talk to Jeff. Jeff was pretty open at first about trying to comfort these people, and hear what they had to say or what they had on their mind. I think to me that felt like something that became part of the strain or part of the need to protect himself a little bit, and become less publicly active and--

Alison Stewart: Available. We have been talking about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, celebrating its 25th anniversary. My guests have been Lance Bangs and Rob Hatch-Miller, check out their documentary, The Elephant 6 Recording Company. Thank you so much for taking our listeners' calls.

Rob Hatch-Miller: Thank you so much Alison. People can find @Elephant6Movie online. We hope to have more news about the release of the film later in the year.

Lance Bangs: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: We'll go out on Holland, 1945.

[Music]

Two

One, two, three, four

 

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