in the aeroplane over the sea

Neutral Milk Hotel found a transcendent expression of this curious life with the lo-fi psychedelic folk of a concept album set during the second world war. The band was the vehicle for Elephant 6 Recording Company co-founder Jeff Mangum who recorded their full length debut 'On Avery Island' on a four-track in a bedroom with Robert Schneider, fellow Elephant 6 founder and leader of the Apples in Stereo. When it came time for the followup 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea', Mangum and Schneider went to the new Pet Sounds Studio at the home of Jim McIntyre. The sessions featured Jeff Mangum on guitar, vocals, organ, floor tom, bass guitar, tape, shortwave radio, and art direction; Jeremy Barnes on drums and organ; Julian Koster on Wandering Genie organ, singing saw, bowed banjo, accordion, and white noise; Scott Spillane on trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, euphonium, and horn arrangements; Robert Schneider on home organ, air organ, bass, backing vocals, piano, and horn arrangements; Laura Carter on zanzithophone; Rick Benejamin on trombone; Marisa Bissinger on saxophone and flugelhorn; James Guyatt on percussion; and Michelle Anderson on Uilleann pipes.



Mangum would confess: "This record wouldn't be this record without the band. I think that's something that isn't stressed enough usually, because they've had a very huge influence on me. I think the extent of the credit I get for this is a little much. Scott, the man who played the horns, has got a certain style that's all his own which has sort of grown through us playing together for a number of years. And then Jeremy the drummer is just amazing. Julian always has something magic up his sleeve, things that make it really exciting. Recording with Robert, having him being able to produce and have such a real feel for music is really important ... Some of it happens in my head, some of it on the road, and some of it in the studio. Because the band's personal lives are always in evolving states all the time - we'll be in different places at different times, and then we'll be apart, and then we'll be on the road, then in the studio, then apart again - makes each song a little different. Sometimes a song that we've been playing for a while; [or] we'll be hearing a song for the first time when we've woken up in the morning to go to the studio to record...All the songs I write are really one story that evolves - personal experiences that I come across, experiences of my friends, and the dream-world that exists in my head. To me, there really is no line between where one song begins and the other ends...There's a certain discomfort I have in staying in one place for very long, and I think being able to travel makes each experience really new and fresh for me. I think there's a lot of unexpected things that you figure out about life and things you come across, and a certain state of confusion that you seem to stay in that certainly helps songwriting...I'm not too much into punk rock any more, but I'm into a lot of world music and a lot of folk music: Hungarian gypsy music, Smithsonian Folkways recordings, Dust Bowl ballads, Hasil Adkins, and Harry Partch. Currently I like Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing, Robert Wyatt's Shleep - and I thought the last Built to Spill record was really great. I've always appreciated - never seemed to be any limits to music for those people - they seemed to be so in love with music... They had the ability to sort of let yourself completely go and express what you're feeling and not really worry too much about self-editing...I felt that I had to really challenge myself and come up with music that maybe I feel a little uncomfortable with when I'm writing it. And then I need to take a step back and decide is it something that could convey beauty or not."


'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea' sold over one hundred and forty-one thousand copies and was a huge critical success. In the aftermath of the album, Mangum dropped out of the public eye for almost ten years: "I went through a period, after 'Aeroplane', 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 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...I feel like we're so limited by the context at which we look at life. The way we look at who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to love... everything. I feel like that, in and of itself, is a project of a lifetime: the problem of how to break out of the limiting context that is imposed upon us by the educational system, by the church, by our parents... As a kid I rejected it without even thinking about it. Now that I'm a little older, I see how deeply destructive it really is. Even our concepts about romantic love, I think, are destructive; treating people as property is destructive; being jealous of other people is destructive. You know, being jealous is a perfectly natural thing to feel, so it's not about suppressing jealousy, but learning to come to terms with it and to recognize its destructiveness and then to transform it. I'm not saying that I've overcome anything, but I've definitely seen the blinding truth of how imperative it is that we have to overcome these problems ... 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 6 thing, we 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 all created our dream 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 realized 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 of these issues was on a pretty flimsy platform, that's when the platform started to give way. One of the biggest wounds that I carried around with me for a long time was that a very dear person in my life, and the person who had probably the biggest influence on my life artistically, had been molested and abused by her father from the time she was a baby. After 'Aeroplane' came out, I saw her going through a lot of pain, and I also saw some of my other friends crumbling. So I realized that even though I believe with my whole heart in the power of music... it didn't provide any solid answers on how to heal myself and heal others so that they could overcome what had happened to them. I realized that I wanted to take a deeper look at life in order to be some kind of truly healing force in people's everyday lives ... The music is supposed to be healing ... I think the songs I was writing after 'Aeroplane' were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about ... It was just very strange timing to get in over my head. I don't know how it happens... 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 everywhere else."










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'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea'
full album:

All songs written by Jeff Mangum, except where indicated. Horn arrangements by Robert Schneider and Scott Spillane.

Side One
1. "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One" 2:00
2. "The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three" (writers: Jeremy Barnes, Julian Koster, Jeff Mangum, Scott Spillane) 3:06
3. "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" 3:22
4. "Two-Headed Boy" 4:26
5. "The Fool" (writers: Spillane) 1:53
6. "Holland, 1945" 3:15
7. "Communist Daughter" 1:57
Side Two
1. "Oh Comely" 8:18
2. "Ghost" 4:08
3. "Untitled" 2:16
4. "Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two" 5:13

Neutral Milk Hotel live 

Two-Headed Boy

April 8th

Oh Comely

The Fool

The King of Carrot Flowers pts 2 & 3

Naomi

Ghost

Song Against Sex

Ruby Bulbs

Sailing Through

Two-Headed Boy pt 2

Holland 1945

Gardenhead / Leave Me Alone

A Baby for Pree

Ferris Wheel on Fire

Worms in the Wind / King of Carrot Flowers pts. 2 & 3

Song Against Sex

Ruby Bulbs

unknown ("swimming in your speakers")

Snow Song pt. 1

Naomi

I Will Bury You in Time

Ghost / untitled

Oh Comely

King of Carrot Flowers pt 1

Two-Headed Boy