Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea Read online

  On the lyric sheet, Jeff omits the words of this song in favor of a run-on message declaring that the song seems to confuse people, but that he means what he sings, and further that the theme of “endless endless” on the album doesn’t stem from any one religion, but reflects his belief that all things contain an eternal white light.

  When asked if there were any happy accidents in the recording process, Robert Schneider immediately mentioned this song, and the part where Julian’s amplified, fuzz-pedaled banjo comes in, right after the drums, in a woozy effect achieved by bowing the strings. “It really bugged me that it was out of tune. But Julian really liked it and Jeff liked it. And Jeff’s not looking for tuning and stuff like that. But now listening to it, I hear that it has a raw, almost Eastern quality of being out of tune. That’s its little tuning, but I didn’t recognize it at the time. Now I hear it as being noisy. At the time, I went for a walk with Jeff and said, ‘I can’t stand hearing this in the song.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, but you know, Julian likes it, and I think we’ll leave it.’ It overrode my sensibility, which was that it was out of tune, but if Jeff is happy with it, it doesn’t matter, that’s all I wanted.”

  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

  With the title track we find the first hints of Anne Frank’s posthumous presence, and she’s everywhere (“Anna’s ghost all around”). Briefly in this album dotted with darkness, love and beauty are celebrated—but mainly for their effervescence. The singer treasures these gentle graces, but must introduce the inevitability of death into the equation. This aeroplane delivers ashy remnants into the sea. (I can’t think of cremains thrown from a plane without being brought into real-time South American horror: in Argentina the Junta flew dissidents out over the Atlantic and pushed them out alive, while Pinochet’s Chile more neatly dumped weighted corpses into the Pacific. Perhaps not coincidentally, plenty of ex-Nazis lived out their dotage in Argentine villas.)

  The singer animates his beloved, a flesh puppet maybe already dead, by putting his fingers in her mouth. In this way he even manifests a voice. One is reminded that the most precious things pass out of living memory and are lost, but also that the dead can live on in those that loved them. And Anne Frank, already immortalized by her diary’s survival and the cult of the lost girl genius with the goofy-pretty face, gains new levels of posthumous being from Jeff Mangum’s work with Neutral Milk Hotel. Picture the Franks in their Dutch hidey-hole, 1944. Picture the Elephant 6 gang fifty years later, rock’n’roll and road trips and DIY. Incongruous worlds, but the sets collide, and somehow fit perfectly together. If Anne were alive today, what would be her favorite band?

  Two-Headed Boy

  This scans like a song for a carnival punk—one of those freaks of nature preserved in formaldehyde, yet somehow animate, cognizant and full of love for she who waits outside the jar for the radio he’s building her. And here’s starved Anne again, with the lover’s—or are they the killers’?—fingers that trace her meatless spine. Maybe the jar is a metaphor for impermeable time, a transparent barrier between souls. Maybe the title is an off-color reference to every man’s (woman’s, too) eternal struggle, which head do you think with? The song closes with words of comfort for the jar-baby, singing him to silence, or the sinking into poison fluid oblivion that he resists no more.

  Scott Spillane notes that it took him six or seven years to realize that the two-headed boy was tapping on a jar in a darkened lab somewhere, as someone asks, “Where are you? Tap on the jar and I’ll follow the sound.”

  The Fool

  The origins of Scott Spillane’s soundtrack piece are discussed in the section on the Aeroplane sessions.

  Holland, 1945

  Halfway through the album, hints of Anne Frank’s presence give way to direct biographical references. Frank and her family went into hiding in occupied Amsterdam in July 1942. In August 1944, an informant alerted the Gestapo to their presence and the Franks were captured and sent to internment camps. Anne and her sister Margot arrived at the German camp Bergen-Belsen in October 1944, where they died of typhus in February or March. So while Anne was not physically in Holland in 1945, the association of the country with the year of the war’s ending nonetheless suggests her presence. And it was in Amsterdam in 1945 that Anne’s father Otto, himself liberated from Auschwitz, learned of his daughters’ deaths and received Anne’s secret diary from family friend Miep Gies.

  In “Holland, 1945,” the singer proclaims his love, marveling at the awful randomness that sees his darling in the ground just weeks before the Allies liberated her camp. But mourning makes a metaphysical leap as the promise of reincarnation is introduced in an image (perhaps borrowed from avant-garde Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1967 Fando & Lis) of a young Spanish boy playing a flaming piano. This is a blessed relief, for if she can be this little boy in Spain, why mourn the teenage Jewess in the mass grave? Can life and consciousness and identity maybe mutate to survive human evil and corporal rot? Those who survive war’s traumas are advised to pick up all they can of their old, shattered life so that they can continue on to what’s next. This suggests Otto Frank’s protection, editing and publication of his daughter’s journal, which would become the most powerful personal document of the Holocaust.

  But to read “Holland, 1945” or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as being “about” Jeff Mangum’s fantasy love affair with Anne Frank is far too literal and limiting an interpretation. The second verse introduces a circus/fate wheel on which rides a dead brother who refuses to be reincarnated, happier in the cosmos above than down on troubled earth, where human actions and emotions trigger such suffering. That image of a dead brother, which Boston Phoenix critic Carly Carioli connected with a suicide in the family of one of Jeff’s close friends, will recur powerfully in the Neutral Milk Hotel mythos.

  The closing couplet, “That they’d rather see their faces fill with flies / All when I’d want to keep white roses in their eyes,” is curious. When he wrote the song, Jeff had never heard of the White Rose movement, the anti-Nazi Munich-based student group whose main members were jailed and martyred in the early 40s. Somehow he must have heard the name without consciously realizing it, or he simply plucked the phrase out of the universal mind in one of his creative channeling sessions. The White Rose was famous for the leaflets they secretly printed in one of their bedrooms and mailed out to random Germans whose names they found in the telephone book; the parallels to the Elephant 6 DIY scene are obvious and fascinating.

  Communist Daughter

  Simple, brief and lovely, this song introduces itself with delicate cricket-like oscillations. The imagery is South American and at the same time elemental, with semen and seawater and powerful drugs. Cars careen from the clouds, fusing the earthly and heavenly worlds. Meanwhile, to prove she still exists, the title character masturbates and walks on the water, a hermaphroditic fusion of man/woman, human/god, body/spirit. All things are present within the selves painted here.

  Oh Comely

  “Comely” is an old world word, Middle English for someone pleasing and wholesome. But in Jeff’s song, the one who’s called comely seems to roll in filth. The narrative is unclear, but disturbing, suggesting obligations and desires that can pull one down into dark, dangerous parts of oneself.

  It seems there are four separate songs fused here: “Oh Comely” itself; then the part about the father/betrayer which slides so elegantly into plant-body-machine metaphor; a verse (the most direct of all, with a hopeful heartbeat rhythm as accompaniment) about Anne Frank’s death; and finally a verse from the lost song “Goldaline.”

  Then there’s a shadow/companion song, the relentless, unreleased “Oh Sister,” which Jeff introduced at the Aquarius instore as being connected to “Oh Comely.” “Oh Sister” is full of bits that ended up elsewhere: a character called Rose Wallace Goldaline; the “moves herself around her fist” lyric that found itself in “Communist Daughter”; and the “bright and bubbly” bit that went to “Oh Comely.”r />
  In interviews, Jeff has identified the characters in “Goldaline” as Siamese twin sisters, lost and freezing in the woods. The narrating sister sings to Goldaline not to worry, that they two will be eaten but it’s not so awful, for they’ll be warm and one again in the belly of some beast. In this spare little fairy tale narrative, death is accepted as inevitable and possibly improving.

  Ghost

  A song about spirits moving between bodies and the memories the living keep alive. Anne Frank was born in 1929, so maybe she’s the one who was born in a bottle rocket. If so, then the lyrics obliquely trace the contrast between America and the old world, between different sorts of tragedies and the ways in which souls can overcome them.

  Jeremy Barnes remembers witnessing a fire in a tall building near the apartment in the West Village, standing down on the street with all his friends watching the fire engines and the smoke up high—he always thinks of this scene when he hears “Ghost.”

  10.

  The untitled tenth track is a carnivalesque jam recorded at the end of the sessions, featuring Michelle Anderson’s uilleann pipes, an Irish instrument akin to the Scottish bagpipes.

  Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two

  There’s a weary quality to Jeff’s vocal on this closing song that makes the tender sentiments especially moving. Even with the lyrics changed to mask Anne Frank’s presence, there really is no lovelier moment in pop than when he sings “and in my dreams you’re alive and you’re crying.” The dead brother reels through, his head burning, his skull broken by what might be a suicidal bullet, as the living who love him seek to undo the destruction and put him back together.

  At the end, the twin boy in the glass jar appears. Now he has a lover who gives him tomatoes and radio wires (he’s building a magical radio for her, down in the wetness where he bobs). “But don’t hate her when she gets up to leave” is a gentle, somehow humorous warning, as if to say “what else can she do but leave—you live in a jar!” God is there too, as a place, as every place. Whatever the trials these characters confront, in closing they find a peaceful spot where miracles can be awaited.

  Listening parties

  Before they even left Denver, the band had sought out their peers’ opinions on the record with a listening session at the studio for their local friends. Jeremy felt so detached from what they’d accomplished over the last weeks that he left the room during the playback. When he came back in, he found the locals speechless. It wasn’t until several months later, when he heard a few of the songs on the radio in New Orleans, that the intensity of the recording really struck him, and he began to understand their reaction.

  For Jamey Huggins, the completed album stirred mixed feelings. He’d already heard the songs dozens of times as Jeff worked out the lyrics and arrangements—adding words and moving them around, repeating or holding phrases, singing the horn parts long before the brass players had ever heard them. Once the songs were fairly static, he saw the band play them repeatedly as they tried the new material out in live settings, so when Jeff and company came back to Athens with tape copies for their friends, there was no way Jamey could listen objectively. “I was not prepared for half of the album to be stripped down to basically voice and guitar with very little or no effects or coloring to the sound from the studio. I kind of wanted it to bubble and bounce like the Apples or Olivia’s recordings did. I wanted to hear Jeff’s voice through heavy space echo, and Jeremy’s drum sound defined and isolated. I was put off somehow. I basically wanted the songs to go into the board like a washing machine and rinse them out so I could see them clearer.”

  Later, as the power and loveliness of the album overrode his initial preconceptions, he recognized that it worked in ways he couldn’t have anticipated. “What was I thinking?! I quickly came to appreciate that the beautifully blurry layers of madness that shot through the microphones and onto the tape were perfectly imperfect, raw and fierce, frantic and immediate. The whole thing just spins around the center: Jeff’s voice.”

  Cover art

  There are no great records without great sleeves, and Aeroplane’s is a stunner. The front cover shows a group of old fashioned bathers—though with the odd cropping it’s unclear if they are waving from the shoreline or drowning in the deeps. The central figure, a curvaceous lass in a gold-starred red costume, gazes out from a perfectly neutral visage, in place of her face an oversized, well used drum head. That same drum is found on the back cover, strung round the tallest of the stilt-striding musicians who march across a pastoral stage set unsuited to their blare. Externally, the name Neutral Milk Hotel appears only on the spine and on a sticker that Merge applied to the shrink-wrap.

  The record cover was a collaboration between Jeff Mangum and Chris Bilheimer, R.E.M.’s staff designer. But the first bit of art came from the pen of Brian Dewan, a visual artist, inventor, filmmaker, carpenter and musician from New York. The iconic line drawing of the enormous Victrola soaring above a smoky city is his. Brian’s first Elephant 6 collaboration came when Julian Koster asked him to provide drawings for posters to be inserted inside early singles by The Music Tapes. These singles had three-dimensional pop-up sleeves with mechanisms designed by Chris Bilheimer that Julian and his friends painstakingly cut out with x-acto knives—a fact Brian discovered when Julian asked if he could recommend a good die-cutter. Julian supplied Brian with words and drawings, and Brian adapted this material for the poster, which featured land- and waterscapes decorated with mysterious slogans like “March of the Father Fists” and “Every time you light a cigarette with a candle a sailor will not return from sea.”

  Not long after the Music Tapes commission, Brian got a call from Jeff Mangum, who identified himself as Julian’s housemate. Would Brian be interested in doing some artwork for his new record? Intrigued by the tape he received, Brian agreed to draw two things for Jeff: a flying Victrola and a magic radio. That Victrola would become a shorthand symbol for Neutral Milk Hotel and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but first it was just one in a stack of potential graphic elements that Jeff brought to Chris Bilheimer when it came time to design the jacket.

  Chris Bilheimer was a fine arts student at the University of Georgia when he stumbled onto his dream job with R.E.M. in 1993. Grateful for the opportunity to make a living making art (and to make art on the best equipment “Losing My Religion” could buy), he was a notoriously easy touch for indie artists needing record covers or poster design. Chris had told Jeff to call if he ever needed help; for Aeroplane, Jeff took him up on the offer.

  Bryan Poole recalls that Jeff “was always into that oldtimey, magic, semi-circus, turn-of-the-century, penny arcade kind of imagery,” examples of which he’d find in thrift shops on his travels. Among the pieces that Jeff brought Chris was a vintage European postcard of bathers at a resort, and this was the image that Chris—working closely with Jeff—cropped and subtly altered to create Aeroplane’s front cover. The other source material included a book of historic circus posters, a clip art book of cloud formations, Will Hart’s Elephant 6 logo and Brian Dewan’s aerial cityscape.

  Although Chris Bilheimer mainly works on computers, his aesthetic is more analog than digital. The disparate images selected for the album design ranged from Brian Dewan’s crisp new drawings to the slightly grubby old postcard. How could all these pieces be given a visually cohesive look? Chris solved the problem by scanning the back of the postcard and using the foxed, spotted, off-white paper as the background against which all other images were screened. In this way, everything appeared to be about the same age and printed on similar paper, with the overall effect one of slow decay. Chris even left a splash of dirt on the postcard—just above the girl’s waving hand—a touch that’s easily overlooked on the CD cover, but obvious on the larger LP jacket. The CD contained a piece of art absent from the album, two reproductions of tiny human figures beneath dramatic clouds. These images appear on the back side of the single sheet of paper on which the CD cover was printed, with the mysterious numerals �
��205/6” a carryover from the back of the vintage postcard.

  Instead of a standard lyric sheet, Chris arranged the song titles, lyrics (which Jeff provided) and other information like a broadsheet. Every song had a title except the one that starts “The only girl I’ve ever loved / Was born with roses in her eyes.” He asked Jeff what to call the track. Jeff said he was thinking about calling it “Holland,” or maybe “1945.” Chris suggested he combine the two titles, which is how he named what would become his favorite song on the album.

  Chris: “I wanted to have a little bit of a ‘circus coming to town’ feel without an obviously circusy-looking image. And so I laid out this whole thing and printed it out and crinkled it up and then scanned it back in and laid it on top of old paper. I work really hard to make things look like they weren’t made on a computer. Even though I’m not using traditional graphic methods—it’s the same reason bands like recording with tube amps and recording to tape instead of to hard drive—it has that tactile warmth to it. That’s what I try to do with graphic design. Especially by designing something, printing it out, fucking it up and then scanning it back in.” Most of the fonts used came from old typography books and were set by hand, although the headline is set in an especially handsome computer font derived from Vineta, an in-line shadowed Clarendon designed in 1973 by Ernst Volker.