Grizzly Bear

Weeks before Veckatimest-- Grizzly Bear's third LP-- was properly released, besotted critics and fans were already declaring allegiance: arguably the band's most affable and ecstatic effort to date, Veckatimest (named after an uninhabited island off the New England coast) is an odd and thrilling collection of tracks. Pitchfork spoke with guitarist/vocalist Ed Droste-- a Massachusetts native-- a few hours before the band's Boston show.

Pitchfork: How's the tour going?

ED: The tour is going really great. It's been a lot of fun so far. We've been to Philly and D.C. and yeah, it's just beginning. New York was a lot of fun, and we found out today about the Billboard thing, which we're all really excited about.

Pitchfork: Number 8! Did you see that coming?

ED: We didn't see it coming at all. It was a complete shock. I don't think anyone, even internally at the label, expected that.

Pitchfork: Congratulations. So, the band has a reputation for being a revelatory live act. Obviously, these songs demand some kind of rearrangement to be properly played live-- is that something you think about when you're writing and recording?

ED: I think when we're recording we're really just focused on making a song that we really like. Often, in the back of our heads, we're wondering if-- you know, I remember, making "Southern Point", I remember as we were finishing the song we were looking at each other like, "How the hell are we gonna play this live?" It's a big question mark. But that's some of the fun of it, because I remember that was also a question with "Little Brother" and we just sort of re-interpreted it for the live setting.

For us, that actually keeps the material fresh-- to be able to have a different version live or have a different energy behind it live. I mean, "Cheerleader" is essentially the same chords and everything's the same, but the delivery and energy in the live setting has a more spirited feeling to it. It's always really fun to have different versions, and sometimes we discover the essence of the song by playing it live. "Two Weeks" would be a really good example of that-- the song was done, but it wasn't until we had played it a bunch on the Radiohead tour that we figured out how we wanted it to be. We went back and re-recorded it. The vocal delivery was much different.

Pitchfork: It works the other way then sometimes?

ED: On some tracks. One really nice thing about this album was that we took a lot of time on it. We would step away from the material for weeks at a time, and either go on tour, like last August, as I mentioned, or just take a break. There's something about stepping away from the material for a month or so and then coming back and re-addressing it that gives you such a fresh perspective. It makes you look at something and be like, "Ooh, I don't like this song," or "Wait, I do like this song, but we need to change this." So we were able to weed through things and decide what actually stood up to our test of time, which is obviously not 10 years, but at least [it's not] jumping in the studio and immediately recording everything in two weeks and being like, "It's done!"

Pitchfork: Grizzly Bear have a history of eschewing studios for more personal, comfortable spaces. Is that important to you?

ED: We've become accustomed to Chris Taylor recording and producing the albums, and he has his own mobile rig, so that's one element. Another element is that our recording budget is pretty small and a lot of studios are really expensive. When push comes to shove, actually, I think we just prefer, like you said, a comfortable environment in which we can sort of live. We move into the space and there's something really great about being able to creep out in the middle of the night and just shred on guitar.

We had this one space that was so big that we could all be sleeping and no one would notice [if someone got up to play]. There was this freedom of being able to do what you wanted when inspiration struck. There was no 9-to-5, punch-in-the-studio fee. There were old wood floors that creaked and a fireplace and natural reverb in the room, and sunlight coming through the windows. As opposed to a sterile studio space. I think generally, we just really prefer working in houses or, I don't know, places that aren't a professional studio that's perfectly soundproof and keeps all the extra ambient noises out. We really enjoy having those weird little textures find their way in. We left in the sound of the fireplace on one of the songs because we liked it, but lots of other little sounds later, when we were listening back, we were like, "Oh, weird, I didn't even hear that at first," "Oh, that's the wind rattling the window."

Pitchfork: Is your instinct to leave those sounds in, or edit them out?

ED: We edited some out. One thing we learned on this album was how to edit ourselves and, oddly enough, there are actually less layers on this album then there were with Yellow House.

Yellow House was a product of just constantly adding until it became this thick, textured dream. This is way more dynamic. There were moments where people would be, "You know, let's let this song be a song and not this grandiose thing." Like "Foreground" had all these arrangements where we'd go on and [add] strings and all this stuff and then everyone was like, "You know, why don't we just leave it as it is and just let the song speak for itself?" It was this lesson in how to edit yourself. And the thing with song choices and, like I said, having space on the album, cutting material and just learning how to be like, "OK, maybe this isn't the strongest thing, let's not use it," or "Let's not use this arrangement and let's just leave it as just simple guitar here," or something like that.

Pitchfork: Editing your own work is really difficult. It can feel like cutting off your own leg.

ED: Yeah, I think sometimes I get overly excited about adding things and having new ideas. You forget that more isn't always better. It's something we learned from playing out and becoming attached to live versions of things, which are significantly stripped down because it's just the four of us. I think it's some sort of amalgamation between our studio ideas and our live ideas and trying to find a happy balance.

Pitchfork: The "Two Weeks" video, directed by Patrick Daughters, is bizarre and haunting. Whose vision was it?

ED: We don't ever dictate our videos, which is why they're each so different. They're always almost the opposite of what I would've imagined [for] them, which is actually what's really fun. It's sort of like getting a remix back. It's like, "What part of the song, what essence of the song, is that artist gonna pick up on and use?" Take the "Knife" video, which was really out there as well-- it was like, we liked what those artists [Encyclopedia Pictura] had done, and we said "You know what? Just do what you're gonna do and we'll release it."

And that's the thing with the Patrick Daughters video. It was tapping into a different side of the song and I think we were all really surprised at how it looked. We were also really excited by it. It's always fun. I think it's as much of a surprise to us as it is to everyone else when they see it. It's just like, "Whoa, heads are exploding? What the hell is going on?"

Pitchfork: It looks like it was filmed in a church?

ED: We were in a defunct boys' penitentiary chapel outside of L.A. I don't remember the town. And yeah, it was this very small little chapel. It's really funny actually, hearing from people who are like "Why are your eyes so big?" And I'm like, "Isn't it clear that it's digital? That's not really how we look." All of our faces are completely manipulated and they did facial scans and this weird, sort of futuristic thing and so our actual, the shape of our heads, our mouths and our eyes are just slightly off to make us look really weird and then we start exploding.

Pitchfork: Wait, people think that's really your face? That's kind of great.

ED: I know! People are like, "Damn, you look really weird and ugly," and I'm like, "That's a digital weird thing!"

Pitchfork: The thing I'm most struck by on the new record is the harmonies. There's something really serene, really rich, really communal about the way you all sing together-- it's gospel music, in a way. Do you consider any church music an influence?

ED: I don't think necessarily gospel music, but I think there is a fascination with choral music in general. My mother was a music teacher and my grandfather was a professor of music, and there was a lot of singing in the family. It wasn't like trained singing or anything like that, but it was singing. [My family] listened to a lot of choral music. Everyone in the band has different musical backgrounds and that plays a part in it, too.

Pitchfork: Do you think of Grizzly Bear as a folk band? And do you think definitions of folk music, which were never clear to begin with, are expanding?

ED: I don't know-- I mean, I think of it more as pop music, but I guess everyone has their own definition of what folk is or pop or whatever. I find it incredibly hard to describe music these days. Someone was asking me about what I was listening to and I was saying "Oh, Dirty Projectors, I love the new album," and they were like, "Well what kind of music is it?" and I just stopped dead in my tracks and literally didn't know how to describe it.

At first I was embarrassed because I didn't know how to describe it, but then I was like, this is what's so amazing about a lot of music now. There are so many different things and there's so much going on and [Bitte Orca] is so distinctly Dirty Projectors that I didn't even know how to begin to describe what genre it is, you know? What would one categorize it as? So I find it hard lately to label things as indie or pop or folk or give it some sort of categorization.

Pitchfork: You've named your last two records after places. New York is an incredible city to be an artist in, for all the clichéd reasons, but it can also be deadly-- it's overstimulating, it's unfocused, it's spastic. Do you feel like you need to get out of New York and put yourself in a new context when you're recording?

ED: Definitely. I mean, everybody has a different relationship with being creative there, but on a personal level, I find it extremely distracting. It's really exciting and there's a lot of amazing music happening, which I find really invigorating and exciting to be around. But that said, we all have, or most of us have, significant others, and we've been living in New York for 10 years or so and it's always someone's birthday or something's going on. And sometimes the four of us just need to step away from all that and just focus on being a band together, which I think is why we leave for a lot of these recording sessions or creative weekend jaunts.

That said, naming the albums after where we were, I guess it's just because the spaces that we've used have ended up being really influential in the sense that, like I mentioned, these sounds from the spaces that make their way into the album. For us, the memory of recording the album is very closely tied with what we think and remember of those spaces-- like, remembering Daniel [Rossen] singing into the strings of an old, out-of-tune piano and listening to it reverberate and just sort of playing around with the materials that were around us in each space. And so there's always this weird inclination to just name it after one of the locations or spaces that we used. I don't think we'll do it again because it would become probably a little cliché or stupid but this time it just sort of felt appropriate and it's not exactly the place we were. We didn't actually go to that island, but it sort of represented the area that we were in.

Pitchfork: It's a great-sounding word, too.

ED: It's kind of fun. I get a kick out of hearing people pronounce it. I have a way that I've learned was correct, but I don't know if it's [actually] correct. So really anyone's pronunciation can work.

Pitchfork: Well, how do you say it?

ED: I say it veck-uh-tim-est. Some people say ve-cot-a-must.

Pitchfork: How did you come to collaborate with [composer and Björk collaborator] Nico Muhly?

ED: I met Nico a few years ago and we hit it off and became good buddies. We had always wanted to work together in some capacity, and when the Brooklyn Philharmonic opportunity came along [in February], it just seemed natural for Nico to be involved with making the arrangements for the songs for the orchestra. Around the time that he was doing that, we were finishing up the album and we were playing around with the idea of adding some choral and string bits and we basically just let Nico go wild-- and he did, I mean, he went crazy. He did tons and tons of stuff and we probably only ended up using 10% of it.

Pitchfork: With all of your tinkering, how do you know when you're done with a song?

ED: I think some people get the weird impression that our music is over-arranged or over-meticulous or over-labored, and the interesting thing about this album is that it was really, really natural. The whole process was really natural and organic and nobody was rushed, there was no one stressing out over details all the time, it was just sort of like, "Oh, that works." Everyone felt really at ease with the process. We knew it was done when we asked each other, "Can you stand behind this song 100%?" And if everyone was like, "Yes, I can," then it made the cut. And that was what it was. When everyone was excited about the material and felt really proud of it, then it was like, OK, we're cool. But the whole process, it was a really fun, natural process. It was totally different from making Yellow House.

Pitchfork: After Yellow House, did you say "We want to do the next record differently," or did it evolve organically?

ED: Well, we knew it had to be done differently because Yellow House came from pre-existing songs that either Daniel or I had written, as well as a couple that we wrote together. But we were really starting with a blank slate with Veckatimest, so there was sort of this question mark of, "Do we even know how to write together and collaborate together? How will this work?" And we were pleasantly surprised when everyone presented their ideas much earlier on in the stages of development, which allowed for a lot of other people in the band to get involved in the songs. In the past, someone presented a song and [other members would be] like, "This song is done. He wrote the parts. Let's play them."

Pitchfork: Are all of these songs collaboratively written?

ED: If you hear a melody one of us is singing, it's generally the person singing that wrote the melody. But a lot of the chord structure and arrangements-- sometimes the whole song-- can be changed by a drumbeat or a bass line. They can change the feeling of the song-- they're as important as the words and melody.

Pitchfork: The lyrics on Veckatimest are almost incidental, and I don't mean that as a slight. They're more textural than literal.

ED: Dan and I have discussed this as lyrics have come up in the past-- I think we both have a sort of similar [process] with [regards to] writing lyrics: They come from a personal place and can often be factually true, but there's an element of changing things, too. I think we both really appreciate keeping them a bit vague and open for interpretation 'cause we're both-- like, one of my favorite things is when I'm listening to a song and I find my own meaning in it that I can relate to and I can create my own relationship and bond with the song.

Pitchfork: I'm curious how the Department of Eagles record affected the new album-- not in terms of band politics or anything like that, but as an influence, a presence, whatever.

ED: Well, this is a hard one to speak about because I wasn't involved with the record and I don't want to say something that is wrong, so I can't really talk about their process. But I know that Dan and Fred had those songs for a while and I had heard some of them in the past and it was kind of like they had them bubbling for a while and it was time to let those songs happen. I really love that album. Daniel has a very distinctive songwriting style and as he grows, obviously Grizzly Bear grows because he's, as is everyone in the band, just creatively, extremely important. And it's so obvious he's trying new things, and if he were to make another album, I'm sure that would affect our next album, too.

I don't know the specifics exactly, and this is a question definitely more suited for Daniel, but it was a pleasure to see that album come out and do so well. It was really cool to see those songs finally see the light of day. I think it was really neat too, because Daniel kind came to this blank slate position where he was like, "OK, those songs are done," and then approached the new Grizzly Bear material from "OK, now where?" Which was fun and a little bit nerve wracking, but also an exciting place to be-- we were navigating new terrain together.

Pitchfork: The record leaked online before its release. Was that a disappointment?

ED: Well, it happened, literally, maybe five days after we mastered it. That was a really huge shock because it came from a really sort of shady-- no one ever confessed to it, but something sketchy happened. It was a really huge bummer that it happened so soon. We knew it was gonna leak and we were prepared for that, but really, the biggest bummer for us was that we spent a lot of time and put a lot of effort into making sure that it's a really rich recording-- recording it to tape and doing all these nice sonic details-- and then it leaked and I remember listening to it and it sounded like an underwater YouTube stream or something. It was really, really bad. And so it's just a bummer to think of everyone's first impressions of this album being this horribly compressed, terrible-quality version of the album.

But that said, the excitement behind it and everyone's reaction was really encouraging and exciting for us to see. I think people find their own way of showing support, whether it be through an album sale or coming to a concert or even just telling some friends about it. Obviously, the leak didn't hurt us because we debuted in the Top 10. You've gotta be sort of Zen about it. I would never be angry at someone for downloading the album. Sometimes people just wanna listen to it first to see if they like it and that's totally fair. I'm as guilty of that as anyone else. The only thing I find a little strange about the download culture now is that people have so much music at their fingertips that it's really easy to dismiss an album quickly. I'm speaking from my own experience, where I've caught myself downloading a bunch of albums and then I sort of listen to one and I'm like, "Eh." And I wasn't really giving it my all or listening to it in the right order. I caught myself one day where I was like, "What am I doing? This is so not how this artist intended it to be."

Pitchfork: It's definitely not the way I listened to music when I was a teenager-- I memorized every album I bought, whether I liked it or not.

ED: Remember that feeling of buying an album? And you didn't have a lot of money so you bought one album and you had that album for like, two months or something until you bought another album? This really cool thing that would happen where you would be forced to only have that album because you couldn't just download a million more, and you may not have liked every song on it, but then as you started listening to it more and more you'd be like, "Oh wait, I do like track nine." You lived with an album, and that doesn't happen as much anymore. I'm sure some people do have that experience still, but it's a little bit harder to get to that place because you can easily just switch gears and go off to something else if it's not tickling your fancy at that moment.

I haven't had that kind of experience with an album for awhile, either. And I sort of miss it-- that feeling of not necessarily settling for an album but just of having an album and having your initial favorites, then listening to it and listening to it and discovering new things and being like, "Whoa, I really like this part now." Just the feeling of "This is what I have for the next six weeks or so until I can buy another album."

Pitchfork: There was time to develop that relationship. Now I feel like it's so hard to develop a relationship with anything because music moves so fast.

ED: There are so many more releases that people have access to. I don't know, maybe there were this many releases when I was growing up and I just didn't know where to look for them. That's probably very much the case. But it just feels like there are a billion [new records] every year. A lot of people are curious and excited about stuff, and one of the great things about the Internet is that people are excited about music and wanna hear a random album from a band somewhere in Romania or something, and to listen to all sorts of stuff from around the world. They have access to new stuff that they would have never had access to [before]. But sometimes I feel like it's a total overload. Where you're like, "I can't even focus anymore." You know?

Pitchfork: Sure. Everything feels disposable.

ED: It is definitely much easier to feel that an album is disposable-- to dismiss an album or delete the tracks you don't like or to just throw it into shuffle or whatever. But that being said, it's a case-by-case situation and that's the way it is and there's nothing we can do about it. People digest and process music differently, and I'm sure that was the case even when I was a kid. I'm not critiquing the general public, I'm speaking from my own experience of being guilty of deleting a track that I didn't like. Then I'm like, "Wait a second, that's not fair. Why am I doing that?"

Pitchfork: We all do it. I do it all the time. Do you read reviews?

ED: When we were smaller we read much more than we do now. We get updates from the label or from our manager but I think reading too much of that stuff can be a little bit unhealthy. You just sort of have to go with it and be like, "If people like it, they like it and if they don't, they don't." I remember thinking, like I was talking about the situation with everyone being able to stand 100% behind every song, I remember being like, "Well, I can stand behind this album. If someone hates it, I can stand behind it and be like, 'Well, I'm proud of it and I love it and sorry that you don't like it.'"