Department Of Eagles

For those lucky enough to be Stateside, the next ten days represent the last chance to catch Department Of Eagles live for quite sometime with Daniel Rossen returning to day-job duties with Grizzly Bear. He and co-songwriter Fred Nicolaus spoke to Ragged Words before Christmas about the utterly gorgeous In Ear Park, on of our albums of 2008.

There’ such a rich and instantly classical feel to the record, I wondered if recording in a church had an impact on that?

Fred - “It was interesting and weird and different. Chris Taylor who produced the record and has produced Grizzly Bear is very much like Daniel and someone who believes when we’re in a space to try and use that space. Like if we were recording here, we’d include the bad cheesy music in the background. In the church, Chris would record us walking up the stairs and record an organ turning on and off. There was a weird cabinet where they would keep stuff and Dan recorded the vocals in there at one stage.”

It’s quite different from your first album The Cold Nose...

Fred - “Yeah, just a bit...”
...Was that circumstance or just being older and wiser?

Daniel - “Cold Nose is what seven, eight years old. I think for the most part it’s being a lot older - the difference between being 17 and 18 and being 24 or 25 is a big one. And I know for me, that had been the first time I’d ever been in a studio, the first time I’d ever sang in front of anyone else so it was pretty terrifying. I think the Cold Nose was a bit of a pre-album experience.”

Fred - “The thing is, most bands have a similar thing but they’re constantly releasing material so you see their growth in a natural way. With us you saw us when we were 18, now we’re 25. It seems like such a huge leap. Every year we were moving in that direction, we just weren’t releasing music so it feels very sudden."

The album was four years in the making - how constant was the back-and-forth. Was it a bit here, bit there or more in quick spurts?

Fred - It was kind of different for both of us. Dan was super busy with Grizzly Bear but I had a day job so I was constantly working on ideas the whole time and we would work together in fits and starts. Dan might have a couple of weeks off and we’d get together and work on these songs, then we’d go away and I’d still be working on demos. I suppose then I was working continuously and Dan in fits and starts.

Musically in that period, were you doing anything apart from demoing Fred, gigging etc?

Fred - No, I was just working on writing songs and that’s basically all I did creatively.

Personally, was it great to actually get the chance then to...

Fred - “...To actually record! We were working on it for a long time but it was never clear at all whether we’d actually do it. It was very much circumstantial - Dan had a break from Grizzly Bear, Chris was available, we had these songs and that was the only reason the album actually happened. It wasn’t some long awaited destiny. For an entire three or four years it was not entirely clear whether it was going to happen so the fact that it finally did happen, everything else has just been icing on the cake for me.”

Was it frustrating at any point? Obviously you were happy for Dan to be doing so well with Grizzly Bear but were you envious at all?

Fred - “In a weird way, it actually made me better because Grizzly Bear is obviously a great band - it’s weird to say that with Dan here - but they’re a really, really great band so I think them being successful and getting better made me think well if what Dan and I are going to do is in anyway going to stand up to this, it better be really good. Also I didn’t write the whole album, Dan wrote half or more than half but just from a personal stand point it made me work a lot harder.

Conversely Dan, have you had a second to think having been so busy with Grizzly Bear in the last two or three years?

Daniel - “There were seven or eight months off (from Grizzly Bear) that we used to make this record so the last year’s been pretty intense. After putting so much focus on this, I pretty much had to jump right from the mastering of this record straight into recording with Grizzly Bear. I’ve had pretty much no time in the last three years but hopefully it’s coming soon. I’m getting into the form where I’d like three or four months away from music and get a regular job to clear my head.”

Fred - “Take that job back at the video store.”

Daniel - “The video store’s closed. I don’t want that kind of job. I kind of have this idea that it’d be so wonderful to leave the city to work on a farm but I think the best thing to do would be to get a real farm job, like shovelling chicken shit all day so I’d be begging to come back to the city to work on music again. I think that‘s what I need to do.”

When you’re write separately to start with, Dan, from you’re point of view it must be very different to writing with Grizzly Bear. Was that a refreshing change?

Daniel - “Mmm, yeah. I think I kind of needed it. It was nice that there were no particular roles that anyone had to fill with this record so we could try things out. That’s the nice thing about this project is that it’s not really a band.”

How do the song breakdown? do some belong to one and some to the other?

Fred - “We contributed a little bit to every song, I suppose there was some I didn’t do much on. I don’t know. ‘Herringbone’ is my song. “No One Does It Like You’ was both of us but written around a demo I did. ‘Around The Bay’ is pretty much all Dan. It’s kind of hard to have an exact breakdown, how do you think of it Dan? It’s kind of a hard question to answer.”

Daniel - “It’s got a bit of a venn diagram going on. Sometimes it’s clear cut - and sometimes it’s very collaborative and jumbled up. Usually if there’s any song of mine that I bring to DOE, it’s usually something that Fred really loves and will really want to work on that mightn’t have clicked with the guy’s in Grizzly Bear. ‘Floating On The Lehigh’ is one of those songs that was around for a while but Fred and I really understood it.”

Fred - “It’s hard, no matter what it’s somewhat collaborative. The difference, and I’m speaking for you here Dan, but with Grizzly Bear everyone’s got a specific role to fill whereas us, it’s like ‘you wanna play this on this?’, yeah whatever. It’s pragmatic… prag-rock… That’s our genre!

Lyrically, it’s quite nostalgic, was it a coincidence you both wrote that way or was it something you’d talked about before?

Daniel - “I don’t know. I think there was just a set of songs that had that quality along with what was going on in our lives and I think it got the ball rolling in that direction. You know, we never sat down and said ‘we gotta make this record nostalgic’, it just really became this cohesive thing which was cool.”

Fred - “It’s weird because when we first started off I didn’t think it would go that way at all. I thought it would sound much poppier, different and strange but the songs that worked out had that tone. We had other songs that were really fast and rocking which I still like but didn’t work for this album.”

You’ve already said it’s a project and not a band but is it starting to feel that way when you’re appearing on Conan O’Brien and getting to tour?

Daniel - “Not really. It’s a fun challenge to try and make it a band but it also really brought a degree of clear focus as to how much of a band it really isn’t. At times it’s been really fun and at times, it feels like this really forced challenge. The ‘make this marketable the way bands are supposed to be marketable’, you know? ‘Give us a live act.’ It just doesn’t really feel natural. It’s always been such a home recording type thing but then again it could very well go that way ‘cause that’s what happened with Grizzly Bear – Ed (Droste) just made songs at home and didn’t even think about a band.”

Fred - “I totally feel the same way - it’s not like we’re four guys who came up from the factories… Saying whether it’s a band or a project is just a linguistic thing - we just don’t have these regular schedules like other bands do. It is kind of funny that we fly across the ocean and do and interview and say we’re not really a band!”

What then is the Department Of Eagles plan beyond this point? Is there one?

Daniel - “There really never has been. We’ll probably still keep writing songs. I know Fred has been and I like them. I still have some that aren’t going to Grizzly Bear so it’s quite possible that down the line we’ll do another record.”

Fred - “So far it’s worked not to have a plan so why mess with a good thing.”

Daniel - “Yeah I think it’ll be in the same spirit as the last album, if we’ve got something we want to do, we’ll do it. There’s no pressure, no contractual obligation.”

Fred - “It’s the prag rock way.”

And Fred, with Dan back at Grizzly Bear, what will you be up to next year?

Fred - “I’ll be crying under my bed for about a year… No, I’ll continue writing on songs, I might get a better job, I might go work on a farm. I don’t know.”

Daniel - “I think we should do the chicken shit project together. Let’s record a record in one of those tiny chicken coups.”

Fred - “Yeah, you know, the best laid plans often fail so we just have to go with whatever happens.”