Grizzly Bear

Ahead of next week's release of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest, an album which has become the most eagerly-awaited from a Brooklyn-based experimental pop band in at least, oh, four months, vocalist/guitarist Daniel Rossen speaks to Ragged Words.

Mentioning Animal Collective here may be obvious, but it seems relevant, and not just because the two bands’ respective albums are among this year’s big ones. Over recent years, both bands have come to be seen by many as standard-bearers for thoughtful, interesting and unpredictable pop, and have picked up fans on the back of word-of-mouth/critical/blog attention rather than record company hype. Like AC, Grizzly Bear’s penchant for experimentation and lack of obvious commercial ambition have earned them a lot of love from indie fans: Yellow House was unashamedly complex and ambitious, with even the catchiest tunes like 'Knife' and 'On a Neck, On a Spit' taking detours a hit-seeking band wouldn’t countenance. Their obvious musical ability didn’t hurt either: with three of the band having met in music camp, and a producer in their midst (bassist & multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor), the band were able to match their ambition and ideas with intricate, intelligent production.

Perhaps most of all, music fans love a good album, and even in this age of the ipod shuffle and personal playlist, many still consider the album to be the ultimate yardstick of a band’s ability. In this respect, Yellow House was a triumph: a foggy, dense forest of a work, an album to wander around and get lost in. The album (Grizzly’s real debut as a band, as 2005's Horn of Plenty essentially consisted of singer Ed Droste’s bedroom demos) was a slow-burner, picking up admirers as it went along, and since its release three years ago their profile has risen steadily: 2007's odds n’ ends collection Friend EP easily stood up with most of the year’s albums proper, while vocalist/guitarist Daniel Rossen’s side project Department of Eagles’ lush, classical second album In Ear Park won universal acclaim on its release last autumn. There’s also the small matter of the band supporting Radiohead on their US tour recently…

All of this goes to explain, then, why there is something of a “buzz”, in the parlance of our times, about Grizzly Bear at the moment. Daniel Rossen, on the phone from the London hotel where the band are staying while waiting to appear on Jools Holland’s show, is friendly and forthcoming, answering every question without hesitation. In fact, he sounds like a man who’s been talking a lot about his band's music recently, and when I put this to him he admits “yeah, it’s just kind of reeling off the same answers at this stage…” Nevertheless, he answers each question thoughtfully and liberally. I begin by asking him about how the band’s writing and recording methods have changed between this and their previous full studio album. For Yellow House, the band retreated to vocalist Ed Droste's mother's house to write and record, and the live performances followed the album: they wrote, orchestrated and arranged the songs, and only then figured out how to play them live.

With the new album, it seems like the songs were more fully realised by the time the band got to the studio: “Yeah, to a certain degree. We’ve never recorded in a proper studio really, I mean Chris has got like a mobile setup that we move around, so we can just kind of record very casually somewhere comfortably and you know, kind of lay down tracks while someone’s cooking, you know…But yeah it’s kind of true, for Yellow House we didn’t really play the songs together, we kind of just laid them down. Which makes for something pretty distinctive cos you get this kind of strange almost like collage-ey sounding thing, but this time around we actually were able to play pretty loud together, especially when we were recording in upstate New York: we had this huge beautiful wooden room that we could use at any hour of the day so we played a lot, kind of just cos it was fun, and we don’t get to do that in New York. So that resulted in some of the more “band” stuff than on the other record. There are several songs that we did play live before recording, like 'Two Weeks' and 'While You Wait For The Others', and 'Cheerleader', so there is a little more of a live energy in combination with all the layering and kind of, you know, the rest of the way that we record. There’s no one set process for the way we record songs - we don’t like, have a drum day, a guitar day and a vocal day, we kind of just do things in whatever order we feel like, so this record is kind of a nice combination of a band feel and also all the layering stuff.”

The album also seems to have been more of a collaborative effort. While it’s still often easy to tell which song is Droste’s, which Rossen’s – the former’s are often more direct and pop-oriented, the latter’s tend to feature unexpected, jazzy chord changes and opaque lyrics – there are several which feature both singers, and which seem to have been co-written: “Well there are a number like that, songs like “Dory”, “All We Ask”, and I mean even…with Ed and I, there’s also some secret collaborating going on that nobody really knows about, like sometimes we’ll give each other lyrics to work on, that kind of thing! But definitely on this record there is a lot more collaboration. The other thing is that all of these songs came to the table at a much earlier stage: I mean, I didn’t actually have any demos going into this record, everything was put down in the first few takes of the song, so a lot of the arranging was worked on together by the band. So it was much more collaborative: Chris, Bear and Ed took a lot of trips on their own too, and there are songs that the other band members worked on without me, and figured out on their own. I dunno, it just happened in all different kinds of ways, which was cool, so it worked out that I guess it covers a lot more ground. "

Veckatimest feels more ambitious, more expansive, and seems to allow in more influences than the almost claustrophobically close Yellow House. The band went on tour with Radiohead before Christmas to play their most high-profile shows yet: I mention the possible influence of the Oxford band to Daniel - “fair enough” – and ask what other musical influences were at play during the recording process. “Chris Taylor and Bear talked about wanting to have a lot more kind of steady rhythm, like steady beats sort of thing, and Bear was always thinking we’d have a more sort of hip-hop influence. I guess we were trying to get more hip-hop sounds, so our songs weren’t so much built on our tendency to sit on the guitar and pluck out a load of random jazz chords…so I think it’s sort of counteracting that in a way. Certainly simpler song structures, and also drum feel and sounds too, and also a kick drum now, which I’m being reminded! Bear used to only play with this kind of stripped-down kind of jazz set, and now he has a full-on kick drum. 

The album’s expansive nature is also due to the increased number of creators – Victoria Legrand from Beach House contributes guest vocals, while the band invited conductor/composer Nico Muhly to contribute choral arrangements to the record. Says Daniel: “I think the Victoria thing…we just love Beach House and we love her voice and stuff, so that particular melody on “Cheerleader” seemed very suitable for her, and we just sort of thought it would be fun to have her voice, we just thought it would be kind of a festive thing. Nico Muhly is like an older friend of Ed’s for a couple of years, and we always kind of liked the idea of trying to do something with a choir, so Nico hooked us up with the Brooklyn Youth Choir. Nico’s kind of, he had so many ideas at once all the time and he’ll throw at you fifteen different random things and you pick through it and say “we’ll use this one”, and he’ll just keep throwing at you all these new ideas, so that was kind of fun. When it worked it was amazing, I mean he did this beautiful choral end to “Foreground”, the very last song, which is kind of an eerie send-off, which is one of my favourite parts of the record.”

With so many ideas floating around, and a band comprised of four creative people, I ask how they manage to ever get their songs finished? “With Yellow House we would kind of pile everything on every track, every single small idea we had, we would just put it on, so you’d get these gigantic heavily-layered things. This time we tried to kind of stop piling quite as much, and tried to like, just let the songs be small, let the songs have less parts as much as possible, because it’s kind of our instinct I think to layer and make everything huge. So yeah, I mean, it’s a challenge. Sometime it just makes sense…I mean, “Foreground”, for instance, it just was so nice that it was just, “well, it’s working with just a piano and a vocal, we don’t really need to add that much”, we wanted to resist the urge to make it a gigantic orchestral thing, like it’s already working, what’s the reason to add more?”

I mention the band's outside interests: their striking record covers, their nice band photos, their well-maintained blog. Ed studied art, while Daniel studied psychology, linguistics and art history; the band seem to have almost drifted together by accident while busy with other things. Do these things feed into the music they make? “That’s really hard to say, it’s hard to talk about that sort of thing, cos it’s very easy I think to sound like a pretentious bastard…I think we all have all kinds of interests, you know, my girlfriend’s an artist and she makes all kind of different stuff, and I don’t know how to in any way like, it’s hard to explain how anything like that could possibly affect what you’re doing when you’re writing a song - especially for us, where it’s such an intuitive thing. I’ve certainly never really sat down thinking “I want to make this kind of song now”...I guess it’s a little too intuitive to really talk about that stuff. I kind of think of it as more of a discovery process, where you don’t know what it is you’re trying to make, but the more you make it you kind of realise what it is you’re trying to say or what you’re trying to hear, or something. ”

A bit like the band as a whole, I suggest; “Yeah, I mean I certainly never...I mean I always wanted to make music, but I didn’t ever think I would be in a band, so…it’s a weird thing.”