In the Aeroplane Over the Sea— Neutral Milk Hotel
#365Songs: April 10th
Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all
I think about this lyric a lot, perhaps my most referenced and favorite line in any song I’ve ever heard. What it means to be alive, what combination of random encounters and biological interactions it requires to be a person in this world.
Pitchfork has gotten a lot wrong over the years, A LOT, but I fully agree with their perfect 10 rating for Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. There is no wrong note, no throwaway song, a perfect collection of thematic references to centuries of history, to Anne Frank, to instruments that span genres, styles, and moods. To me, it’s the greatest Indie album of all time, and there is quite simply nothing else like it.
Slate Magazine referred to Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum as, “The Salinger of Indie Rock.” Reclusive, bizarre, and brilliant, Mangum disappeared for a decade after a purported nervous breakdown. After touring THIS album. We often celebrate the most prolific amongst us, but some of our finest artists have just one or two moments to share with the world, but sometimes those moments leave the largest mark. Neutral Milk Hotel had one other album, On Avery Island. It’s fine, with a few great moments, but something happened in the brief two years between releases. Mangum read Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl for the first time, obsessed with grief, and dreamt up one of the most bonkers displays of literary lyrical prowess one can ever imagine.
Here are a few of my favorite lines:
When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers
And this is the room, one afternoon, I knew I could love you
And from above you how I sank into your soul
Into that secret place where no one dares to go
And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy’s shoulder
And dad would throw the garbage all across the floor
As we would lay and learn what each other’s bodies were for.
Catching signals that sound in the dark
we will take off our clothes
And they’ll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine
And when all is breaking, everything that you could keep beside
Now your eyes ain’t movin’
Now they just lay there in their climb
Now she’s a little boy in Spain
Playing pianos filled with flames
On empty rings around the sun.
Semen stains the mountaintops
I know they buried her body with others her
Sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine
And she was born in a bottle rocket, 1929
With wings that ringed around a socket
Right between her spine
All drenched in milk and holy water
Pouring from the sky
I know that she will live forever
She won’t ever die
I go through waves with this album, as I do with most music, but I love to let time pass so that I can revisit anew. Each listen after the passing of time brings a fresh discovery, a journey back into Mangum’s messy mind. That first note hits, and I’m captivated again, along for one of the greatest 40-minute rides in all of music.
What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all ‘round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
As the story goes, Mangum dreamt of traveling in a time machine through history, landing just in time to save Anne Frank and carry her with him back into the future. I’ve been captivated so many times in life by various pieces of art — novels, films, songs — that have devoured my waking and sleeping hours, so on one level I get that as a spiritual experience. But nothing Mangum did before, or after, this album came even close to this opus, as if he gave every ounce of his artistry to this one perfect expression. An inspiration so deep, a reaction so intense, an expression so emotionally gutting he had nothing left to give.
That’s not to say Mangum’s impact hasn’t been broad. He was a founding member of the The Elephant 6 Recording Company, one of the most impressive collectives ever assembled — Apples in Stereo, NMH, of Montreal, Beulah, Circulatory System, Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power. Even that seemed to fizzle, though, as Mangum melted down and disappeared.
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me
And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Mangum resurfaced in 2012 for a rare solo tour during which he played In the Aeroplane Over The Sea in full. A dream concert, and given his history, likely the final opportunity. I woke up on April 26th with tickets to Denver’s Ogden Theater, and as the morning turned to afternoon my temperature rose to… 104 degrees. My first bout of Strep Throat since early childhood couched me, incapacitated me. Though I defer the time machine for Mangum’s far more vital journey, I do wish I could take it for a quick spin back to that night.
Love to be
In the arms of all I’m keeping here with me
What a curious life we have found here tonight
There is music that sounds from the street
There are lights in the clouds
Anna’s ghost all around
Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me
Soft and sweet
How the notes all bend and reach above the trees
Mangum told Pitchfork in 2002, “I went through a period, after Aeroplane, when a lot of the basic assumptions I held about reality started crumbling,” he said. One of those assumptions was that music would somehow erase his problems. “I guess I had this idea that if we all created our dream we could live happily ever after,” he continued. “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 think about this album a lot these days, as Trump rises again, as Israel genocides Gazans, as far too many of us turn our attention away from what now feels inevitable. To think about this album is to think about Anne Frank, which is to contemplate the sheer magnitude of the Holocaust, which is to think about those quiet neighbors who looked the other way, who were complicit in their silence, who years later likely wished they, too, had a time machine so they can go back and do it the other way.
Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all
Imagine it’s 1939, and this is your Germany. Who would you be, what would you do? It’s not too late, not yet. History is a time machine, serving us images and lessons from failures past, and we are here now with all the knowledge we need to save the next Anne Frank.
Now how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet
But now we keep where we don’t know
All secrets sleep in winter clothes
With one you loved so long ago
Now he don’t even know his name
What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all ‘round the sun
And when we meet on a cloud
I’ll be laughing out loud
I’ll be laughing with everyone I see
Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all
