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In the early '90s, Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum and a few childhood friends had a vision to establish the Elephant 6 Recording Company, which it's founders saw as a utopia through which their individual projects could grow and take shape by the eyes and hands of an encouraging collective. Their ambition, maybe especially Jeff's ambition, was to create music that could change the world. He believed that music has the power to transform your life and heal your suffering. No small thing - - yet if you ask most anybody who has heard their second and final album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, they will tell you, he was right.
After the album was released in 1998, it seemed as though the Elephant 6 dream was a reality - - Aeroplane blew up and was striking chords with critics and fans alike. Sadly though, it wasn't long after Neutral Milk Hotel's tour behind Aeroplane, when Jeff basically lost it. Even with the newfound success, Jeff couldn't help but notice he and his friends weren't going to be living happily ever after. One very close friend in particular, who since birth had the dehumanizing experience of enduring abuse and molestation by her father, was going through heavy emotional distress.
Jeff believed to his very core that music - - his music - - could reach people and help them overcome the difficulties of everyday life. When he saw that his own friends weren't being healed by the power of music, well . . .
Call it a nervous breakdown or a loss of focus and direction, or maybe an inability to handle the pressures of the spotlight. Mangum suddenly wasn't so sure of anything anymore, let alone himself. To this day, Jeff has by and large disappeared from the music scene, turning instead to making field recordings of crashing waves, parades, children playing, and cathedral bells for audio collages.
So what kind of record did this man leave behind?
Mangum found inspiration for his celebrated epic after he was moved by the unlikely beauty that sprang from the horrific tragedy of Anne Frank's diary. Heavy stuff, indeed. Its not an album you can just throw on in the background - - it very much requires your full attention. It's adventurous and bold, much in the same vein of classics like OK Computer by Radiohead or Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Pet Sounds and Smile by Brian Wilson, and is full of touching urgency captured by Mangum's heartfelt wail. Lyrically, the songs have a haunting way of evoking a film strip of imagery that runs through your mind like a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film. It can be at times both disturbing like City of Lost Children and sweet like Amélie. The instrumentation alone is so otherworldly - - musical saws, accordions, a strange organ called a wandering genie and some of the most heart-aching horn arrangements - - it's unlike anything you've ever heard. How unfortunate for music that Jeff Mangum just quietly went away after reaching such a great height. Yet in the tragedy of the short life and premature death of Neutral Milk Hotel, we still have In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. People continue to discover and fall in love with Mangum's songs about finding the redeeming beauty in the overwhelming tragedies of life. I wonder if this irony isn't lost on Jeff Mangum. 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
Count every beautiful thing we can see - lyrics from In The Aeroplane Over The Sea |
