By Doug Wallen
Photos by Ray Lego
Ed Droste wrote some out-there songs a few years back. The terms were pretty basic: one dude, alone his bedroom, taking down ideas on a tape recorder—this type of thing happens in Brooklyn all the time. And being in a huge band? Last thing on his mind. But let’s face it: When the blogs start buzzing, you just can’t stop them. With the addition of instrumentalists Chris Taylor and Chris Bear, and another local songwriter named Daniel Rossen, it happened for Grizzly Bear. And if being handpicked by Radiohead to open for their U.S. tour is any measure, it happened pretty big.
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Shuffling onto the vast stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House and into the view of over 2,000-seated spectators, Ed Droste finds a microphone and quietly announces, “Hello, I’m Paul Simon.” There’s an awkward laugh from the crowd as Droste and his band mates in Grizzly Bear take up their instruments and begin a carefully rehearsed two-song set.
Droste may not be Paul Simon, but tonight Grizzly Bear are playing two of his songs at the folk legend’s request. In fact, they’re doing it five nights straight as part of Simon’s month-long residency at BAM. This week is themed “American Tunes” to differentiate it from his African-influenced work, but Grizzly Bear still get to perform “Graceland,” the title track of Simon’s influential Afro-gospel opus. Other guests tonight include adult contemporary superstars Josh Groban and Gillian Welch.
Daniel Rossen, the band’s other guitarist/songwriter, sings lead on “Graceland,” which is unusually terrestrial by Grizzly Bear standards but must seem utterly cryptic to a crowd of Paul Simon fans. The rendition is spooky and spectral, Chris Bear’s light drumming and Chris Taylor’s towing bass drifting along as Droste dips into a sea of effects pedals.
There’s big applause when they finish and then they play “Mother And Child Reunion,” for which Droste sings in a room-filling moan that nears falsetto. The song is made sparse and echo-y, with buzzing synths and a transcendent hum. Taylor briefly employs flute and turns to the pedals to conjure a crackling sample at the end. Droste whispers “thank you” and the boys exit, looking out of place in their humble collared shirts and sneakers.
As Simon sound-checked the song “Homeward Bound” hours earlier, Edward Droste perched on a stool off to the side of the stage to discuss this unlikely experience. We soon struck off in search of a more suitable place for an interview, but not before I got in a few questions.
Are your parents excited about this?
They grew up when this was really big. My mom probably doesn’t own any CDs of his [but] I think my dad has Graceland. I remember Graceland from other people’s parents’ houses.”
How much of a fan are you?
There was a period where I lost touch with him but I came back. It has its place.
Did you choose the songs you played?
Dan had done a version of “Graceland,” a home recording. Since then we’re allowed to play that song even though it’s not part of this week technically.
Was it weird having Paul Simon come to your rehearsal space?
It was surreal. There’s some people I would be nervous around but for some reason I wasn’t. He definitely has ideas he likes to explain, diplomatically put.
Grizzly Bear don’t always put things diplomatically. Discussing their label, Warp, in separate interviews, Droste and Taylor said things they asked me not to print. Taylor especially is prone to frank tangents, whether recalling a tour with the Books (“They’re just really stuck-up. And they basically press play on a DVD player and play guitar to it. It’s like karaoke.”) or explaining why the band’s production isn’t left to just any engineer (“They spend all this time making [an] elaborate-looking cake and then it tastes like shit.”).
Aside from the topic of Warp, though, Taylor doesn’t take anything back. He’s visibly passionate about playing in Grizzly Bear, producing Grizzly Bear and other bands, and bestowing more rock elements into the band’s notoriously sleepy sound.
Not that Grizzly Bear need any work. 2006’s Yellow House, their Warp debut and first album as a proper band, leapfrogged 2004’s Horn of Plenty and landed on prominent year-end lists, baffling listeners with its slow-mo atmosphere and ghostly songwriting. The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones, usually so confident dissecting music, could only say this: “The band’s sound suggests a group of eunuchs singing next to a music box on a sunken galleon.” He also called them “the indie band that excites me most right now.”
If Grizzly Bear’s music is by nature thrillingly mysterious, the key to unlocking Yellow House is understanding how collaborative an effort it was. Unlike Horn of Plenty, which Droste recorded mostly alone with Bear helping out on drums, Yellow House is the result of a month of democratic songwriting in Droste’s about-to-be-sold childhood home (thus the title). Rossen wrote and sang lead as much as Droste, Bear’s percussion is everywhere all at once, and Taylor contributed woodwinds and bass while overseeing production. And all four sang.
Droste sums it up best: “No one would have been able to [make Yellow House] without each other. And to make everyone psyched about it, [you] make it a democracy and have equal say and equal parts. But really how it [grew] from the first album is the label [said] ‘You need to do some live shows.’ An attempt to find a live band turned into a band that went somewhere else. We were all like, ‘We gotta find out how to play these weird, scratchy, AM-radio-frequency demo songs live. How do we do that?’”
The four members of Grizzly Bear come from very different places, figuratively and literally. They hail from far-flung cities—Droste from Boston, Rossen from L.A., Bear from Chicago, and Taylor from Seattle—and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn after graduating from NYU. They were working humble non-career jobs when the band gelled and never dreamed they’d be making a living from music.
Perhaps that’s what gives Grizzly Bear such an accidental feel. That and the fact that each member wants to see the band go in a different direction. Taylor is chomping at the bit most, wishing he could inject dance and rock influences into such a subtle palate. In the meantime he’s busy as a producer not just for Grizzly Bear and pals Dirty Projectors but for Department of Eagles and Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, each of whose album features him, Rossen, and Bear, making Grizzly Bear founder Droste the odd man out.
This isn’t to predict the end of Grizzly Bear. If anything, they remain a band in flux. Last year’s stopgap Friend EP saw them reshaping older songs into more upbeat creations and collaborating with members of Beirut and Dirty Projectors as well as getting covered by CSS, Band of Horses, and Atlas Sound. And despite their excitement at earning the opening slot on half of Radiohead’s summer tour, the guys are most eager to embark on the next Grizzly Bear record, which could be as submerged as Yellow House, as bouncy as Friend, or as ephemeral as Horn of Plenty. It’s anyone’s guess, including the band’s.
Not long before their third show with Paul Simon, I sat down with Chris Taylor at the nearby hole-in-the-wall Smoked Joint, where he is a proud regular. We nursed Dale’s Pale Ale and jumped from topic to topic without skipping a beat.
How’s the crowd been?
It’s been an older crowd. There’s been some young kids, though. The first night was really funny because it was benefactor night and it was just so many gray-hairs. They were really quiet and really confused by our music.”
Were you guys Paul Simon fans already?
We all of course are really inspired by Graceland. Past that, I know Chris and Dan liked his other solo stuff. It was never really my bag [but] I like Graceland a lot.
With the Radiohead tour and Lollapalooza coming up, are you nervous about playing to bigger audiences?
Well, we’ve done big outdoor festival things. The most people we’ve ever played for is, like, 8,000. Weirdly, once you get past 8,000, it doesn’t feel much bigger. It’s gonna be crazy though. All four of us completely adore that band.
Will you adjust your set to reflect the size of the shows?
We’re probably going to play our louder stuff. We’ve been on tours with louder bands and we accommodate. We don’t pretend to think we can just play a bunch of quiet stuff before opening up for a loud band.
Tell me how you joined the band.
Well, Chris [Bear] is my roommate and has been my best friend for a long time. We’ve played in other bands before. Chris and Ed were working on Horn of Plenty together and they finished and they asked me because I can cover a lot of bases. I play bass, saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute.
It’s actually hard to tell at times that those woodwinds are on Yellow House.
I was just embarrassed to be playing clarinet and flute, so I heavily [treated] all of it. Originally I wasn’t playing bass so I was playing bass parts with clarinet. I guess we’re a band that doesn’t require bass all the time. But we love playing more rock stuff. It’s been a bigger part of our stuff lately. It’s mostly Dan and Ed that come from much quieter music. Me and Chris had played in louder bands. We were sometimes just feeling so restrained.
Are you working on a new album yet?
We’ve actually kind of been working on a new album, in a way. Dan’s side project Department of Eagles …he writes songs with this guy Fred Nicolaus. Dan and I have been recording this album and we use Chris Bear as the drummer and I play bass and all the woodwinds and sing as well. It’s three out of the four of us. I technically, for my own self, consider it another Grizzly Bear record, altogether it’s under another moniker. Ed is not a part of it, so it wouldn’t be a Grizzly Bear record. We’re starting work on the Grizzly Bear record as soon as this Paul Simon stuff is done.
You recently played a show with the L.A. Philharmonic.
That was fucking cool. I don’t know how the hell it happened. We played our own set. They were trying to tie classical music into indie rock. I feel like it worked. They played some really cool pieces. We all listened to a lot of classical music in college. I played in symphonies for a while. It’s so weird because my band didn’t know that. I was like, Dude, I played clarinet in a symphony for eight years. But it was just really cool for such an esteemed orchestra to even talk to us, because we think of classical musicians as so standoffish. And we came to find out that they thought younger generations were standoffish to classical music. They were as afraid of us as we were of them.
Does this string of high-profile shows put more pressure on you for the next record?
[Hesitates.] No, not really.
And there’s been so much press—
Do you think there’s too much? I feel like there’s too much. Even this seems like such overkill at this point, like totally random timing. But I don’t really feel pressure as much as … it’s been tough. It’s been hard for us coming up to where we’ve gotten to, because we’re earning a living but it’s not even barely comfortable. I work in the studio six days a week at least eight hours a day.
How did you start producing the Grizzly Bear material?
I quit playing jazz two years into college. I was in New York and I’m a talkative guy so I was able to meet all my heroes and become buddies with them. So I met my heroes and figured out they were all sort of depressed. So I was like, What I am aspiring to? Kids don’t wanna come out to jazz shows, y’know? And I wanted to play music that would be appealing to my generation at least. I switched to the audio engineering department and began recording and found out that I really loved it, like creating a vibe and an atmosphere.”
Do you think there’s an identifiable style to your production?
Well, I’m not trying to create a style. If anything, a style will naturally be there or it will create itself. But I’m trying to constantly challenge myself. I work until I’m psyched about it. Then I hear things later on and it’s like the low end doesn’t sound like a D’Angelo record yet. Or like a Neil Young record. Or like the high-end sound of a Justin Timberlake record. All that stuff I’m completely in love with. I’m inspired by so many different types of production.
There’s an echo of traditional folk songwriting in Grizzly Bear.
A lot of that is probably Dan’s writing. We all love that type of music. At this point I’m feeling slightly burnt on it, or at least burnt on the way we’ve done it.
There are videos of the band playing on a beach and in a bathroom, which exposes the heart of the songs and especially their folk qualities.
It’s a real challenge to play like that, and I feel like we’re pretty nervous and apprehensive to do it. It leaves us feeling pretty naked. The crutch of sound effects or amplification or drums … all that stuff really makes it feel safer than doing it stripped down. But I’m glad to hear you think it works out. I tend to disagree in general.
Do you do any solo stuff?
I’m working on that. I have so many ideas. I haven’t had any time to work by myself. I really just need a vacation. There are so many things I get so frustrated trying to communicate to the band. They almost refuse to make stuff obvious in any way. I love dancing and I’m trying to get that into the music. I’m almost like, ‘Fuck it, I’ll make my own Prince record somewhere else.’[Laughter.]
Tell me about the Friend EP.
It’s just odds and ends. [Other bands covering our songs] was part of the whole idea. Playing festivals, we were lucky enough to meet bands we really loved. I think the whole remix album is kind of corny and doesn’t really mean much, so to just call on your friends to collaborate … we were really stoked on what they were doing.
It shows a different, more extroverted side to the band.
We don’t want to look like a stuck-up band. We’re not stuck-up, I don’t think. I don’t want people to think, Oh, that highbrow band. It’s just to show that it should be fun. It was also to make live versions of our records because they’d changed so much.
After Grizzly Bear finished their own sound-check, Droste and Rossen hunched on a fire escape outside BAM to field more questions about the band’s past, present, and future.
Is it hard, as a somewhat intimate band, playing a venue this big?
Droste: This is an intimate big space. The audience is trained not to talk and there’s no bar.
Daniel Rossen: I don’t feel like our live set is very intimate anymore. If you think about it, Yellow House is like two years ago. It’s not really up to date.
How do you anticipate the Radiohead tour?
Rossen: Luckily, Radiohead is relatively dynamic, so it’s not gonna seem absurd. I actually have no clue if it’s gonna be really positive or just totally ridiculous. I’m sure it’ll be fun, regardless.
Droste: There will definitely be a large majority of people waiting in line for beer and going to the bathroom during our set.
Rossen: When I went to see Radiohead when I was eighteen [at] the Hollywood Bowl, I was a relatively attentive, open-minded sort of person. It was Beta Band opening and I didn’t pay any attention. I absolutely did not care.
Droste: And it’s biting you in the ass right now.
Who chose the name Grizzly Bear?
Droste: [Resigned sigh.] I did, unfortunately. It was before I even knew who Animal Collective were and I really regret it. It’s just so cliché and ridiculous. It was a nickname for an ex-boyfriend so it had some sort of relevance and I thought it was funny and I also never thought I’d be doing this for a living. I thought I’d just release a random solo disc and like 10 of my friends would buy it at [NYC music store] Other Music and I’d be like, ‘That’s that.’
You didn’t think it’d be on marquees under Radiohead…
Droste: No, definitely not. But I wouldn’t have thought that three months ago.
Tell me about Department of Eagles.
Rossen: I kind of had a joke-y band before I joined Grizzly Bear. We did a bad record when I was about eighteen that I’m pretty deeply ashamed of…
Droste: C’mon, people loved it.
Rossen: I don’t. I’m not very into it. But we kept writing songs and in the past four or five months we’ve done another record that Chris and Chris worked on. So it’s a weird hybrid.
Is Department of Eagles going to play live?
Rossen: I’m not really sure. Only if there’s time because we really need to jump straight into doing the next Grizzly Bear record and then touring with Grizzly Bear, and that’s obviously my top priority.
Do you feel like the Radiohead tour will take the band to another level?
Rossen: I don’t think so. I mean, think about Beta Band. Or think about Black Mountain opening for Coldplay. It’s a really great honor, and I respect Radiohead a lot, but I don’t know if it’s going to change anything.
Have you demoed anything for the new album?
Droste: We’ve done some very rough demos. And then there’s the song [Dan] wrote, “While You Wait For The Others,” that we played for KCRW.
Is it too early to tell where the new material is headed?
Rossen: I think everyone wants to do something different. So it will be very interesting to see what happens. I think if you asked any four of us, we’d say different things.
