Above photo by Tom Himes; photos below by Barbara Anastacio
"Grizzly Bear is a democracy," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her review of the band's new album, Shields. "They stand in a horizontal row on stage, and you get this sense of intra-band egalitarianism from their records, too." But you don't realize just how much of a democracy Grizzly Bear is until you've interviewed a few members of the band.
They all have a role to play both on and offstage. Founding singer Ed Droste has the gorgeous voice and the ear for pristine melody; he's the most social member of the group and also the biggest fan of collaboration, but he's also the one who, since 2009's Veckatimest, most needed some time away. Singer Daniel Rossen is a brilliant guitarist with a deep knowledge of music structure; like others in this low-key band, he's a not a huge fan of talking about himself ("I don't love the process of, you know, putting music out there and trying to make people think it's actually cool or relevant") but he likes talking about how songs come together. Producer and bassist Chris Taylor is the sonic architect; gregarious in conversation, he also plays cheerleader and therapist in the studio, doing whatever it takes to realize the band's songs. I didn't get a chance to talk to drummer Chris Bear, but all spoke of his contributions, and he and Droste share a songwriting partnership.
Shields had an unusually difficult birth. After the success of Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear toured incessantly and finally took some time off to re-charge. During that period, Rossen worked on a solo EP and his other band, Department of Eagles, while Taylor became an in-demand producer, recorded a solo album as CANT, and stayed busy on his label, Terrible Records. When they were ready to make another Grizzly Bear record, the band decamped to a space in Marfa, Texas (Droste described it as a sort of hangar), to work through almost two-dozen demos. But the chemistry wasn't there. So the quartet paused and re-grouped in Cape Cod, where they recorded their previous two albums, and started writing songs mostly from scratch. The result is their finest album to date, a gorgeous and mysterious collection that gathers the best of everything the band has done in one place. I met with Droste at a cafe in Brooklyn, and spoke to Rossen and Taylor separately by telephone.
Pitchfork: Do you still see each other a lot just hanging around in Brooklyn?
Ed Droste: I see Chris Bear a fair amount, but everyone has their own life. From that first booked tour up until the end of promoting Veckatimest, we hadn't ever really fully stopped. But there was an actual break this time, when everyone could do what they wanted to do. For me, that meant pretending I wasn't in a band-- not thinking about music or the music industry. I didn't read anything about new music. I traveled; you disappear for so long and you come back and three of your friends have babies and you're like, "Damn, I should probably go see those babies."
But then the urge comes back to write and come together. Before we got to Marfa, Bear and I had gone to Mexico for a month to get the juices flowing, and we demoed 10 songs there. Dan had been demoing songs, too. So we got to Marfa and we were like, "Well we've got over 20 songs, surely we have an album." But it hadn't been the four of us together.
Chris Taylor: After the Marfa thing, it was more just like, "How do we get this back on track?" When I was working on my solo record, I was thinking, "God, I can't wait to get back to work with my band, because I hate working by myself so much." But when we finally got back together, it was just so confusing, which was a surprise. I was optimistic, and I felt really blessed to be going back to three guys that I respect a lot, but it took us a second to really get our momentum.
Daniel Rossen: I enjoy making music alone, and I like keeping my options open for how I release my own songs. But everybody in Grizzly Bear is full of ideas. So it's kind of boring to come to the band with a complete song and be like: "Here's what I want you to do." With this record, we wanted to make everything feel like everyone-- music that we could never do on our own. That's a real gift, and it's one of the best things about being in a band like this.
Pitchfork: Can you think of a song that went into a direction that you wouldn't have anticipated?
DR: "Sun in Your Eyes" is a good example. While we were up in Cape Cod writing and working on the record, every once in a while I would ask Ed to just go to the piano and play whatever he was thinking-- whatever the hell came out-- and I'd record it on my phone. Sometimes it was great and sometimes it was nothing. There was one night when he just started playing this really simple figure, and it stuck with me. That song developed from so many angles, and all of a sudden it was this sprawling, seven-minute piece of music that came from a couple of chords randomly played on the piano. It ended up being one of our favorite things on the record.
Pitchfork: Why do you think it was tougher to initially get on the same page this time around?
CT: It had been so long since we had sat in the van and listened to songs-- like when you're on tour and you have to listen to something to get across Pennsylvania. We'd always try and find things that everyone sort of agreed on, so we'd have this active rapport: "I hate this," "I like this a lot," "I want to listen to this again," "I never want to listen to that again," you know? We collectively figured out which kinds of bands we liked. But with the nature of the last tour, we were on a bus together and all really burnt. We weren't talking about music as much as just trying to play a good show and get along with each other and keep going. So when the time came for us to record a new album, no one had any idea as to what anyone else liked.
ED: Every album has a thing where it's like, "How are we going to marry our four ideas and personalities?" The older we get, the more people become comfortable with their strengths and weaknesses. Being in a band with such a long history can be frustrating and slow, but ultimately it's so much more rewarding.
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Pitchfork: "Sleeping Ute" feels like a proper opener-- it's like kicking this door into another world.
DR: It was actually the oldest track in terms of when the song was written, and it's one of the only songs on the record that I wrote alone before coming to the band with it. That and "Yet Again" are the two songs that were done kind of separately from the band, a long time ago. "Ute" was one of the first songs we put down that we felt really good about.
Pitchfork: There are all these different parts in that song-- when the guitar crashes in after that quieter opening, and there's this synthesizer moving around. When it comes time to assemble everything, how are you generating ideas for specific sounds like that?
CT: I came up with that synth idea when I was sitting with my friend, who was like, "Let me hear some of the new stuff you did at Marfa." So I played the music for someone else for the first time, and there was this incredible moment listening to it, almost like you're sitting above the two of us, just watching us listen to it. You get this perspective of objectivity.
The obvious choice for a bassline to that song seemed to be laying down the rhythm of the hit, but I thought: "What if there was a bass presence doing something that completely threw that whole thing off, and was moving completely fast?" You would never expect anything like that-- it's like you're laying in the grass and some wild animal flies over your face. I wanted the track to really open up in a way that felt very unhinged, like anything was possible. It's just one of those things: the myopic, to the the kaleidoscopic, to the explosive.
Watch the video for "Yet Again" directed by Emily Kai Bock:
Pitchfork: Daniel, for you as a songwriter, how do lyrics fit? Do you put the music and the lyrics on equal footing?
DR: I'm certainly not a lyricist first, I'll say that much. I prefer doing it intuitively and not really thinking about it so much. That said, in the last year or two especially, we've also made a point of making sure we're focusing a lot more on the lyrics, so they fit in correctly and represent the song right. In the past, we tended to be too off-the-cuff with lyrics; we would let things slide just because we felt like the texture of the song and the arrangement was enough to communicate what we were going for. But I got a lot more interested in songs that could hold up completely on their own, with just a guitar and voice. For some people that's easy to do, but I find it's really difficult.
CT: For this record, it was really important to us to try and make sure that lyrics had a weight to them and at least some sense of a narrative, even if it was loose. There were lyrics in previous albums that seemed to have no meaning whatsoever. And that always really annoyed me. We agreed it'd be really important and awesome if we could just try and make all the lyrics tell something.
And I was definitely able to use lyrics as a frame to how I would let the arrangements build and then fall away. As awesome as it is to think about creating music as this weird serendipitous magic thing that shines down because you're young and crazy and it's a full moon or whatever, with Grizzly Bear, it's not all like that. We're sculpting the songs as we go.
Pitchfork: Daniel, who are some guitar players that you admire?
DR: I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band. So I ended up pillaging a lot of music that had nothing to do with guitar playing, using a lot of strange tunings and voicings and chord structures that aren't really that natural to the guitar; I ended up developing a harmonic palette that's not particularly natural to the guitar because I was always trying to make my guitar sound like something else.
I mean, I loved Elliott Smith when I was a kid, he was an incredible guitar player and one of my first influences as far as anything outside the realm of jazz and classical music. As a matter of fact, one of the very first songs I ever tried to write was a blatant rip off! I love Nick Drake and Jim O'Rourke's playing, too.
Pitchfork: Chris, how do you bring the Grizzly Bear world to life as a producer?
CT: I have a macro approach. There's people's emotions, there's their intellect, their experience, their creativity-- all these different reactions people have to a recording situation. It's my role to take stock of what's going on and pull something articulate from chaos. Maybe someone's making pasta downstairs and that's really distracting, so it's knowing enough to just tell the person, like, "Hey that's throwing things off." The most important side is the creative side, and its all about helping them find that. I think that's actually true to life, too-- being compassionate toward someone and their current state.
A lot of my production is about trying to hear what the musician is trying to accomplish. And if I think the idea they are going for is really great, then let's try to enhance that and pull it even further. But I'm not going to be like, "I know you like to use that reverb, but I have something better for you." I'm not going to do that, because people are attached to that, and it means something to them. They're the creator; I'm helping guide. If the performance is there, that speaks louder than any U47 Microphone you put on the vocal with the NEVE 1083 Pre-Amp and the Sta-Level Compressor. You could have like $12,000 worth of gear in the vocal chain, but fuck that. That shouldn't do anything.
ED: You can hear the vocals become clearer with each album. Before, if I ever heard anything out of tune, I'd be like, "Let's just put five layers [of vocals] on it." In retrospect, that puts a barrier between yourself and the audience. You're actually pushing people away by not letting them hear an exposed take. Nothing's ever perfect. It's more like a conversation you're having with an audience. Eight years later, I'm finally comfortable enough to do that.
