Many bands write love songs about girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, even moms and dads. And don’t forget exes (God, so many exes). But fewer bands write love songs with their ATVs in the center. And yet this is how the band Grizzly Bear decided to start their new album, Painted Ruins: Lead singer and guitarist Daniel Rossen on his ATV, an old Honda TRX250, his dog Joey baying nearby in quiet upstate New York.
“I like lyrics that are very straightforward scenes like that,” says Rossen, dressed in the middle of a New York summer in a dark navy shirt, black pants, black shoes, and black socks and permanently wearing the expression of someone who just told a devilishly clever joke. “I think it's a really simple snapshot of life.” It’s why Rossen’s dog makes more than one appearance on the album.
This is how Grizzly Bear is surviving—no easy feat in 2017—by staying in the moment and simply sticking to what they know best. And I’m not talking about surviving Donald Trump and the unrelenting sense of doom that comes along with it—”A truly traumatic experience,” says multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor—although it’s definitely in there. But surviving as a band and as human beings who have reckoned with becoming dads, husbands, and divorcés since we last saw them. Surviving in a business that won’t stop changing at Usain Bolt speeds, with new moronic, soul-sucking, or just plain complicated ways to make money. Oh, you’re a musician? Name three times you pretended to kill yourself, hooked up with Target, or Beautiful Mind–ed how many streams you need to make rent.
And yet here is Grizzly Bear, once dubbed “indie rock royalty” before nakedly explaining what that really entails in an (in)famous New York mag story, making it in an industry that’s bloodthirsty for the new, different, state of the art, fresh, current, modern, nuovo, nieuw, nouveau, uus—they’ll take it however you got it. So, Grizzly Bear has a strange problem on their hands: They make consistently great and dazzling music. They toured with Radiohead and the latter's guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, called them his favorite band. Jay Z and Beyoncé even turned up at a Grizzly Bear concert in 2009. But the music landscape right now favors two kinds of artists: your megastars, the ones who can sell out Madison Square Garden and make a fortune off streaming, and the scrappy, young musicians who have the potential to go viral (SoundCloud wunderkinds XXXTentacion and Lil Uzi Vert hold the top two spots on Apple Music’s top album chart). So where does that leave a band that's somewhere in the middle?
Grizzly Bear is surviving, and they're doing it with their first album in five years, one they're extremely proud of, Painted Ruins—stuffed with strikingly gorgeous music and harmonies that Brian Wilson dreamt of only in his most rococo acid trips—out now, everywhere. They're happy here in a cramped room in the basement of the Public Hotel, where they’re jokingly weighing whether they’ll ever release a “fire” album. They've done something they care about, that's meaningful and gives them a sense of purpose for the foreseeable future, seemingly without playing the games typically required of successful musicians—it’s not a leap to say they wouldn’t be happy or proud if they had. They’re surviving in the most admirable way possible, so what can we learn from these scrappy beasts?
If you were following in Grizzly Bear’s path, you might blow it all up just to see if you’d still put the pieces back together the same way again. The band members went separate ways after the release of 2012’s Shields and the tour that followed. Survival just as a band was the first hump to get over. Rossen was particularly miffed by what transpired. “I felt beat down,” he told Paste. “It took me a long time to ease back into the idea of doing a record with those guys.” He took refuge in the quiet of upstate New York and went on a solo tour.
Meanwhile, the rest of the band mostly went westward, to Los Angeles, followed by ghosts of existential wonderings. “I sort of lost sense of, like, even what I was without being in a band on tour,” Taylor says. Christopher Bear, the drummer who could easily have a lucrative second career as a J.Crew model should this band thing ever come to an end for good, says, “I had to come to a place where I was like, this might not happen again, and maybe it's important for me to just be cool with that.”
The break was absolutely essential, they all agree. Taylor, who was itching the most to get back into the studio, says, “If we had started the record when I wanted to start the record, I would have not done as good of a job. I would have been anxious. I would have wanted things out of it, and it was good I had to lose that and go through that.” Painted Ruins had to be something the band wanted to do.
If you were following Grizzly Bear’s model, you might not care that Painted Ruins was released to almost unanimously positive reviews or even if your friends are listening to it exclusively via streaming services. You’re just happy they’re listening. You might not give credence to wonderings of whether or not a band like Grizzly Bear can “matter” in 2017, a year dominated by our first Cheeto president.
Droste quickly shuts me down when I ask about this. “The music matters,” he replies. It simply has to. Droste gives a resolute answer, but maybe not the one they started with. “The profession of being a musician felt inherently a little trivial with all the chaos and major, major things going on,” says Taylor. The response echoes all the most cynical thoughts most of us have probably had over the past several months—Can my, or any, job do some good? Does any amount of time or money make a difference? Is it okay if I just take a nap, right here, right now?—but unlike those roundabout nihilistic conversations, Grizzly Bear has found solace.
“Do what you do well,” Taylor offers. “Do it as well as you can.” The advice is universal. I’m trying to write this story the best I can, you’re taking just a quick teensy tiny surely earned break from whatever you’re doing the best you can to read it, and we are intersecting thanks to Grizzly Bear. “Make the community,” Taylor adds.
If the community of Grizzly Bear fans is anything like myself, they appreciate now more than ever what the band offers: a moment of escape. The dense music welcomes you to hide under each layer, the way you might pile a quilt on top of a duvet on top of a comforter on top of even, yes, a top sheet before hopping into bed on a cold night. Because of their vague and multi-layered approach to songwriting, Grizzly Bear can often suspend you in a space away from the world we’re currently in. The song “Colorado” from 2006’s Yellow House repeats the word “Colorado” 24 times. It’s hard to parse out a song like this and make it about your singular and current misery, so you just listen. You’re just trapped there in this little space, at the most imagining how many different ways you can sing “Colorado.” (A lot, it turns out!)
“Hopefully [the album’s] healing and a momentary piece of relief or comforting or helpful in some way,” Droste says. He’s already gotten notes from fans confirming it has been, he adds. “We want it to be a world,” Taylor says before Rossen chimes in: “I love that kind of record.”
If you were taking cues from Grizzly Bear, you might cocoon yourself, refuse to explain your actions, and just be yourself, even if that won’t make money rain from the ceiling. If clicks were your persuasion, you might never stop bringing up a decade-old feud in order to hype up your upcoming release. You might drop a bundle of bangers on Soundcloud just to survive. “Just wait,” Rossen says when I suggest it. You might open up about the sort of deeply personal stuff that would make Perez Hilton’s fingers quake.
But Grizzly Bear mostly refuses to explicitly decode the album’s most tender moments, Hilton’s hands be damned. Droste got divorced from his partner between the making of Painted Ruins and Shields but won’t discuss in detail how it’s informed the record. Why be vague when dealing with human experiences and emotions most everyone can empathize with? “You don't want to tell people what to feel,” Rossen counters.
Droste will only lightly theorize on other juicy bits that might yield an explosive headline. Why hasn’t Ivanka Trump, who Droste routinely calls out on Instagram by @ing her directly, unfollowed you yet? “I don’t know,” Droste says. “She doesn't seem to mind when I'm like, ‘Hey, your dad's an asshole.’” And after you get caught in a vortex of Taylor Swift drama so severe that her foul-mouthed fans chase you off Twitter for suggesting she’s “mean” and “calculated,” how do you interpret these reptilian clips? “Interesting choice of animal,” Droste muses. But that’s it.
They don’t want to “do something for the sake of a headline,” Droste says, even though that would inevitably lead to clicks which would probably trickle down to some album streams, every single one of which matter. It’s not that they’re oblivious to the machinations of the industry—on the contrary, they’re crystal clear. “People are really into their brands,” says Droste. “Because that's what's marketable and that's something people can remember,” Taylor says, finishing off the thought.
At one point Droste mentions that “1,500 listens equals one CD sale.” And I think about how many sets of 1,500 could be cycled through if Droste would say anything more than Swift’s snake is interesting. There’s no temptation to play along? “It doesn't ring authentic or true to us,” Rossen says, closing the matter. Surviving, after all, isn’t just about money. Anyway, “cross-branding with vintage Honda ATVs is pretty cool,” Rossen jokes.
The album title Painted Ruins is really an artful way to say putting lipstick on a pig. “Painting crumbling things, or fixing things up,” Droste told Pitchfork. And on the album, Grizzly Bear makes utter heartbreak, dissolution of foundational relationships, and political collapse beautiful. They’ve done the absolute best they can and put out something people can hold close. They’re surviving; they’re flourishing.