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Beyond buzzBrooklyn’s Grizzly Bear are
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“It just made sense with the abstract nature of the art,” says Ed Droste, explaining Veckatimest, the title of Grizzly Bear’s third LP, their best yet. The quartet took their time following up on 2006’s widely adored Yellow House, releasing Friend (a collection of outtakes, alternates and Grizzly Bear covers by other bands) before holing up to work in three locations: an old mansion in upstate New York, the Brooklyn church they call their rehearsal space and Droste’s grandmother’s cottage in Cape Cod, from whence Veckatimest took its name. Ed Droste: We’ve spent a lot of time rehearsing there and we got into the topography of the region—we all found it really beautiful and dramatic and blustery and New England-y—and we found these small, uninhabited islands with old Native American names and one of them really jumped out at us. We like to keep our lyrics a bit open for interpretation so that people can relate to them, and it’s the same idea with the title. M: I hear this is your most collaborative work to date. What happened? ED: I think we really grew up and learned how to be less protective of our material and let each other jump into each other’s songs and present the material at an earlier stage, as sketches as opposed to finished products. Everyone’s just more at ease with their skills and strengths and weaknesses, we’re just more comfortable with each other so there’s a lot more trust. M: Your sound is pretty hard to pin down. What influenced you to start writing music in the first place? ED: I really liked the first Liz Phair album and the first Jeff Buckley album and the Pixies, but that inspired me to write totally random weird stuff in high school, which has nothing to do with what I do now. Influences are hard ’cause I feel like I’m influenced by everything. There’s bands I really hate that influence me not to make music like that. M: Such as? ED: I’m not gonna say. I don’t believe in slagging off other artists publicly. M: Yeah, this is Canada, not England. ED: Ugh, they always try to get us to do that over there. They just wanna start all this drama, I hate that. M: You guys get a lot of props though. I read that Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead said that you’re his favourite band. ED: Yeah, that was surreal. It was the last date of the tour with them, and on that entire tour, he never spoke—apparently he rarely speaks on stage. But he just came up, wearing our merch shirt, and said that in the middle of the set. I was in the crowd and I was just like, “Holy shit! Did I just hear what I heard?” I had to double-check with, like, 10 people. It was extremely flattering and surprising. M: You must’ve had a lot of moments like that over the last few years. ED: Yeah, getting to meet some of our heroes has been amazing. Touring with Radiohead was like a dream come true. Working with Paul Simon was absolutely incredible. Just being able to do what we love to do, being able to make music, actually having a career out of it, is really fantastic. WITH HERE WE GO MAGIC AT |
