A week before Christmas 1997, my ex-wife and I drove the few hours from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to Athens, Geo., to spend four days with Jeff and the band, plus all their friends and collaborators. It was really exciting; everyone seemed super productive and energized, in half a dozen bands, and yet eager to share their time and art with anyone. If some of the questions here seem overly obvious, remember that at the time Aeroplane hadn’t even been released—I didn’t know for a fact that the record had any relation to Anne Frank, for instance.

I wrote in the introduction to the original Puncture article that you can hang Aeroplane “on the shelf with Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, Daniel Johnston’s Yip/ Jump Music, Skip Spence’s Oar, Incredible String Band’s Wee Tam, Syd Barrett’s Madcap Laughs, and the Television Personalities’ Could Have Been Bigger Than the Beatles. It’s as good or better, this music, this record. And unlike a lot of what I’m listening to and really enjoying this week/this year, Aeroplane will remain essential listening long after the echoes of my overheated excitement are silent.”

Pitchfork: Are you conducting experiments on how many words can be said in one song, in one breath?

Jeff Mangum: Ha ha. The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it’ll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I’m telling. Then I start building little bridges—word bridges—to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end. A continuous stream of words keeps coming out like little blobs, usually in some sort of order. They come at me at random and I have to piece them together.

Was “Song Against Sex” that way?

Actually, “Song Against Sex” came about pretty spontaneously.

So what’s a better example then?

Like with “Two-Headed Boy,” each section sort of came out at different times, so many that I’ve forgotten most of them by now.

Do you edit yourself a lot, then?

None of the editing happens on paper, it all goes on in my little computer-storage brain.

How often do you write songs?

All the time. There’s at least four records’ worth of stuff that’s not out and may never come out ever—just different things.

That have been recorded?

Not really.

Is it because these haven’t fit with the concepts of On Avery Island and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea? Because your records are concept records.

No. Stories. But I guess [a story] is a concept, huh?

[After moving to the kitchen for some reason] Wow, you have a lot of melodicas lying around!

Yeah.

How many of the parts of a song do you hear in your head when it’s first coming together?

I’ll hear lots of parts, but the songs are like little blurs in my brain. They’re whole entities, but it’s weird—I write them and I sing them and I envision them for what they are, and the recordings never go very far from that, but at the same time when they do become recordings they become like a whole other thing. It takes a little while to get used to the music coming from these speakers instead of inside my head. It’s very exciting to hear that, like when we play live, but it’s very strange.

When you’re walking around doing whatever, do you have melodies happening in your head?

All the time. My songs pretty much revolve in my brain most of the time—usually whatever’s coming next. Like right now I have a lot of Hawaiian music in my head.

Are you on a Don Ho or Roy Smeck slack-key kick or something? What’s up?

It’s not real Hawaiian music, but that’s the closest thing it is to what I can call it. It won’t actually sound Hawaiian. Just for some reason I hear the ukulele in my head lately. Everything I’ve done has just been pure intuition.

Do you write, aside from the songs?

Nope; all the words are me playing and singing and opening my mouth and letting them come out.

Does Neutral Milk Hotel practice?

Not really. We don’t practice in the standard way. We did for a month in Long Island, when we first got together. But that was it; we’re not a practice space band.

Do you tell Julian [Koster], “Play this saw part here”?

A lot of the saw parts, Julian will make them up every night on tour, when we’re on the road, and eventually he’ll have something that he’s happy with. The horn arrangements are kind of the same way.

So a lot of the components of a song get ironed out by just playing live?

Sort of, but there are still very primitive things that flourish when we record.

What do you mean by that?

Just little key, basic ideas—like Julian will go and take what he was doing live and expand it, you know. He’ll go from doing the one simple part he was doing before, and then he’ll sit in the bathtub for three hours playing it over and over until it’s a three-part harmony saw part that sort of sounds like Hawaiian singing, or little angelic voices.

The way I understand it, you’re working with fidelity in a conscious way, using different methods for recording; you’re seeing the recording apparatuses as instruments in and of themselves. Like, Faust did that, and dub producers do that. And this is part of what I dislike about the “lo-fi” tag, because it just seems really inexact and inaccurate. For instance, you use distortion, really heavy distortion when you could just as easily have something sound clean, right? I see that as being a choice rather than a necessity.

What, the distortion? Oh yeah. And all of the recording is intended. There’s a certain way that we’ve gotten used to things sounding from recording on a four-track for so many years, and there are certain sounds that we love to hear. All the heavy distortion was always intentional. We used as much old-timey equipment as we could. But when we made On Avery Island, and with this record too, we were making the best sounding record that we could possibly make. Current standards of high fidelity are really pretty lousy sometimes. There are a few producers that are really great.

Like who?

Well, like Jim O’Rourke. He knows how to make things sound the way they sound in a room. I have a very limited knowledge of recording, but the miracle of being able to capture sounds on magnetic tape and the miracle of electricity, and these little magnetic particles, is amazing to me.

Who’s your preferred person to record with?

Robert Schneider. I’m very comfortable with him. He’s an old friend that I’ve worked with all my life. I know he understands me. The energy and love he puts into the recordings, how personal he takes it, and that there’s always enough time to do exactly what you want to do. So, it’s like home recording, but with this person who pushes you to new places. Robert lets you find the very best, most interesting sounds, like, inside yourself. Does that sound stupid saying that?

Not at all. Now, I know you’re really into musique concrète composers like Luc Ferrari and Pierre Henry, and that’s part of why NMH is so great—the dissonant touches in the background by Julian, Jeremy [Barnes], yourself, Robert, Scott [Spillane], Laura [Carter], and whomever else is around while you’re recording or playing. The mixture of droning sound, carnival music, and total noise that’s contained within these pop songs is part of what makes them instantly recognizable as Neutral Milk. But why don’t you make out-and-out experimental stuff yourself?

Oh, I do music like that! But with songwriting there’s a certain place I’ve reached, where I’m comfortable expressing it openly. I’m just working on some of the more… munchkin music right now. I consider the kind of music that Ferrari and Henry make to be part of the same kind of angelic, otherworldly music place in my head that a lot of the jazz guys seem to inhabit. I see that as amazing music that really has nothing to do with rock’n’roll.

Do you do a lot of four-track recording, just by yourself?

Yes.

And how much of that has been released?

Maybe three songs.

Why isn’t it released?

There’s all those boxes [walking through his room, littered with gear and records and books]— and then that box over there.

Why isn’t it released? [Here we’re interrupted by some nice people who bring us delicious cinnamon bread.] How much of an influence are the sounds of the circus?

I’m very influenced by the circus. A lot of the dreams that I have, I’m in the circus. I have this song called “Ferris Wheel on Fire,” and in the dreams a lot of times I’ll be walking around and there is this Ferris wheel in flames, and I’m on the ground walking through the crowd—a lot of the songs are influenced by my dreams. And where my dreams come from, I have no idea. When I was a kid, the bed used to feel like concrete, and I always had this dream where this bomb was rolling towards me, and everything was moving really incredibly fast, but it would never reach me. And I’d wake up, and my hands would feel totally enormous, and the bed would feel like concrete.

Do you think of the different records as like, different places in your head, like a place that exists, but only you can see it or hear it?

Definitely.

And then the record is sort of a document of that, but not really?

You’re right. There’s a certain feeling that the songs come from and the songs can’t come into being unless that feeling comes to me. It’s kind of an uncomfortable, lonely feeling that I get in my stomach. I get that feeling and I get really freaked out so I have to go and play and sing and sometimes a song evolves and sometimes not. The songs are all sort of in the same place for sure.

In “Song Against Sex” and in that one on the new record you sing that “Your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies.” These seem to be strong, visceral reactions against copulating bodies. Does sex gross you out?

I’m grossed out about sex being used as a tool for power, about people not giving a shit about who they’re putting their dick into. I find that to be really upsetting. I’ve known a lot of people that have been heavily damaged by some asshole’s drunken hard-on. And that stuff really upsets me. It’s not against sex itself. All those sexual references are like...

About specific personal references?

Yeah.

There’s a real joy and wonder to your work. It has elements of the outlook of a six-year-old, the way a kid might look at a car going by and still be weirded out that such a thing even exists. This is distilled for me in the line off Aeroplane that goes “How strange it is to be anything at all.” Is that your philosophy in a nutshell?

It’s been a really strange process, because I was a very religious person growing up. The church told me how things are and I took things in that way and it was all very simple. As I’ve gotten older, the more I don’t understand, the more amazed I am. I usually wake up every morning completely freaked out that I’m in my body. Like usually whatever dream I’m having has something to do with being totally freaked out that I’m in my body and I usually wake up with a shock. And then I relax, forget about it and go and make a cup of coffee. And I wish I could say something about how I'm completely freaked out about even being here without sounding really silly.

It’s also about all the crazy sleepwalking dreams that I have.

You sleepwalk?

Incredibly, yeah. I have like all kinds of crazy hallucinations and it’s pretty strange.

You mean when you’re asleep...

Well, I open my eyes and I see things. I’ve seen spirits moving through the walls. I’ve seen a vortex coming through the wall. I’ve seen amorphous little balls of light bouncing all around in the front yard through the window. I’ve seen giant bugs on the floor. I was in a hotel room in Amarillo, Texas, and all I remember is standing on the bed and seeing the whole wall in front of me filled with lights that were [makes popping sound] popping like popcorn out of the wall. Then I’ll wake up and I go “Wow, I was standing on my bed and staring at this wall.”

Well, no wonder you don’t do drugs! And speaking of hallucinations or visions or whatever, I like how the word “sober” appears in your songs, how that goes against the grain of the hippie “underground” mentality that’s still prevalent in many music scenes. There are magazines where you can’t read a review without anything interesting or droney being compared to this or that drug. Which is intriguing to me, because when you do a lot of drugs, it’s much more difficult to make interesting art. If you can that’s okay, but think how much better it’d be if you weren’t so fucked-up. And if it’s the drug that’s doing all the work then what kind of chump are you that you can’t get to that place without it?

I agree with you. I had your typical drug experiences in high school—I was pretty much a pot head and did a lot of acid—but I don’t do anything now. But I also want to add that other people can do whatever they want, you know. I don’t preach. And plenty of rock people have made great records while they were totally fried!

When I started writing “Ghost,” it's like the 10th track, the song that goes [sings] “Ghost, ghost I know you live within me,” because we thought we had a ghost living in the house, living in the bathroom. So I locked the door and started trying to sing to the ghost in the bathroom. But then that was sort of like singing about the ghost that we thought was constantly whistling in the other room that kept waking me up, and then a ghost that may or may not live within myself. And it also ended up being more of a reference to Anne Frank. And a lot of the songs on this record are about Anne Frank.

To be doing art that refers to World War II and the Holocaust, it was only a generation or two ago, but I don’t hear a lot of records that do that in 1998. What compelled this? Did you read or reread The Diary of Anne Frank?

Yeah. I know it might sound kind of cheesy.

Not at all.

Right before recording On Avery Island I was walking around in Ruston [La.] waiting to go to Denver to record. I don’t consider myself to be a very educated person, ’cause I’ve spent a lot of my life in dreams... And I was walking around wondering, “If I knew the history of the world, would everything make more sense to me or would I just lose my mind?” And I came to the conclusion that I’d probably just lose my mind. The next day I went into a bookstore and walked to the wall in the back, and there was The Diary of Anne Frank. I’d never given it any thought in my entire life. I spent two days reading it and then completely flipped out.

So you proved your thesis.

Yeah. I spent about three days crying, and just was completely flipped-out. While I was reading the book, she was alive to me. I pretty much knew what was going to happen.

But that’s the thing: You love people because you know their story. You have sympathy for people even when they do stupid things because you know where they’re coming from, you understand where they’re at in their head. And so here I am as deep as you can go in someone’s head, in some ways deeper than you can go with even someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash. And that was something that completely blew my mind. The references to her on the record—like “Ghost” refers to her being born. And I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. Do you think that’s embarrassing?

If this were talking about wanting to go back in time to save Frodo the Hobbit, that would be embarrassing. Feeling extreme empathy as a result of this enduring writing from the Holocaust, that should be the opposite.

The record doesn’t necessarily take place in that time period so much. It’s a reflection of how I see that time period. I’m not even sure if time is linear or if it’s all going in one direction, anyway. The world is this incredibly blurry, crazy dream that I’m just sort of stumbling through. Science has pretty much figured out that the reality we’re living in isn’t necessarily reality. I read a lot physics and metaphysics books; most of the time they give me a big, bulging headache, but I keep going back to time to try to understand.

A lot of the songs on Aeroplane really freaked me out, and it took other people to make me be comfortable with them, and to see that it was okay to sing about a lot of this stuff, not to shut them inside. ’Cause it was just too intense. I would ask a friend, “What the fuck am I doing?” It took me awhile to figure out that the songs were positive, not just these fucked-up nightmares that I was throwing up.

Do you think some of the lyrics on this record are gonna make people get weirded out?

Well, I’ve already told you what I think is gonna weird people out in the indie-rock scene or whatever—but, fuck ’em! It’s real interesting to me that when you sing “I love you Jesus Christ” rather than “I love you Linda Sue” that it becomes totally different for a lot of listeners. Obviously, it is a very different meaning, but people might ascribe a whole set of characteristics toward you, or think of you completely differently, because of that one line. And of course, just because you sing a song doesn’t mean that it’s your own belief or outlook. People understand Robert De Niro isn’t actually a boxer, but can’t understand that a song might be someone working in character unless you make it super obvious.

I can’t honestly say that I 100 percent know what that song means. Do you have a minute? ’Cause this is going to take a little while to really explain this.

Sure.

For a lot of these songs, I was able to lock myself in a room and allow my mind to completely let out anything it wanted without me worrying too much about what anybody was gonna think. And I think that a song about God was inevitable, because of my upbringing, of the intense experiences I had growing up—going to these crazy Church camps where everything was very open. We talked about sexuality freely, we talked about...

And how old were you at the time?

From 11 to 17.

Where were the camps?

In central Louisiana, out in the boonies.

Is this the hippie influence on Christianity?

It wasn’t even really hippie, it was just weird—where, like, you could just spill your guts all over the place, people were like laying around or like leaping and freaking out. But it wasn’t so much that it was a God trip as much as it was an emotional, human trip. Even if you were an Atheist and your parents shipped you down there, you could talk about it. You could talk openly about your Atheist beliefs and there would be debates about it. And being an Atheist was just as beautiful as anything else.

The thing about me singing about Christ; I’m not saying “I love you Christianity.” I’m not saying “I love all the fucked-up terrible shit that people have done in the name of God.” And I’m not preaching belief in Christ. It’s just expression. I’m just expressing something I might not even understand. It’s a song of confusion, it’s a song of hope, it’s a song that says this whole world is a big dream—and who knows what’s gonna happen.

We played a show with Vic Chesnutt two weeks ago in Athens and he sat on the stage and played for 30 minutes and didn’t stop. And he sang all these songs about how, like, action and reaction are the closest things to truth in the universe, how he’s had all these out-of-body experiences but they weren’t supernatural. And I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. To me, it’s like I’m expressing something that’s within me that I can’t really explain that really has nothing to do with religion. My love for Christ has more to do with what he said and what he believed in. Then the church put all this fucked-up bullshit around it and made it all this really evil thing at times. If you attach man to anything, he’s gonna fuck it up somehow, one way or the other. You think that’s too cynical? [laughs]

No, and we all fuck up. I don’t believe in Christ myself, but the sermon on the mount and all the “love your enemy stuff” is an awesome philosophy. And I believe in God, but it’s not something I talk about very much. And it’s new to me, and it’s weird. But I’ve always found music to be a really spiritual thing. It doesn’t matter what kind of music so long as it’s really pure, and really good: It’s a totally spiritual thing to me.

Right. My only thing with this record is that I feel like the record is very spiritual, but I don’t consider it to be religious. And I just hope that when people hear me sing about Christ in the beginning, I hope they understand where I’m coming from in terms of the spiritual aspect of the record can be enjoyed.

It’s not about preaching.

No. I’m just one person. And I haven’t joined the Baptist church!

What about the spiritual stuff in other music; do you connect with that?

To me, that’s like when I listen to Bulgarian music, like the Bulgarian choir. That’s the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard, and it brings me to a place I could never express.

Have you ever heard Sacred Harp singing?

What’s that?

For me, it’s the closest thing to Eastern European choral music that comes out of this country. I feel similarly about it. And also, it’s the one thing I feel genuine pride for—American pride for—is the art we’ve produced.

Right! I know what you mean.

So, you guys obviously have these elements to your music from other cultures, and you just mentioned the Bulgarian choir. How do you appropriate or incorporate sounds like that, and not be one of those “World Beat” types?

I don’t know! In my little world of music, I’m just sort of following blindly, you know?

And that’s it?

Yeah, that’s pretty much it!

What covers do you all do?

Just the one.

The Charlie Haden Liberation Quartet song? [“Song for Che’ –Ed.]

Yes, that’s the only cover we’ve ever done.

Well, Charlie Haden uses South American music a lot; how does he do it, do you think?

I don’t know! Do you really hear a lot of world music in my music?

Not a lot, but I hear just the sounds of the musicians themselves that seem clearly influenced...

I think there’s a purity to that kind of music that I love—that it’s a little more untouched, or something.

It’s hard to talk about this stuff, isn’t it?

Exactly. My musical philosophy, and my personal philosophy, are things that I understand without “knowing.” And I’m sometimes amazed when I read interviews with people who know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and what they’re doing it for.

So your process is like more visceral and intuitive?

Yeah.

What’s the short list of your own inspirations?

The Minutemen. The Minutemen were like one of the greatest bands ever, and the Soft Machine. Daniel Johnston, too—I listened to his early tapes and they were just the most beautiful thing.

Did you get to see the Minutemen live?

No. I caught up with the Minutemen right after d. boon died. The only song I’d heard from them before was “Paranoid Chant,” on the radio. I remember when I was 14 and heard it, I thought, This is the craziest, fucking most insane scream I’ve ever heard in my life! And it scared the shit out of me. A lot of the music I discovered when I was 14 really scared me, but I loved it. I didn’t quite understand it, and it was so extreme. But then you start to understand…

When I bought Double Nickels on the Dime, I thought it was going to be a double album of “Paranoid Chant”s, and I thought, How am I going to be able to even sit through one side of that?! And I put it on—and I’d actually been getting into the Meters around that period—and it just blew my head off. I couldn’t believe it. And it became the soundtrack to those four years of my life, to high school. They were just so in love with being a band, with being together and singing what they were singing. And it came across so beautifully. I still put it on, and I love everything they ever did; it’s really magical to me. I saw them on TV and they were like, “Everybody should be in a band; every neighborhood should have a band, every house.”

You thank the whole town of Ruston, La., where you grew up, on your first disc.

It was a way of thanking the whole town and the community that was there, but also it’s where I grew up so there were a lot of intense experiences there.

You don’t particularly have a Southern accent. What’s up with that?

In school I was surrounded by totally racist, sexist jocks. From an early age, all of us felt like we didn’t belong there. We all kind of saved ourselves from that place. The little world that we had there was really beautiful. But I think we saw like some guy going, [in heavy accent] “Hey may-an whah don’ we lahk git drunk and lahk fuck that whore over thair mahn” and wanted to be as different from that as possible. When I was young I must have made a conscious effort to stop talking that way, ’cause that’s how those motherfuckers talk that I hate. My lack of an accent was an early rebellion, in every way.

Elephant 6 seems like sort of a commune, in Athens, but one that works.

We sort of record for each other and write songs for each other. And like anytime that I’m in here recording, I’ll be going places that I don’t understand, and I’ll know that my friend Will’s gonna listen to it. I’ll give him a tape and he’ll really dig it. So that gives me a certain kind of gratification, to put something on a tape and walk down the street and hand it to him.

Which band is Will in?

[laughs] Will Westbrook, he’s in the Gerbils, and also he does this solo thing called Wet Host. He’s a saxophone player. There’s about 25 people that all came here from Ruston that live here now. It’s really funny; we all gravitated towards each other. We’ve just always played together our whole lives, but we’re not this closed club or something. There are people showing up all the time and they go, “Well I sort of bow this thing and it makes a squeaky sound!” And then we go “Waaaa! Cool, man! Come squeak on this thing over here!” If anyone wants to play, they just have to show up and want to play.

It’s scary how well you guys seem to get along. You’ve talked about getting land and building your own dwellings out in the woods and all living together, haven’t you?

Yes. Well, Pete [Erchick] from Olivia Tremor Control is really into geodesic domes, and Scott and Laura have a lot of ideas about how you could maintain a community, you know, like giant water-wheels that would create electricity, and things like that.

What makes Athens so great for your purposes?

’Cause everybody’s here! I’m not like these other people who like it here so much—but it’s not that I dislike it. Athens is a nice, easy town to live in. But, see—I’ve never been particularly comfortable anywhere I’ve ever lived.