The neutral planet

Every once in a while, I’ll read a work of criticism and come across a line that might have been taken directly from my own head. I felt this once while reading Kim Hunter’s little book about Neutral Milk Hotel’s album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which was released by Merge Records twenty years ago this month. In a brief discussion of its closing song, “Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two,” Hunter writes:

There’s a weary quality to Jeff [Mangum]’s vocal on this closing song that makes the tender sentiments especially moving. Even with the lyrics changed to mask Anne Frank’s presence, there really is no lovelier moment in pop than when he sings “and in my dreams you’re alive and you’re crying.”

This might seem like an absurdly overwrought statement, particularly for an album that had been released just seven years before Hunter wrote these words. But I believe it. “Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two” is simply the most moving song that I know, and that line is the moment in which it all comes together for me. I’ve always found it quietly miraculous that someone else once felt the same way and bothered to write that fact down. But I suspect that there are a lot of listeners out there who probably agree, and who think that they’re equally on their own.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is an album that encourages such responses. Two decades later, it hangs in there, selling tens of thousands of copies a year, many on vinyl, and yet everyone who hears it feels as if they’ve found something secret. When I first got it—I don’t remember how or why—I was in my early twenties, and it had probably been out for about five years, which was long enough back then to make it seem as if it had been around forever. (These days, half a decade can pass in the blink of an eye, and I’m amused to realize that more time separates us from, say, the release of Moonrise Kingdom than it took me to catch up with Mangum’s work.) It’s been running in my head in one form or another ever since, but it still occupies an odd position in my listening life. I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable ranking it as one of my favorites. It doesn’t really connect or lead to anything else. I didn’t become a fan of lo-fi music or sound collage, and I don’t even think I could identify half of its songs by name, although I did briefly learn the chords to “Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two” so that I could play it on the ukulele. To be honest, I’ve never bothered to check out On Avery Island, Mangum’s only other album, which would have been the obvious next step. It simply exists in a remote corner of my mind as something messy, opaque, but somehow perfect, and it didn’t change me nearly as much as it should have. As I wrote in a blog post a few years ago: “Like everyone else, I’ll often hear a song on the radio or on old playlist, like ‘Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two’ by Neutral Milk Hotel, that reminds me of a period in my life I’ve neglected, or a whole continent of emotional space that I’ve failed to properly navigate.”

I’ve also realized that I don’t fully understand what the album is about, to the extent that this is a meaningful question. While looking up those lines from Kim Hunter’s book, I read the rest of the paragraph for the first time in years, and I’ll admit that I was a little bewildered: “The dead brother reels through, his head burning, his skull broken by what might be a suicidal bullet, as the living who love him seek to undo the destruction and put him back together.” This isn’t what I picture when I hear the song, but I’m sure that it’s technically correct, even if piecing together a narrative out of Mangum’s fragments leads to something that is much less than the sum of its parts. In an early interview with Mike McGonigal of Puncture, given just before the album came out, Mangum offered as much information about his creative process as we’re ever likely to hear:

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…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.

That sounds about right. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of our great works of narrative ambiguity, at least if we define it, as I once did, as a network of specifics with one crucial piece removed—like the face of the woman on the cover. And there’s no question in my mind that Mangum has something achingly particular in mind for every line that he sings. Much of the album was famously inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank, which simply moved Mangum in the way that it should move all of us. His interview with Puncture contains what still strikes me as an extraordinary confession:

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…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?

It shouldn’t be. Yet Mangum seems to have sensed that he said too much, because he hasn’t said much of anything since. “Don’t hate her when she gets up to leave,” Mangum sings on the very last line of the album, and then he puts down the guitar and walks away.

Turning down the volume

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s topic: “What do you listen to when you’re working?” (As it happens, I’ve talked about this before, so this is a slightly revised version of a post that originally appeared on February 25, 2014.)

For years, I listened to music while I wrote. When I was working on my first few novels, I went so far as to put together playlists of songs that embodied the atmosphere or mood I wanted to evoke, or songs that seemed conductive to creating the proper state of mind, and there’s no question that a lot of other writers do the same. (If you spend any time on the writing forums on Reddit, you’ll encounter some variation of the question “What’s your writing playlist?” posted once every couple of days.) This may have been due to the fact that my first serious attempts at writing coincided with a period in my twenties when most of us are listening to a lot of music anyway. And it resulted in some unexpected pleasures, in the form of highly personal associations between certain songs and the stories I was writing at the time. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to Eternal Youth by Future Bible Heroes without thinking of my novelette “The Boneless One,” since it provided the backdrop to the wonderful weeks I spent researching and writing that story, and much of the tone and feel of my novel Eternal Empire is deliberately indebted to the song “If I Survive” by Hybrid, which I’ve always felt was a gorgeous soundtrack waiting for a plot to come along and do it justice.

Yet here’s the thing: I don’t think that this information is of any interest of all to anyone but me. It might be interesting to someone who has read the stories and also knows the songs—which I’m guessing is a category that consists of exactly one person—but even then, I don’t know if the connection has any real meaning. Aside from novels that incorporate certain songs explicitly into the text, as we see in writers as different as Nick Hornby and Stephen King, a writer’s recollection of a song that was playing while a story was written is no different from his memory of the view from his writing desk: it’s something that the author himself may treasure, but it has negligible impact on the reader’s experience. If anything, it may be a liability, since it lulls the writer into believing that there’s a resonance to the story that isn’t there at all. Movies can, and do, trade on the emotional associations that famous songs evoke, sometimes brilliantly, but novels don’t work in quite the same way. Even if you go so far as to use the lyrics as an epigraph, or even as the title itself, the result is only the faintest of echoes, which doesn’t stop writers from trying. (It’s no accident that if you search for a song like Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain” on Fanfiction.net, you’ll find hundreds of stories.)

This is part of the reason why I prefer to write in silence these days. This isn’t an unbreakable rule: during the rewrite, I’ll often cue up a playlist of songs that I’ve come to think of as my revision music, if only because they take me back to the many long hours I spent as a teenager rewriting stories late into the night. (As it happens, they’re mostly songs from the B-sides collection Alternative by the Pet Shop Boys, the release of which coincided almost exactly with my first extended forays into fiction. Nostalgia, here as everywhere else, can be a powerful force.) During my first drafts, though, I’ve found that it’s better to keep things quiet. Even for Eternal Empire, which was the last of my novels to boast a soundtrack of its own, I ended up turning the volume so low that I could barely hear it, and I finally switched it off altogether. There’s something to be said for silence as a means of encouraging words to come and fill that empty space, and this is as true when you’re seated at your desk as when you’re taking a walk. Music offers us an illusion of intellectual and emotional engagement when we’re really just passively soaking up someone else’s feelings, and the gap between song and story is so wide that I no longer believe that the connection is a useful one.

This doesn’t mean that music doesn’t have a place in a writer’s life, or that you shouldn’t keep playing it if that’s the routine you’ve established. (As it happens, I’ve spent much of my current writing project listening to Reflektor by Arcade Fire.) But I think it’s worth restoring it to its proper role, which is that of a stimulus for feelings that ought to be explored when the music stops. The best art, as I’ve noted elsewhere, serves as a kind of exercise room for the emotions, a chance for us to feel and remember things that we’ve never felt or tried to forgotten. Like everyone else, I’ll often hear a song on the radio or on old playlist, like “Two-Headed Boy Part 2” by Neutral Milk Hotel, that reminds me of a period in my life I’ve neglected, or a whole continent of emotional space that I’ve failed to properly navigate. That’s a useful tool, and it’s one that every writer should utilize. The best way to draw on it, though, isn’t to play the song on an endless loop, but to listen to it once, turn it off, and then try to recapture those feelings in the ensuing quiet. If poetry, as Wordsworth said, is emotion recollected in tranquility, then perhaps fiction is music recollected—or reconstructed—in silence. If you’ve done it right, the music will be there. But it only comes after you’ve turned the volume down.

Turning down the volume

For years, I listened to music while I wrote. When I was working on my first few novels, I went so far as to put together playlists of songs that embodied the atmosphere or mood I wanted to evoke, or simply songs that seemed conductive to creating the proper state of mind, and there’s no question that a lot of other writers do the same. (If you spend any time on the writing forums on Reddit, you’ll see some variation of the question “What’s your writing playlist?” posted once every couple of days.) This may have been due to the fact that my first serious attempts at writing coincided with a period in my twenties when most of us are listening to a lot of music anyway. And it resulted in some unexpected pleasures, in the form of highly personal associations between certain songs and the stories I was writing at the time. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to Eternal Youth by Future Bible Heroes without thinking of my novelette “The Boneless One,” since it provided the backdrop to the wonderful weeks I spent researching and writing that story, and much of the tone and feel of my novel Eternal Empire is deliberately indebted to the song “If I Survive” by Hybrid, which I’ve always felt was a gorgeous soundtrack waiting for a plot to come along and do it justice.

Yet here’s the thing: I don’t think that this information is of any interest of all to anyone but me. It might be interesting to someone who has read the stories and also knows the songs—which I’m guessing is a category that consists of exactly one person—but even then, I don’t know if the connection has any real meaning. Aside from novels that incorporate certain songs explicitly into the text, as we see in writers as different as Nick Hornby and Stephen King, a writer’s recollection of a song that was playing while a story was written is no different from his memory of the view from his writing desk: it’s something that the author himself may treasure, but it has negligible impact on the reader’s experience. If anything, it may be a liability, since it lulls the writer into believing that there’s a resonance to the story that isn’t there at all. Movies can, and do, trade on the emotional associations that famous songs evoke, sometimes brilliantly, but novels don’t work in quite the same way. Even if you go so far as to use the lyrics as an epigraph, or even as the title itself, the result is only the faintest of echoes, which doesn’t stop writers from trying. (It’s no accident that if you search for a song like Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain” on Fanfiction.net, you’ll find hundreds of stories.)

This is part of the reason why I prefer to write in silence these days. This isn’t an unbreakable rule: during the rewrite, I’ll often cue up a playlist of songs that I’ve come to think of as my revision music, if only because they take me back to the many long hours I spent as a teenager rewriting stories late into the night. (As it happens, they’re mostly songs from the B-sides collection Alternative by the Pet Shop Boys, the release of which coincided almost exactly with my first extended forays into fiction. Nostalgia, here as everywhere else, can be a powerful force.) During my first drafts, though, I’ve found that it’s better to keep things quiet. Even for Eternal Empire, which was the last of my novels to have a soundtrack of its own, I ended up turning the volume so low that I could barely hear it, and I finally switched it off altogether. There’s something to be said for silence as a means of encouraging words to come and fill that empty space, and this is as true when you’re seated at your desk as when you’re taking a walk. Music offers an illusion of intellectual and emotional engagement when we’re really just passively soaking up someone else’s feelings, and the gap between song and story is so wide that I no longer believe that the connection is a useful one.

This doesn’t mean that music doesn’t have a place in a writer’s life, or that you shouldn’t keep playing it if that’s the routine you’ve established. But I think it’s worth restoring it to its proper role, which is that of a stimulus for feelings that ought to be explored when the music stops. The best art, as I’ve noted elsewhere, serves as a kind of exercise room for the emotions, a chance for us to feel and remember things that we’ve never felt or tried to forgotten. Like everyone else, I’ll often hear a song on the radio or randomly on old playlist, like “Two-Headed Boy Part 2” by Neutral Milk Hotel, that reminds me of a period in my life I’ve neglected, or a whole continent of emotional space that I’ve failed to properly navigate. That’s a useful tool, and it’s one that every writer should utilize. The best way to draw on it, though, isn’t to play the song on an endless loop, but to listen to it once, turn it off, and then try to recapture those feelings in the ensuing quiet. If poetry, as Wordsworth said, is emotion recollected in tranquility, then perhaps fiction is music recollected—or reconstructed—in silence. If you’ve done it right, the music will be there. But it only comes after you’ve turned the volume down.