Neutral Milk Hotel was an American band formed by Jeff Mangum in Ruston, Louisiana, in 1989. They were active until 1998, and then from 2013 to 2015. The band’s music featured a deliberately low quality sound, influenced by indie rock and psychedelic folk. Mangum wrote surreal and opaque lyrics that covered a wide range of topics, including love, spirituality, nostalgia, sex, and loneliness. He and the other band members played a variety of instruments, including non-traditional instruments like the singing saw and uilleann pipes.
Neutral Milk Hotel began as one of Mangum’s home recording projects. After graduating high school, Mangum lived as a vagabond and sporadically released music. In 1996, he worked with childhood friend Robert Schneider to record the album On Avery Island, which received modest reviews and sold around 5,000 copies. Mangum recruited musicians Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes, and Scott Spillane for the band’s second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Its 1998 release received mostly positive, but not laudatory reviews.
Neutral Milk Hotel’s second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, was produced by Schneider, and was recorded from July to September 1997. Schneider used new recording techniques to capture Mangum’s lo-fi preferences. Mangum liked having a layer of distortion over the music, but Schneider did not use standard effects equipment such as Big Muffs or distortion pedals. Instead, Schneider used heavy compression and placed a Bellari RP-220 tube mic pre-amp close to Mangum’s guitar. Schneider then ran the sound through a mixing console, and maxed out the sound on a cassette tape. This process was done for nearly every instrument used on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Schneider claimed that the non-linearities of microphone distortion gave the album its unique “warm” quality.
While on tour, the band’s popularity grew through Internet exposure. This negatively affected Mangum, whose mental health began to deteriorate; he did not want to continue touring and Neutral Milk Hotel went on hiatus shortly after. During their hiatus, Neutral Milk Hotel gained a cult following and the critical standing of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea rose tremendously. Several music outlets such as Pitchfork and Blender called In the Aeroplane Over the Sea a landmark album for indie rock and one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. Many indie rock groups such as Arcade Fire and the Decemberists were influenced by Neutral Milk Hotel’s eclectic music and earnest lyrics.
In April 2013, Neutral Milk Hotel officially announced a reunion tour with all four members of the band. In an interview with Orlando Weekly, Schneider said: “[The hiatus] certainly wasn’t purposeful, and I’m not sure [Mangum] even realised he was being a recluse until it was overwhelmingly the case that everyone was talking about it. I’ve known for seven years that he was going to start touring. I didn’t know if he was going to actually start doing it, but I knew in my heart that he was working toward it.” Neutral Milk Hotel toured from 2013 to 2015. In a 2014 post on the Neutral Milk Hotel website, the band members wrote how their 2015 tour would be their last tour for the “foreseeable future”, and that they were going to take an extended hiatus.The post stated: “Dear friends we love you but it’s time to say goodbye for the never ending now.”
