Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea [mp3]
It was the saw that got my attention and he could tell. “That’s a musical saw he’s playing there.” Ben turned up the volume. Behind us, Cara, Dan and Allen stopped talking because the music was too loud. Instead, they looked forward at the back of our seats with blank expressions. Maybe they were thinking about nuclear weapons. In the front seats, Ben and I stared forward through the windshield at the traffic. The car on our right had Alaska plates and I wondered if they just drove into Des Moines today and why. Maybe they took it’s geographic location to mean that it was the spiritual center of the continental states. I started to think something else but the musical saw came ambling into my mind again. At least I assumed that the depressed warbling aloft underneath guitar fuzz and the depressed warbling voice of Jeff Magnum was a musical saw. I had never heard a musical saw before. I remember once while working on my Uncle’s pallet farm, dropping a standard non-musical saw from a short height and the sound it made was kind of nice and remembering it now, I thought, “That sounds kinda like the saw I dropped once.” Then I started to reminisce about the fort I built in the pallet stacks with my brother and we would watch the working men walking to their pallet posts through the spaces between each slat of wood, throwing rocks at the ones we didn’t like and making farm animal sounds at the ones that we did like when Ben started to shout.
“This is definitely one of those albums that you remember the first time you heard it. Where you were and who you were with. Last album I heard like that was OK Computer. It was Independence Day and I had my headphones on and I was laying on my back in the grass on a hill staring up at the fireworks exploding in the sky. Occasionally, I would forget what was happening and then my girlfriend’s face would come into my periphery as she neared in for a kiss. She would kiss me and behind her a firework would create a halo around her head.”
Ben had to yell his story and it annoyed me a little because I had to concentrate to understand his strained words over the music. I wanted to tell him that I don’t care about Radiohead right now. In the end though, I thought that the story Ben told was kind of charming and it made me want to listen to OK Computer. I had never listened to it before, I realized. Reflecting on what he said as the song came to an end, I wondered if I would remember all of this, as Ben suggested I might. I thought that I would but it depressed me to think that in several years time, I would listen to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea only to be returned to this dank van in Des Moines, en route for Dowling High School to compete in a debate tournament. I would remember that I spent one weekend in March discussing the policy implications of nuclear disarmament, or maybe a ban on nuclear testing, or else some strategic change in defense policy and that during that weekend, I was the victorious debater only twice in six tries. I might even begin to fret at the enormous threat posed by nuclear weapons the second I heard the opening chords.
I was worried and I was young. The rest of the album proceeded without much consideration for the impact my weekend might have on future listens. Instead, I thought about Cara and how I might come to have sex with her. And I forgot the fact that I should be depressed by my poor showing at Dowling in the future when I heard this album and so it was, until now.
Neutral Milk Hotel is a rhythm and blues band from Athens. The featured song is from the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
