In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Jeff Mangum read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and started having recurring dreams about her. He dreamed of traveling back through time to rescue her. Those dreams became songs, and those songs became one of the most quietly devastating albums in the history of indie rock. That is not a metaphor. That is literally what happened.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was recorded at Pet Sounds Studio in Denver, Colorado over the summer of 1997. Mangum and the band worked with their producer Robert Schneider to create a bespoke fuzz-like distortion that runs across every instrument on the record, acoustic guitar, drums, horns, accordion, banjo, and even the singing saw. That last instrument, a literal handsaw bowed like a cello, wails through several tracks like something between a ghost and a violin and sounds like nothing else you have ever heard on a record. The horn parts were written with a piano by Schneider, who favored melancholy melodies, then layered with chaotic celebratory lines by Scott Spillane, giving the album its emotional whiplash of triumphant and mournful existing in the same breath.

The album came and went quietly in 1998 and sold modestly. Then, slowly, over the following decade, it became a cult object of almost religious intensity. Mangum's mental health suffered under the weight of the attention, and he withdrew from music almost entirely, leaving this album as his final statement. There is only one other Neutral Milk Hotel record. This one is all you need. "Holland, 1945" and "Two-Headed Boy" are as emotionally raw as recorded music gets.