through a bad breakup and was looking for catharsis. So I wrote some songs, put them on a CD, and gave them to my friends. I assumed that would be the end of it.”

Hipster samizdat delivered a copy to Bear, 26, who liked what he heard and played it for Taylor, 27. The two met Droste through a mutual pal, and Bear offered some postproduction and remixing help. The results were released in 2004 as Grizzly Bear’s Horn of Plenty. Rossen, a friend of Bear’s from––seriously––jazz camp, was asked to provide some guitar heft for live shows. “I don’t think of Horn of Plenty as a Grizzly Bear album. It’s more like a weird Polaroid of the fetus,” says Droste, whose grandfather was a Harvard Beethoven scholar and whose previous vocal experience included family singalongs of old folk tunes and not much else. “The band began when Dan joined and we started playing more live and doing his songs too.”

The transition from the bedroom to the stage was tough. “I was scared out of my mind as a performer,” says Droste in a voice that gently reveals a hint of Boston Brahmanism. “I used to look at the floor and try to hide my body with the guitar. Eventually, I was able to look into the crowd. Then I sort of crouched. Then I was able to perform standing up.”

“It’s been like the evolution of man with Ed,” quips the small, quiet Rossen, a Los Angeleno with a bashful smile and his own impressive pedigree—his grandfather, Robert Rossen, directed the Oscar-winning Paul Newman drama

The Hustler and the original All the King’s Men.

But even if Droste views Yellow House (released, as Veckatimest will be, on Warp Records) as the first “real” Grizzly Bear offering, its creation was beset by some typically sophomoric rock-band dysfunction. “Making that album was hard for all of us,” says Rossen, thinking back to a sweltering July the band spent recording the album at Droste’s mom’s house on Cape Cod in 2006.

“There were so many factors. We hadn’t spent so much time together. Ed had never been in a band.

I had never been in a band. We ended up having a lot of needless fights about harmonies.” (Says Bear: “It was like The Real World if The Real World was about not hooking up and passive-aggressive arguments.”)

The clashes were worth it. The album’s tremulous folk melodies and deep-focus soundscapes hit like a bolt from some distant, beautiful blue, winning praise from critics and contemporaries. Both Brazilian electro band CSS and Beirut’s Zach Condon covered “Knife,” a you-done-me-wrong creeper driven by disquieting electric guitars and

Droste’s spectral vocals. “The day Yellow House came out, I played it on repeat,” says Robin Pecknold of Seattle folkies Fleet Foxes. “It had a totally different feeling than any other band I’d heard. All the influences were from before the ’60s—it was inspirational to hear strings and pure harmony used in a modern way. A lot of music that gets called ‘independent’ is indistinguishable from major-label stuff, but Grizzly Bear sounds unique.” Of

Veckatimest, Pecknold says, “It’s so good it makes me want to quit and become a banker.”

Suddenly, a band whose frontman was once afraid to look at the audience was now opening for Radiohead and being invited by Paul Simon to play at a career retrospective. “We’re not going to come out and rock you. It took some time to learn how to play in those kinds of situations,” says Droste, who, before touring with Radiohead, hadn’t been in a stadium since U2’s Zoo TV tour in 1992. He was ahead of Rossen, who’d never been to an arena show until he played one.

But despite their unfamiliarity with tailgating and turnstiles, Rossen and Droste soon found themselves living another rock cliché: the press-fueled rift. Last October, when Rossen released In Ear Park with his Department of Eagles side project, a New York Times article implied that the album was a result of his dissatisfaction with Grizzly Bear. Blogs were quickly alight with speculation that the band was in danger of ending before it could really get started. “That whole thing was ridiculous,” says Rossen, still clearly annoyed. “I was talking with the reporter about the same frustrations I mentioned to you and that became the focus of the story. I also talked a lot about how playing with Department of Eagles made me realize how much I loved being in Grizzly Bear—but that didn’t make it into the story.”

“I was a little weirded out when I saw the Times article,” admits Droste, who was wearing a Department of Eagles T-shirt under his button-down on the night we tried to bowl. “But then Dan explained what happened, and we talked about it, and it’s now a non-issue. The thing is, we’re all so much closer now than we were even a year ago.”

 

“THE IDEA THAT SOMEONE LIKE THOM YORKE WOULD KNOW about Grizzly Bear is still shocking to me,” says Chris Taylor. He and Chris Bear are having lunch at a shabby-chic bistro in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The waitress has just delivered some com-

S T YLING B Y ERICA BLUMEN THAL; GROOMING B Y DENNIS GOTS AT COMMUNI T Y N YC USING BUMBLE AND BUMBLE; SE T DESIGN B Y AND Y HARMAN AT THE WALL GROUP; CLO THING PROVIDED B Y LOOMS TATE, PAR TIK ERVELL, BILLY REID, BBLESSING, AND RAG AND BONE

62 JUNE 2009 / GET AXXXXX XXXXRST AT SPIN.COM