“Endless Endless” and an Incessant Research Process

Elephant 6’s most famous musician, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, has not granted an on-the-record interview in two decades and likely never will again. That’s why it seemed like such a fascinating subject to investigate. It’s also why the writers who had tried to tackle it before me gave up.

When I first began research for my book — back in 2008, hundreds of interviews ago—one of the most notable things about the Elephant 6 Recording Company, the influential indie rock collective I set out to document, was the lack of reported material available on the community or any of its members, thanks largely to their to-a-person reticence to do interviews. This is most true of the Elephant 6’s most famous musician, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, who has not granted an on-the-record interview in two decades and likely never will again.

That’s why it seemed like such a fascinating subject to investigate. It’s also why the writers who had tried to tackle it before me gave up. Mangum and I eventually spoke many times, but he never agreed to an interview, despite lobbying on my behalf from a few of his closest pals.

After releasing and successfully touring on its now-iconic 1998 In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel went on hiatus, and Mangum disappeared. He stopped performing, he stopped releasing music, he stopped talking to the press. He didn’t tell anybody, even his own bandmates, why he was stopping or even that he was stopping, when simply continuing would have basically guaranteed rock stardom. It’s been the biggest mystery in indie rock ever since.

Though the book includes no firsthand quotes from Mangum and no other one person really knows the answer, I think I solved the mystery, mostly just by talking to people. But what I wanted to make was less about exposure and more about celebration, to convey both textually and extratextually the spirit of this collective that fostered so much creativity and love. My approach reflects that: the book is roughly half oral history, and the remainder is primarily based on interviews I conducted, too. I can’t say I had much of a plan when I started this project, but let me tell you a bit about what I worked out along the way.

The Obvious Part

I knew from the start that, while it would be great if Mangum were willing to talk to me on the record, I’d at least need a backup plan for if he declined the invitation, which he did repeatedly. I’ve spoken to him plenty of times, but I respect his privacy and his reasons for wanting it. To the extent that the mystique is a big reason why his work has resonated with so many people, I would not want to destroy that anyway. So once I started gathering answers to the big questions (by interviewing everyone else, which I’ll cover shortly), I decided I’d want to provoke at least as many questions as I answered.

People write books about subjects who have been dead for centuries, so a book about a quiet-but-alive subject didn’t seem impossible. I could instead rely on interviews with friends and colleagues, as well as secondary sources. Both of those options introduced new challenges, though.

For one thing, even the most effusive and open interviewees got cagey when I brought up Mangum, sometimes because they were afraid of violating his trust, sometimes because they genuinely didn’t know the answer, sometimes both. Plus, since I was writing a book about the collective as a whole and not just Mangum, I focused most of my time with any person on questions they’d actually answer about themselves and other Elephant 6 artists.

When it came to secondary sources, those were not much more helpful. There was really only a two-year period when Mangum was participating in interviews, and I was only able to find most of what I found through sheer luck: most of the articles were originally printed in small zines that no longer exist, were never digitized, and don’t exist in any database I was able to access. I was fortunate to get access to a number of personal archives and found some gems that way, which gave me a whole bunch of direct quotes I could weave into the manuscript, but they mostly just added texture.

Immersing Myself in the Community

When I first started working on this project in earnest, I got a tip from Bryan Poole, who has played in Of Montreal, Elf Power, and a few other Elephant 6 acts. His advice then was: move to Athens, Georgia, where most of the people in the collective still live. He told me some number of other writers had attempted to write a book about the collective, dropped into Athens to start talking to people, and eventually gave up. As a group, the collective was a little distrustful of outsiders in general, but especially journalists. They’ve all had some bad experiences. Beyond that though, even for veteran psychedelic musicians, they tend to be pretty slippery. Some didn’t have email addresses, at least when I got started, and at least a couple didn’t even have phones. Certainly none of them had a day planner, and I’m not sure what percentage of them could tell you what day of the week it is.

So I moved there, first at the beginning of 2010, six months after graduating from college with a journalism degree and zero prospects in that field. I connected with anyone I could before I moved down and then spent eight months there embedding myself in the community. Athens’s size and Southern friendliness made it easy for me to meet people just by hanging out at the right bars and concert venues. I conducted a lot of interviews during this period but was mostly focused on meeting everyone who might be a useful source and then building comfort and trust. When I moved back in late 2015 for a two-year stint, I could focus more on the actual research. There were lots of phone interviews, too, but mostly with people I’d met in person beforehand.

The result, I think, is less investigative journalism and more ethnography. It’s not an insider account, but because it’s such a complicated story, I wanted to present it in a few different styles from a wide variety of perspectives, most of those coming from the people on the inside. Beyond that, mystique is a major reason why so many people love Aeroplane and Mangum and the Elephant 6 as a whole. To destroy that mystique felt like a buzzkill, and not an especially newsworthy one. Moreover, every interview I conducted produced at least as many new questions for me as answers, and curiosity was perhaps the most common trait among the folks I interviewed. To reflect that in the book, I embraced that ambiguity and tried to find more of it. As with the lo-fi music I was writing about, fuzziness became a pronounced feature.

More Than a Whole Ass Decade of Interviews

One of the less conventional aspects of my research process was the span of time I spent working on it, roughly 13 years. The benefits of this approach go beyond this particular book. It’s helped me notice when someone is giving answers they’ve rehearsed, which becomes obvious when they provide wholly identical paragraphs of speech years apart. The converse, when the same questions asked years apart yield totally different responses, usually happens because the subject’s perspective has changed over time or because they’ve just forgotten something. Since I was the one conducting all of these interviews, it also showed me how my own perspective changed over time.

At first, this made me anxious. What value is a book based on interviews when the people interviewed might change their mind about everything? The fixed nature of a book crystallizes everything it contains, even if its contents are, in the real world, quite pliant. Another good thing about spending more than a decade on a book, though, is that it gives you plenty of time to meditate on what the essence of a book even is, and so I’ve made peace with this no-longer-intrusive thought. No one is going to get mad at me because something that was accurate when the book was published is no longer so, any more than anyone would get mad that they look younger in an old photo than they do when they’re looking at it. Once again, fuzziness becomes a feature.

It pains me to say it, but as much as I hate transcribing—it’s one of my least favorite tasks and not even something I can do with music or a basketball game on in the background—I also learned the value of immediate self-transcription. Acknowledging the time-saving value of hiring someone else to complete the task, especially when a quick turnaround is necessary, I will always opt to transcribe myself when feasible, as it’s critical to note tone, long pauses, and other bits of information that don’t usually show up in outsourced transcripts. I always transcribe right after the interview is finished, too, so I can include as much context as possible, things I’d be liable to forget and wouldn’t pick up listening back to the recording: facial expressions, information shared before or after the recorder was running, etc. This becomes absolutely critical when you’re reading years-old transcripts, but it’s valuable even on a much tighter deadline.

The Section in Which I Coolly but Self-Consciously Implore You to Check Out My Book

If journalism is, as Orwell writes, printing something someone else does not want printed, this is perhaps not a truly journalistic work. It was written, if not collaboratively with my primary subjects, with the intent to document their work, their lives, and most of all their philosophies, to present their story as a case study for art making.

A benefit of this ruminant mode of storytelling is the space it offers for commentary and analysis, whether laundered through direct quotes or elucidated through my own interpolations and digressions. Whether or not you’re into Neutral Milk Hotel or other Elephant 6 acts or indie rock in general or music at all, I think it’s a story that can shape how you consume art, but more importantly, inspire you to live your life more expressively. I think this story makes a very strong case for why that sort of creative expression is worthwhile: benefits for mental health, seeing the world through a more discriminating eye, understanding your agency within the world, and most all, forging bonds with other people. The more art a given community produces, the stronger that community tends to be.

As my own worldview congealed around that perspective, it felt increasingly important for the book itself to reflect that. What is art, if not finding different ways to tell the same few stories? Form can tell a story all by itself—at one point, I was planning to present this story as what I believe would have been the first non-fiction choose-your-own-adventure book—but that form is shaped by the creative processes that generate it. That’s true of every track the Elephant 6 ever recorded, and it’s true of the book about them, too.

Ultimately, my research process was rooted in trust and empathy, and I hope that comes through in the book, which you can buy anywhere cool books are sold, or feel free to email me for a review copy.

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