So was it hard for Droste to relinquish complete control of a band that began as a solo project?
“I was actually really excited about it. I liked being challenged and just bouncing ideas off each other. I think the end product is much better when we were able to all sort of . . . not combat each other, but butt heads at times and come to better conclusions together. It’s really communal creativity going on, and everyone’s really involved. Even in the live show, everyone sings, so there’s not really like super front-person vibe. And I’m glad because I didn’t really want to be that.”
Although the album’s press release will have you believe it was recorded in Droste’s mom’s living room “in a yellow house just off Cape Cod,” the yellow house is actually in Watertown. Droste’s family moved into it the day he was born in 1978, and he lived there until he was 18, with the exception of one year — “not a very good year” — when the family moved to Colorado temporarily. That year and Droste’s relationship with his father are the subject of Yellow House’s melancholy closer, “Colorado”: “When I clung to you there was nothing to hold on tight with/You left me adrift/Colorado, what now?”
His Massachusetts roots run deep: his mother is a member of the Forbes family, Boston brahmins who got rich in the Old China Trade of the 19th-century. He’s a great-great-great-grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a distant cousin of John Forbes Kerry. His grandfather Elliot Forbes was a prominent figure on the Harvard faculty, Fanny Peabody professor of music for nearly half a century. Despite that connection and the fact that his mother is a music teacher at Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Droste is the only member of Grizzly Bear with no formal musical training. Nonetheless, he says his family had a big influence on his music: “There was a lot of singing in my family. My grandfather played the piano and would sing a lot. Have you ever seen those movies when they gather ’round and sing by the piano? My family did that. I think that’s why I got an appreciation for the voice, because he [Elliot Forbes] was a composer and a conductor and he listened to a lot of choral music. I think that sort of through osmosis that was what influenced me the most — singing.”
Although there are some long instrumental passages on Yellow House and much of the vocalizing is wordless (the entire lyrical content of the album fits on the tray card underneath the CD), Droste says that many of the songs were written using nothing more than vocals. “I do a lot of sketches on my computer with just singing chord progressions or singing background stuff that gets transferred to guitar, because that’s sort of how I write, with just singing and sort of intuitive melodies that I come up with because I’m not trained. That’s how I write — a little more sloppy, confused, a little less organized. But I think the part that I focus on the most and that Dan and I think about are harmonies and melodies.”
And though much of what’s been written about Yellow House has focused on the deft use of “space” and “atmosphere,” it’s the attention to those basic pop-music elements — melody and harmony — that makes the album so rewarding. Fortunately there are still many people willing to spend the time and listen.
GRIZZLY BEAR | Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston | February 2 [officially sold out] | 617.369.3306
On the Web
Grizzly Bear: http://www.grizzly-bear.net/
