Free Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper

doubled the vocal.
    Vocal doubling was a convention that both Jeff and Robert had long relied on while recording alone, an easy way of making a performance sound rich and layered. When Jeff came to Denver to work on
On Avery Island
, he’d told Robert, “I don’t want to double my vocals anymore. I just want them to sound like me singing.” This proved a hard habit for Robert to break, and he’d often suggest doubling, only to have Jeff say no. But by the time
Aeroplane
rolled around, Jeff had relaxed his strict anti-doubling policy, resulting in some striking effects on otherwise spare vocal performances.
    As a producer, Robert feels that he has a particular gift for capturing elusive, unique aspects of performance. “I like to think I have a talent at capturing actual spirits and emotions. I don’t mean like souls, I just mean a spirit, a feeling, off the tape. You can create a certain environment with people you’re recording with and make them feel free. It doesn’t feel like they’re under any pressure, and it feels creative and like you can do anything. If you capture it, without beating it into the ground and doing it over and over again, it, that’s a real thing. You make a real sound that is recognizable to other ears, and seems spontaneous and creative. That spiritedness, like an old jazz recording or an old R&B recording, it’s a real sound.
    “You can attribute it to a lot of factors, like the performance and way it was recorded, but in reality, people recognize cues from other people. We build up our world by our interactions with other people. The point is that there are cues that we get from other humans that
sound like
what they are doing, and you can capture those sounds on tape. You can capture the sound of creativity and energy, and it’s separate from the performance and the production and the miking and all of these different things. There’s just this youthfulness, this untamed quality that, if you can capture it, resonates with people when they hear it. Like when you hear an old R&B recording from
before
they were multi-tracking, you’re getting the soulfulness, the musicianship, all these different things that are great about it. But on top of that, there’s this extra quality of rawness and reality. It’s listening in to people’s lives, and when you capture that it resonates for people who hear it. It feels like you’re at a party, or at the circus—you really feel it when you hear it. And that’s whatI’m proudest of, that and capturing his vocals.”
    The first time Great Lakes’ Ben Crum met Robert Schneider, he was “surprised to hear him talk about Neutral Milk Hotel as if he was in the band.” But on some very real level, Robert was a band member, and his production and engineering choices had as much to do with the sound of the record as any of the players. Ben muses, “If Jeff and the band had gone into a ‘regular’ studio it never would have sounded anything like that. Robert gave it that sort of cartoon kind of sound, where the instruments are all more colorful than they actually are in real life—warmer, more present.”
    For Julian, a defining quality of making Neutral Milk Hotel music and being in the band was the way the players navigated through the chaos, without seeking to control it. This was very much the case in their lives, out on the road or in whatever nest they found along the way, but even more so when it came time to try to capture the band’s essence in the studio. Julian reflects, “I think I really recognized how important that chaos was, how much of the magic of what was happening radiated through that chaos. In a weird way, I felt that the record was supposed to be chaotic: there needed to be an explosion if there was going to be a record of the thing. Maybe loving that chaos was part of my job—because I know Robert’s job was to try and reel everything in and make it not fall apart. Without each of us being what we were, things would