"Yeah, I've been around since 1983!" says Mangum in husky drawl, and with the slightest hint of a Southern accent. He is joking about his earliest teenage recordings in smalltown Louisiana.
"My first songs were about the kinds of things you talk about when you're 13 - running away from home, defecating. I'm going to get those tapes out someday . . .
"When you grow up where I did, in the South, there's not many people who share your viewpoint. You seek out freaks. You see someone walking down the street with green hair, and you're like 'Hey! Come back here!'
"Will Hart [now of the Olivia Tremor Control] also lived in my town, Ruston. We were into punk and put on a few shows - Calamity Jane, the Supreme Dicks, Sebadoh.
"I went to college in town. But since it was just down the road, it was kind of like being back in high school. I tried pretty hard to fail out, and finally quit after two years.
"I went to Athens [Georgia] because Will had gone there. I was in a band called Synthetic Flying Machine. I like it more in Athens because of the music and lifestyle. But I wouldn't want to live there forever. Too many crazy people. Like my roommates - I had to watch out they didn't kill me. I went out west for awhile, lived in LA and Denver. I had to find something new.
"I was always doing Neutral Milk Hotel on my own," Jeff explains. "It was kind of a side thing, away from being in a band. I never thought it would become my main thing. It always sort of just for me - to get extra songs on tape, ones that I didn't think fit with the band."
I ask if Neutral Milk Hotel became a bigger deal for him after the early '90s spate of home recordings on indie labels.
"Well, sort of. But it wasn't like I was thinking, 'Wow, now I can do that stuff and people will listen.' That never really entered my mind. The music I did on my own was special because it was my music, at its most basic, not trying to fit someplace.
"I sent out a few tapes and got a call from Cher Doll in Seattle. They were like, 'Do you want to do a record?' I said 'Sure.' That was it. We did singles and a few other things leading up to the album. It's not just me in Neutral Milk Hotel, though. I wrote all the songs and sang and played, but I still think of the records as more filled out - more like a band - than my original idea of the music was."
At a time when indie bands are branching out from pop-song forms, the Neutral Milk Hotel album, On Avery Island (Merge) - despite its dalliances with noise and with bleating, marching-style horns - is pretty traditional. With a layer of fuzz on top, these are melancholy tunes filtered through a '90s-style lo-fi lens. Moving past the limits of collective playing, Mangum downplays rhythm and lingers over his vocals, freelancing with melody.
In fact, the record could be said to be a vocal improv on a mini song suite. But that doesn't imply conceptual pretentiousness or enforced repetition. There are enough strange noises and breakdowns to keep you guessing, and the tunes he rings variations on come across catchy rather than as vocal improvisation for its own sake. Nothing falls apart.
The word "suite" in rock is usually for prog-style motifs which get developed (or not) inside a larger idea. But Mangum's songs rise up whole again, the emphasis not on any extended work but on the tune itself refocused, extended, given to us one piece at a time. And why not? The tunes are beautiful, and it's a pleasure to hear them return with new additions. The lyrics, spewed rapid-fire, concern those moments during a person's twenties when relationship and freedom are tested together, when everything but fun is tentative, before commitments turn into battles. All is loose and a bit mysterious.
"I'll probably do a couple more records like this one. But I want to do noise, something weirder, too. I've always listened to jazz guys like [Eric] Dolphy and Pharaoh Sanders. I saw him last week; I'd heard him for so long . . . to see him live blew me away. I'm in New York for a bit, then we'll probably move out to some small town in Arizona. We're going to tour later this year. It'll be a band, and we'll probably do some folky songs, and some noisier stuff.
Jeff Mangum's presence on a prominent indie label like Merge is a healthy development, I think. Whether his music fits into a lo-fi movement or not, his songs are a way for indie-style pop to continue developing after the four-person band ideas of first-generation acts like R.E.M. have either played themselves out or moved into a rock context. Stuff like On Avery Island, too delicate for any alternative market, would not have been released with such a high profile ten years ago. But it's just that reputation preceding them that has gotten a four-tracker like Jeff Mangum to fill out his bedroom recordings - to play them without obscure indulgences and squeeze them into a big, uniquely personal statement. The result is a music that doesn't forsake tune, or attempt to leave rock behind; at the same time, it is too personal to fit with a band's need for variety. This record benefits from its single-mindedness. Its sharply honed ambition doesn't leave out popwise roots. And it still delivers plenty of surprises.