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long piece with the drone that ends with the gamelan piece. It’s probably one of the favorite things that I’ve everworked on.” This song, “Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye,” featured a drone Robert created from looping tape delays of a skipping banjo record Jeff selected and an orchestra of Denver musicians, among them Merisa Bissinger, Hilarie Sidney, Dane Terry, Lisa Janssen and Aaron Reedy, playing Indonesian instruments.
    Jeff’s certainty of what he didn’t want the album to sound like didn’t always kick in until after a track was nearly complete, which meant that many things recorded for
On Avery Island
ended up being erased. Sometimes Robert would argue for a mix or an arrangement, “Okay. I worked really hard all day doing that and it’s great.” But ultimately, he knew his job was to realize Jeff’s vision, and it if didn’t sound right to Jeff, then it simply was not Neutral Milk Hotel music. “At first it was frustrating, but I came to enjoy it. That’s how I learned to produce, doing that record, because I totally had to let go of what I thought it should be like.” Robert likens his role as producer-collaborator to that of Tibetan monks who paint elaborate mandalas in colored sand, then blow them away, loving the beauty while accepting its impermanence.
    The connection between Jeff and Robert was deeper and more personal than just artist/producer. Their long history of friendship and understanding of each others’ peccadilloes and emotional needs allowed Robert to create a safe working space where Jeff could become more fully himself. “We were very closely connected at the time—and we still are, but we have our own lives now. He was my dear friend, and in a sense I was trying to soothe him and make him feel confident. And trying to do something great for him, as opposed to just trying to do something great for the sake ofart. When I think about the records, I don’t know if there are any records that were ever made like that.”
    Well, of course there is a long history of producers trying to make something great for the artist, just rarely in a traditional studio environment. Robert’s work with Jeff seems closer to those brave cultural chroniclers who dragged heavy tape or wire recorders around to make field recordings in jungles, swamps and (if we briefly allow ourselves a peak into Jeff Mangum’s future) Bulgarian music festivals.
    Once the recordings were finished, Jeff made copies for his friends. Julian Koster remembers first hearing it while driving an enormously long station wagon through roads bordered by corn and wheat. “I was really amazed by how different it was from anything that I’d ever heard come out of him. The things that he had shared with me were so chaotic—it was a wonderful chaos, a crazy sort of freedom. It was just such an amazing, surreal thing Jeff had expressed through an album—almost like an
album
, a big leather-bound thing full of photographs. It was this really bizarre new chapter. I know that it was really scary for him—as it is for everybody—sharing things with the outside world, when the things that you’re sharing are almost the whole of your insides, the thing without which there’d be no purpose to you. Just to let it go out into the world is a tremendous thing. I think he’d tried several different approaches at trying to share that. So it was neat and interesting that he’d figured that out and finally settled on this. To me it wasn’t definitive. There were all these cassettes, all these moments; all this music that was Jeff’s music, so this thing was just a thing to me. It goes without saying that I loved it. It was Jeff; I love Jeff.”

In Queens there was a queen named Marie, and in her castle all things were possible
    On Avery Island
was different from the tape releases that had preceded it. Not only was it a more complex piece of work, with arrangements that couldn’t be convincingly replicated by Jeff alone