As a child, Jeff Mangum experienced recurring lucid dreams – nightmares, really – of a bomb hurtling towards him. He’d always manage to wake himself up right before it hit, but in the morning light his hands felt huge and the bed seemed as hard as concrete. In others, he’d see spirits moving through walls or giant bugs crawling on the floor. One time, in a hotel in Amarillo, Texas, he realised he’d been sleepwalking and came to while standing on top of the sheets, staring at what looked like spotlights making popping sounds. This is an insight into the unquiet mind that plagues the chief architect of Neutral Milk Hotel.
In early 1995, days before he was due to fly to Denver to record debut album On Avery Island with boyhood friend and musical co-conspirator Robert Schneider, Mangum walked around his hometown of Ruston, Louisiana, with a curious preoccupation on his mind: would the world make more sense if he knew the entirety of its history, or would it merely make him insane?
Concluding it would most certainly be the latter, he retreated to a bookstore in an effort to distract himself from such impossible thoughts, picking up a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary Of A Young Girl. So consumed was he by the implicit sadness of the teenage holocaust victim’s story that he spent the next three days crying. Suddenly, songs were demanding to be written about it. And 50 years on from the end of the second World War, the seeds of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea were sown in the most unlikely of sources.
