"In the Aeroplane Over the Sea"

Seeing as it just so happens that we started this adventure last Sunday, and i recieved notice that my last outstanding preordered album got on a plane in Syndey last night and is as i write this currently in an aeroplane over the sea, we should epilogue the week by acknowledging that coincidental subplot of a detail and listen to Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. 

Gotta find it though. It's here somewhere. Tricky because it has absolutely no writing anywhere on the jacket. A lot like the blueprints for that cat tower the minions helped me assemble earlier. It's somewhere over on the newer album shelf and it's a vaguish bluey green color, tada found it. ..."built a tower..." that's a fun coincidence. 

This might be my favorite "you can't possibly describe what this is actually supposed to mean" albums of all. The best you can possibly do is take the obvious personal and historical references and make up a scenario in which they all occur. Most people like to say it's some sort of weird dream about Anne Frank. Sure, that's as good as any other explanation, but that's not the actual concept. The actual concept is the creation of the art by taking completely boring everyday mundane things and running them through your brain filter to produce something for other people to consume and experience. 

It's total coincidence that the brownian path i took to get here led to this album, but it's not at all coincidence that that's exactly what this week long adventure was, me explicity showing you how i do that same thing. Remember how i started out calling my crew to man their battle stations on whatever sort of ship i'm running here? Now there's bomber planes swarming overhead. I'm as surprised as anybody. 

So how in the world do you unravel it for yourself? Well, we don't start with wildly speculating about who the king of carrot flowers or the 2-headed boy or the communist daughter are supposed to actually be. Those are all just made up characters there to represent various relationships. No offence to you guys. 

E: some days being a fictional character makes way more sense than anything else. 

S: none taken. 

We start by really pondering how those relationships work inside the art, then transpose that interaction into some more realistic scenario. So for example, it's ridiculous to say something like "this album is Jeff Magnum having a bizarre dream about being in love with Anne Frank." It's better to say that the concept of being in love with Anne Frank is a good analogy for whatever slice of mundanity Jeff was grappling with at the time. 

It's not about who the two headed boy is supposed to be, it's about what two headed boy is doing/experiencing in the story. Not surprisingly it's a song he wrote after attending a carnival/freak circus about a two headed boy in a glass jar who builds a magic radio for his girlfriend and dies. It's a song about being stuck inside the physical reality around you.

Is the album about yearning/merging? Is it about accepting our own mortality? Is it something else entirely? The answer is that it's an album about its own making, the real and the unreal merging to produce an album that represents a snapshot of Neutral Milk Hotel's existence at the time. 

That may sound silly and pointlessly obvious, but the song about the two headed boy he wrote after visiting a carnival serves that function in the unfolding of the album the same way my going to Walmart served a function as the start of my adventure. 

As bizarre and scatterbrained as the whole thing feels, it's exactly like 2525 in the sense that at its heart its about how complicated people seem to make loving each other. 

And we end with dad singing to the two headed boy about how God is the jar that contains your existence, so enjoy eating tomatoes and building a radio for your girlfriend, but don't be mad at her when she leaves. 

The important question, at least to my mind, is does this album take place inside an airplane? No. The album clearly takes place outside the aeroplane and speculates about what's happening inside it. It's literally a made up story about what's happening inside the aeroplane, and you can tell because the album title has quotation marks around it. 

And now that this bizarre week in the life of me, Bottle the Curmudgeon, is officially over, you can read the whole thing in cyclical fashion:

Regenerator