Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – My Desert Island Disc

I hated Matt Smith.

We were rival guitar players in rival high school bands: He was with The Reeky
Shanks, a name stolen from Shakespeare1, and I was the songwriter for Melting New
Hampshire, a name stolen from an article about ski conditions in the winter of 95’. They
were punk. We were ska/pop. They had piercings. We had glasses. They borrowed riffs
from Green Day and had girls. We rehearsed in my living room – alone.
To complicate matters, Matt Smith was next-door neighbors with my lead singer,
whose fraternal twin brother happened to be the Shanks’ bass player. The Rock scene at
Pennsbury High School circa 1996 was very incestuous.
One day I was over at Dan’s, MNH’s singer’s house, working out some lyrics for a
song called Try it Out about Gary Kasparov, the famed Russian chess player and his
recent match against Big Blue, the IBM chess supercomputer. Yes, we were nerds and are
lyrics confirmed the fact. I had this wonderful arpeggio on the guitar and Dan played the
chords (C-F-G-F) on my accordion – a Christmas gift from my father. Sidenote: Some
kids get cars when they are sixteen, I got an accordion. I remember opening the gift and
thinking to myself – Great, there goes Junior Prom. Nevertheless, I had to make the
accordion work to my advantage and this song about loneliness and chess was the perfect
ailment to my predicament.
We were sitting in Dan’s room working out the lyrics (we opted in telling the
narrative from the point of view of the computer), when in strutted, guitar in hand, my
rival, Matt Smith.
I can remember my blood boiling. What was he doing here?
“Hey guys, what are you working on?”
The next hit single.
“I song about Chess.”
“Sweet, I just wrote a song called Apocalypse at the Mall.”
Man, even his song titles were better than ours.
Dan chimed in. “Are you playing out anytime soon?”
“Yea, we got an acoustic gig at Yardley Leaf and Bean (the local cigar shop/coffee
house)”
I was envious. I wanted to play at a coffee shop.
“Your twin, Chris, and I, are playing some Neutral Milk Hotel covers.”
Dan and I both went: “Who?”

That’s when I was educated in the ways of Neutral Milk Hotel. Matt Smith picked
up his guitar and sang: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The jangling progression – First –
1
Romeo and Juliet: Act IV, Scene I. Juliet:
O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower;
Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk
Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls
minor sixth – major fourth – major fifth and the lyrics of love and heartbreak: “What a
beautiful face, I have found this place…” It was the song I wanted to write. Even I had to
admit Matt Smith had a great voice. But it wasn’t the voice – it was the song. It spoke to
that part of my sixteen year soul. You know, that part that buys into every cliché but
denies it, that longs for a place in this world, but wants to rebel all the same. It was raw,
lo-fi, unpretentious, but totally cool and better-than-you. Here was Matt Smith into it,
singing it, my song (though he didn’t know it and I’m not sure I knew it then either).

I did what most guys do in situations when they are insanely jealous. “It’s all-
right,” I said and I dismissed the song and its words and the band and Matt Smith. After
all, I had a song about chess. I didn’t buy the album or ask Matt or Dan or Chris for a
mixtape. I didn’t ask him to play it again or write down the progression – after all, I
figured it out by watching him. I didn’t even really remember the name of the band
Neutral Milk Hotel or NMH – even though, it was a little like ours MNH, Melting New
Hampshire. I forgot Matt and the band and the album until last year in a coffee shop in
Cambridge, MA when I was working on a short story and the Siren Song called to me
through the loudspeaker.
In that moment, I was back in my childhood – to places long forgotten. It was like
my current state, faux writer and latte drinker, was my island. I was stranded, lost,
desolate, and the familiar and replicable progression of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
brought me back.

To me, a desert island disc has to be the album that connects you to the mainland.
John Donne wrote that “no man is an island” and neither should an album. In the
Aeroplane Over the Sea is the album that connects me back to my childhood, to the joys
of lo-fi rock. There is probably some noteworthy irony in the album’s title, right? If I
were literally stranded on a deserted island, wouldn’t I wish most for a literal airplane to
come over the sea and swoop down to rescue me? But, here I am totally in the figurative
– comfortable to allow the metaphors and music to bring me back, to cool off the hot
days, and help me reflect as I pass the time – preferably under a coconut tree.
The opening song, “The King of Carrot Flowers” is in two parts. The opening line
of the album “When you were young, you were the King of Carrot Flowers” speaks to me
in a profound way. One, I have no real idea what a Carrot Flower is? I imagine it is the
top green part of the carrot that sticks out of the ground. If so, then hot darn, I want to be
the King of Those – Those are cool. But, if my desert island disc has to bring me back to
a time of playful childhood innocence then the first line does just that. From the opening
clause “When you were young”, the singer calls me to a memory, a memory of fields and
carrot tops, when I was my own master.
The first part of the song “King of Carrot Flowers” is more upbeat, the rhythm
suggests something playful, and the lyrics are clearly about love and intimacy. The
second part is more transcendent – sure the lines “I love you Jesus Christ” suggest just
that. But, the song devolves into madness, the horns blare, the rhythm breaks down, and
so do the lines - “the dogs dissolve and drain away / the world it goes” - and by the time,
I reach the third track, I’m there - lost in the music, away from my desert island – back in
the recesses when innocence was king.
I wouldn’t want the music to be too complex on a desert island – not an aria or
prog rock. Lyrically, yes – musically, no. I think Kid A is more accomplished and I dig
Beck’s work. I wouldn’t want an album too polished either like something by Belle and
Sebastian or The Decemberists. I want something that purely speaks not to my ear (and
they are many parts on the album when it doesn’t) but speaks to my soul.
The album for all of its madness is soulful – not in the sense of Ray Charles or
Aretha Franklin, but soulful in the sense that the songs are not constructed for the radio or
sophisticatedly arranged – rather, the songs move and glide with the singer - as the singer,
Jeff Magnum, and lyrics become more frustrated, so does the music, as the song laments,
the music dampens, as the sings whines, so does the violin – slightly off-pitch, but
thematically, right on.
The Tour-De-Force of the album is the third song, the title track, the one Matt
Smith played, and the one I play and annoy my upstairs neighbors with (my wife sends
me to the basement to practice). In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is again about youth taken
too soon. Remember, when I first heard it when I was sixteen, I thought it was a simple
love song, but now that I am older and listen more carefully and know the context of the
song, it is more disturbing and troubling and is not about love at all. It is about death. Not
just any death, but the death of Anne Frank and a reflection on deprived childhood of
Anne Frank. The narrator of the song doesn’t speak of love, but rather how he wants to
escape the idea of a loss childhood, yet “Anne’s ghost all around.” The narrator wants to
remain young and innocence and “laughing all around”. It is a narrator searching for the
mainland, wanting to connect to something, and the story of Anne Frank and resilience
provides that.
Other songs on the album speak to the influence of Anne Frank and her
everlasting influence on those who read her work. “Holland 1945” is louder fare, almost
playful, while “Ghost”, despite being upbeat, depicts Anne as a ghost that “won’t ever
die”. The Anne Frank motifs throughout the album are complicated – in part of “Holland
1945”, Anne becomes a boy and facts of her life are distorted. Clearly, Magnum is
playing with facts to suit his purpose about loss of innocence and Anne’s influence on
others. But, any great song or series of songs are interpretative, soulful, not rooted in a
straight-read or listen. These songs ask the listener to follow an emotional line, not a
sequential one. The songs on Aeroplane aren’t narratives, particularly the ones about
Anne Frank. The question even arises who is the “you” that Magnum speaks so often to
on the album – I am/was selfish enough to assume it was me in the first song, but perhaps
it is Anne Frank, who has lost everything, who was the King of Carrot Flowers. But,
questions like this are just the kind of things I would want on a desert island. Questions
that keep be guessing.
Side Note: If I were to take this album along, it would be helpful of a copy of
Anne Frank were to come along as well. Though, my desert island book would be
something about Faulkner – Absalom, Absaolm, perhaps.
Despite its serious matter and its focus on Anne Frank (a fact I later learned), the
album is also playful and about other matter entirely. He sings twice about a two-headed
boy - “Two-Headed Boy, Part One” and “Two-Headed Boy, Part Two” – great titles. He
also laments with just his acoustic guitar on the romantic ballad “Communist Daughter.”
Yes, I would want something playful as well – music to listen to as I tried to catch fish or
build a sand castle.
 Really, the question of a desert island disc is unfair. How could you ask me to live
without the hits of Thriller or Abbey Road, not to mention anything by Dylan? Oh, I
would want to take Appetite for Destruction for when I was angry, R.E.M.’s Automatic
for the People when I wanted to cry, and, yes, it would be really hard for me to part with
Stankonia. Yes, I would feel stranded without these works. But, to survive the heat and
the abandonment, the loneliness and starvation, I would need an album to connect me
back, one that would is soulful and speaks to my soul, one that is literary and complicated
lyrically, one that is imperfect and playful and relishes in it. Yes, for my desert island
disc, I would have to thank Matt Smith.
Thanks, buddy.
Melting New Hampshire rules!