Is it tied to shame or sex, or both -- or broth?

This isn't a recent article, but it has some nice commentary by Jeff Mangum about various Neutral Milk Hotel songs.

He grew up in a deeply religious family in rural Louisiana, though he makes it clear, over the phone from Athens, Georgia, that "I wasn't brought up, like, Southern Baptist burn-in-Hell. I was brought up, like, weird sorta psychedelic Christianity."

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Even Mangum's most patently nonsensical musings have an amusing, playfully poetic ring. He once wrote an item to publicize an appearance by New Zealand singer/songwriter Chris Knox that concluded: "What makes great art? Music? Is it tied to shame or sex, or both -- or broth? It is none of these things but only in being born we walk in the womb forever battling egg-shaped saucers."

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"There are only a couple of parts that seem to me to be pure dream-sequence type of stuff," he explains. "But 95 percent of the album is either experiences that I've had or experiences that friends have had, or historical figures -- it's all real stuff. I mean, I could write a song where I'm just farting images all over the place, but I don't think I'd be very satisfied with that. Even though when other people do that I think it's amazing. I love that, you know.

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Although he's grown rather tight-lipped when it comes to expounding on the stories swimming in the prose of In the Aeroplane, he gave up some quickie plot sketches to Denver's Westword last year while the album was still being recorded. "One of my new songs ["Oh, Comely"] talks about Siamese twins freezing to death in the forest," he said. "One is saying, 'Don't worry. We've been attached forever, and we'll end up in someone else's stomach together anyway.' "

Of "Two-Headed Boy," which is broken into two nonadjacent parts on the album, he said, "it's about a two-headed boy who makes a magic radio for his girlfriend, but then she breaks it. It's also about the end of the world, and he's in a jar, and you can't really tell if he's on display or real or not. But it's also kind of like his dreams. At the end, everything he's ever wanted is in these packages under a Christmas tree in the snow."

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"The album takes place in the past and the present," says Mangum. "But for me time is kinda weird anyway. I don't think I'm in the now very much. A lot of what we base the now on culturally -- I feel pretty out of it most of the time. I live in an insular world. I surround myself with old records and weird shit; I forget that most kids these days don't know what a vinyl record is. So it freaks me out."

To make things even more complicated, some of the album's narrative lines are sustained over the course of several different songs, with slight variations in character. You'd have to know that the brother of one of Mangum's friends committed suicide to figure out certain connections. The dead brother haunts a ferris wheel in "Holland, 1945." And he lurks on "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two," which begins as a father's lament for his son in the third person, then switches to a brother's lament in the first person: "You left with your head filled with flames/And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth/Push the pieces in place, make your smile sweet . . . And in my dreams you're alive."

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"Everything's sorta interconnected, and everything is reliant on everything else to exist, and everyone is a part of that. And I just think that, I don't know, the way things are set up right now doesn't leave very much room for wonderment. So much of it is like driven to pay your bills and your rent and stuff, you know?" He pauses, and chuckles, still struggling to make himself clear. "I don't know. It gets hard to explain."