Interview: Grizzly Bear band

Published on Sunday 1 November 2009 12:48

SOMETHING tells me Grizzly Bear are going to be hard work. It could be their music, which requires a fair degree of concentration, although it's lovely all the same. They look very clever – they're certainly smart enough to dispense with conventional choruses – and, call me shallow, this only makes me want to chuck in the odd daft question.

Such as: you call yourselves Grizzly Bear but what would you do if confronted by a real grizzly – incapacitate it by lengthy intellectual discourse? Something tells me this would cause their serious expressions to contract into deep frowns.

But, five minutes in, Chris Taylor and I are chit-chatting about Jay-Z and Beyonc's relationship. Taylor – jazz-trained, Grizzly Bear's producer as well as their bassist and therefore possibly the cleverest of the Brooklyn-based quartet – seems to be something of an expert. "They're a really, really, really cute couple," he says, "and really in love."

Grizzly Bear are this year's Fleet Foxes: American dudes in plaid shirts who've gone from indie to mainstream with close harmonies which evoke the Beach Boys at their most experimental and the golden age of psychedelia. The Grizzly noise, though, is more otherworldly so it won't have done them any harm at all to have the hip hop overlord and the bootilicious queen of R&B turn up at one of their gigs. "We were playing a free concert in Brooklyn just blocks from my home," says Taylor. "It was lovely and sunny down on the waterfront plus it was my birthday. All our friends showed up and I was serving them beer all afternoon. It was going to be a great day whatever, and then we heard that Jay-Z and Beyonc were coming.

"We were like: 'Yeah, right'. Their names went on the guestlist and we still didn't believe it. Then, as we were getting ready to play, we saw them walking across the park with Beyonc's sister Solange. The pressure! But everyone played really well."

There is now YouTube footage of Beyonc dancing to Grizzly Bear and if anyone can find the beat in their songs, she can. Like most of the world's males and millions of females too, Taylor is in awe of her. "I saw her play in Japan and the memory of that gold dress will stay with me forever."

He's flattered by her patronage of his band's music but adds: "That doesn't mean I want to see her swap the dress for a red checked shirt anytime soon."

Formed five years ago in Brooklyn and with a breakthrough third album Veckatimest expected to figure high up the critics' polls of the year's best, Grizzly Bear – Chris Bear, Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen and Taylor – probably believe in fate by now.

Back in May, Taylor was quoted as saying the band liked to "be out in nature, making fires, drinking cocktails and singing along to Beyonc" during the intense sessions for the album, which takes its name from the uninhabited Cape Cod island glimpsed from Droste's grandmother's house where it was recorded. Four months later, the self-same Beyonc is declaring herself a fan.

Further back, when the band were "really poor, sharing beds and driving hundreds of miles to gigs in draughty vans" they'd cheer themselves up by singing the Doobie Brothers' What A Fool Believes – "a perfect pop song which just infects you with happiness", according to Taylor, with vocals by Michael McDonald.

"We started doing that on a really scary Scandinavian tour in these horrible upright seats, sliding around on the ice in total darkness." Then, in the midst of their fantastic summer, the Grizzlys chanced their luck and asked McDonald if he'd help them re-do a Veckatimest track and the soft-rock legend obliged.

There's also the Radiohead connection. "I used to be a real jazz-head and rock just didn't fascinate me," adds Taylor. "But then Radiohead came along with this really gorgeous music with so many emotional layers. That totally changed my perception. If I hadn't heard them, I probably wouldn't be doing this.

"And I can still remember where I was when our manager phoned and said they wanted us to support them: in my apartment tending my cactus collection. So we toured the States together and each night Grizzly Bear would be cooking in the amphitheatre carpark and the great Radiohead would come by and stare at our little hibachi grill and say: 'This is very King Of The Hill.'

"That was last summer, when we probably thought things couldn't get any more surreal for us. But recently it's all been too crazy. Never in our wildest dreams did we think this intimate music would have such an impact. It's quite shocking."

Perhaps the most surreal thing was the night they were backed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. "That was amazing – super-dreamy," adds Taylor. "Instead of me playing flute multi-tracked like on the album, we had 13 real flautists. It was how we wanted the record to sound but we felt so small standing in front of an orchestra, and so undeserving."

Grizzly Bear, as represented by Chris Taylor, turn out to be nothing like hard work. He's a refugee from jazz who hated its snobbery and competitiveness and, like Jay-Z, wants nothing to do with the rock-hip hop phoney war started by Liam Gallagher.

So I try out my bear-avoidance question. "That's so weird you asked me this! I was camping in the Catskill Mountains just last weekend and I heard one. It was no moose – I've seen black bears there twice before. Play dead or wave your arms around? Apparently it's different for different species. Ain't life just too hard... "

Grizzly Bear play the ABC, Glasgow, tomorrow. www.grizzly-bear.net

This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on November 1, 2009