Recording
With the four-piece band line-up in place, Grizzly Bear began recording at Ed Droste's mother's house in Cape Cod in July 2005, with bassist and multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor adopting the role of producer. Drummer Christopher Bear stated, "A lot of the stuff we'd end up recording was really late at night, after voices had really warmed up, or after properly loosening up at our religious cocktail hour." Following a month of initial tracking, each band member added individual overdubs at a later date, with Bear noting, "After the initial basic tracking month, a lot of things were added individually by everyone and a lot of those sounds were very time intensive. I couldn't imagine doing some of those things with everyone around, or feeling like you're on the clock at a studio."
Many of the demos for the album were what the band refers to as "sketches," done by mostly singer/guitarists Daniel Rossen and Ed Droste. "Marla" itself is actually a song written by Droste's great aunt, a failed musician. As he explained in an interview with Pitchfork Media:
| “ | Well, the whole "Marla" story of my great aunt being this failed musician that dies at an early age in the 1940s was, basically, I got this CD a few years ago from the last remaining sibling of hers, who had finally decided to transfer this stuff to disc. For me, this was the one song. Much in the way that I kind look at the "Owner of a Lonely Heart" thing-- even though that was just myself-- and see this melancholic, slower edge that I heard in it. Not that it was exactly the same because this was obviously the four of us working on it, but I took the song and said, "Look everybody, I'm not sure how we'll do this, but it will be really cool if we slowed it down and tried to give it our own spin." Luckily, everyone was really into it, but it was very much a blank page for a few days. | ” |
The string arrangements on "Marla" were composed and performed by Owen Pallett, with Christopher Bear noting that their collaboration stemmed from his contribution to the band's remix album, Horn of Plenty (The Remixes) (2005).
As Horn of Plenty was a solo effort by Droste, this record is truly the band's "debut" as it features all members contributing to the writing and production of the album. Recordings took place throughout July 2005 in the house of Droste's grandmother on Cape Cod.
Read more about this topic: Yellow House (album)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)