Lone Bear: Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear on Going Solo and Leaving Brooklyn
All your bands are known for having a lush, filled-out sound. It sounds like it’s been very different for you to go for a stripped-back thing.
True, though there are always moments in both of our shows where the music gets pared way back. When we did the Department of Eagles shows a few years ago, I did some of those songs alone. And a lot of the writing I’ve been doing the last couple years has been more suited toward that, actually. I’ve been more interested in writing songs that can stand alone with or without their arrangement, just make them work as they are. That was my hope for the songs on the EP. Those songs were all written first by performing them alone rather than building them out of the overdubbing process. In my mind, the newer stuff I’ve been writing is more suited to solo performance. When you’ve got nobody else to support you, if you’re not feeling it that night, there’s no show. It’s not like in a band where you can kind of duck back and let somebody else take control.
Especially in Grizzly Bear, where you trade off singing duties with other people.
Yeah, exactly. And I love that about being in Grizzly Bear. It’s nice to be able to do a song of mine where I’m singing lead and then I can step back and be the guitar player for a little while. It’s great to be able to shift roles constantly in a performance. But I’m interested in trying a new way of doing it.
How have rehearsals been going?
Good! We left New York; my girlfriend and I moved out of Brooklyn at the end of November and we are spending the month in Topanga, California. I don’t know if you’re familiar with LA, but it’s like a little community up in the hills just outside of LA. And yeah, I’ve just been rehearsing up here. It’s good. I’ve been writing and running through old songs. It’s not really like rehearsing any other tour. I’ll get through the material and think, “Well, I know these songs, I don’t really know what else I’m supposed to do.” It’s just a matter of really getting into them and putting my whole self into the performance, I guess. I think that’s the only way this show is going to work. I can only really rehearse that so much, so at a certain point it’s like, “Can I write any new material that works for the show that’s gonna add to what I already have from the last few years?” It’s very free-form, which is really nice. That was part of it; I miss, like, well, I guess I’ve never really had that kind of experience of performing where it’s a little more free-form and you can just try new material on the road; you can just try whatever you’re working on right now. It’s hard for us to do that in Grizzly Bear now because the productions are too big and we can’t casually test ideas anymore. It has to be very planned and rehearsed.
The material you’re writing now, is that earmarked for maybe another solo EP, or maybe something with the Department of Eagles or Grizzly Bear down the line? Or is too early to say?
It’s probably too early to say. I don’t really have a plan. We just got done touring Shields a few months ago. And that was like, over a year of playing the same set, essentially, and I think we all are going to spend some time doing our own thing for a while. And I don’t really know what that means for me. I might do a record of my own, it’s a possibility, but at the moment I’m kind of just trying to write music again and play music in a way that feels fulfilling and is enjoyable, and not really think about it too much beyond that.
Did it bug you that you weren’t able to play any shows since recording Silent Hour, like maybe it didn’t get quite the exposure it should have because you had to go straight back to Grizzly Bear?
I don’t know. Maybe. EPs are hard to promote anyway in the way that full-length records aren’t. Even if you do play shows around them, it’s not as easy to make a splash. And I think because it was the first thing I ever actually released under my own name, and it was short, it was inherently… it made sense to me that it got ignored a little bit just because it wasn’t a full length release and I’m already in the midst of doing a whole other record, so it kind of made sense to me how that went. But you know, I’m still happy with how it was received and it seemed like a fair number of Grizzly Bear fans heard it, and I’m very happy with the songs.
Are you going to be playing any Grizzly Bear songs on this tour or are you leaving that as its own thing?
I don’t think so. In Grizzly Bear I think we choose a lot of our songs because they work best as a mood and as a group and as an arrangement and they’re not really—at least not the songs that I contribute to Grizzly Bear—meant to be played alone. They don’t really work that well. They’re built around the arc of the music rather than the arc of the lyrics; that’s really not how those songs function. There’ve been a couple on the last record that maybe would have worked as solo performances, but it’d be pretty strange, I think. And I just feel like the main purpose of this tour is to play a back catalogue of material that has essentially never been played live. I sometimes feel a little regret about that, especially with a lot of the old Department of Eagles songs. I’ve had people asking about them for a while and it seems nice to give some of these songs a little bit of stage time.
Did you ever really get a chance to tour the Department of Eagles album?
We had the chance, but we just kind of didn’t take it. In Ear Park was released while we were recording Veckatimest so it was actually not that different from how the EP went with Shields, but we did have some time. We did something like 10 or 15 shows in the States, a couple shows in Europe and that was it. But the songs from that record were barely performed. I’m not gonna play all of them from that record, but I’m gonna do a few things, just because it seems nice to revisit some of that material. And in the last couple years I just decided, for some reason, to give a lot of songs away, and I’m gonna play some of those because they work well as solo performances.