Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland 1945
Art that refers to World War II and the Holocaust … I don’t hear a lot of records doing that in 1998. Yet that was only a generation or two ago. What compelled this? You read The Diary of Anne Frank?
Yeah. I know it might sound kind of cheesy. Right before recording On Avery Island I was walking around in Ruston waiting to go to Denver to record. I don’t consider myself to be a very educated person, ‘cause I’ve spent a lot of my life in dreams.
And I was walking around wondering, would everything make more sense to me if I knew the history of the world, or would I just lose my mind? I came to the conclusion I’d probably just lose my mind. Next day I walked into a bookstore, and there was The Diary of Anne Frank. I’d never given it any thought before. Then I spent two days reading it and completely flipped out … spent about three days crying … it stuck with me for a long, long time.
