“It’s, what, almost seven years since we last played together?” Daniel Rossen asks over the phone, trying to do the math. “Sorry, I’m a little rusty with interviews.” The Grizzly Bear singer, guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist is calling from a hotel room in Burbank, California, where he’s been staying for several days. A short drive away is the rehearsal space where Rossen, Ed Droste, Chris Taylor, and Chris Bear are relearning their catalog, one cherry-picked song at a time. At last, the band is together again: mostly calm, a little jittery, but excited.
Elsewhere in Los Angeles is Taylor, the band’s backing vocalist, bassist, and multi-instrumentalist, whose steady zeal over the phone is refreshing. “Leading up to this rehearsal, we’ve been nervous about how we’ll sound or what it feels like being together in a room again, but the vibe is really positive,” he says. “I’m happy to see everyone so happy—although maybe that’s the caretaker in me. I live to see everyone happy together.”
In the eight years since Grizzly Bear released Painted Ruins, Droste enrolled in graduate school for psychology and became an associate therapist, occasionally guesting on songs by Morrissey and Haerts. Rossen released his 2022 solo full-length debut, You Belong There, and worked with Bear to score the Oscar-nominated movie Past Lives. Bear also played drums on Fleet Foxes’ album Shore and recorded music under his solo outlet Fools. Meanwhile, Taylor produced dozens of records for other artists, including Beth Orton and Clark.
Next week, Grizzly Bear headline the first show in a five-night run at New York’s Brooklyn Steel, the beginning leg of their first tour in six years. In a discography ripe with ornate songs dominating playlists like “Indie Rock Hits” and, arguably most complimentary of all, “Songs to Test Speakers With,” Rossen and Taylor are eager to pull from overlooked corners of their discography for their grand return. “It’s been a bit of a journey finding our way back to playing this music again,” says Rossen. “The nice thing about this run of shows, where we’re not promoting a specific album, is that we can delve into whatever material we want to, go very far back in time, and explore the catalog however we feel.”
Rossen and Taylor talked to Pitchfork about why the band stopped playing in the first place, how time apart helped them grow, and why these upcoming shows might be the setlist of their dreams. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Daniel Rossen: I wouldn’t say there was a formal conversation, but there was an understanding—and definitely exhaustion. It’s hard to condense into a short summary. By the end of the tour cycle for Painted Ruins, we had grown apart in a lot of ways. Everybody needed time to pursue their own lives. There was never a formal decision that we would never make music again. But at our best moments, I think the band was this balance between an idealistic, writerly, personal pursuit, and this collective soundcraft thing we had going at the high period of the band. It was really hard to keep that balance over the long run. Towards the end, it became difficult to keep morale up, everybody engaged, and a feeling of equal participation in a satisfying way while still functioning. Not a bad run though, huh? It was what, 2005 through 2019? Not bad at all.
Chris Taylor: A band is a collective effort: if everybody isn’t totally on board, it doesn’t work. You can’t force people to do this job because it’s disruptive to what would otherwise be a normal human existence. It’s pretty strange to constantly travel around and play concerts for people; you’re living on a bus for 15 years or something.
Indefinite means indefinite, but I think we all assumed it wasn’t gonna happen again. We just didn’t want to pretend to quit and then surprise you by coming back real quick. I've seen bands do that move. It was a matter of time and all of us individually having space, being back in our respective homes, and turning the lights on. After a while, it felt like it could actually be interesting, talks resumed, and it suddenly rose out of the ashes.
Taylor: I’ve been in full-time producing mode, booking out the calendar, because I haven’t been on tour. Five LPs that I produced came out in the past six months or so. As a producer, I try to cultivate artists’ best facilities and get them primed to create, to feel great. You can tell by how they react to a suggestion how you should support them in the studio. I also just finished a little six-song solo EP that I’ll put out in a month or something. I haven’t released solo music in like 14 years or some regrettably long amount of time.
I was just thinking about this the other day: it’s always been this way, where getting to make music with my band really is the best version of me. So I’m always working on music and wondering how I would apply it to Grizzly Bear material, even if there’s no plan for us to ever record again. Anything I do, even producing other artists, I want to take tricks and bring them back to the band. I guess it’s just my home base, my musical family.
Rossen: It’s funny: I’ve always made music, but I live in Santa Fe and feel isolated from the music world generally, so I tend to think of it as a hobbyist activity now. It doesn’t feel like a pursuit in that same way. That Hannah Frances album [Nested in Tangles] is an interesting one, in how it came together. She came to one of my solo shows in Philadelphia to help sell my merch, and afterwards she gave me a copy of her record Keeper of the Shepherd. You never know what you’re going to hear when someone hands you their album, but as I drove to my next gig I thought, My God, she has a real voice. When she sent me her new music and invited me to collaborate, it seemed fun to try to help her realize it, because her music has some kinship with work I’ve done in the past.
I’m just trying to keep going though. That’s how everybody feels, I think: you don’t wanna stop, in part because I don’t know what else I would do. The solo album was an experience I poured myself into and then it drifted away afterwards. It was hard to promote, obviously, because it’s a dark record, very internal, and not easy to get across to people. After I poured myself into that, I felt like music became something I did in my personal life. Maybe it’s just the state of my music interest, where I am in my life in my 40s, and the way tastes have shifted, but it’s hard for it to feel like a primary pursuit anymore, even though it’s obviously central to who I am.
Rossen: That was really fun to work on actually! The director was very familiar with our whole catalog, so there were no surprises with him. It was an open, riffing exchange making the whole film; a lot of quick, interplay ideas is my favorite way to do that type of work. I think the reason he reached out to me is because he liked the idea of my music opening up the interior world of these characters while the film itself is a bunch of bros being awful to each other. I loved working on that film. There’s a scene where the director asked me to score over this awful pop song called “Glad You Came.” He said, “Why don’t you do this like you did that Jojo cover: just make a verse, score over it, and we’ll try to use it.” It was a very fun back-and-forth exchange working on the film like that.
Rossen: I’ve heard some of those bands and think it’s nice. Hannah Frances is also in that type of lineage, I think. The last couple years, there’s just been a lot of great music, regardless of whether it relates back to that more baroque pop influence of ours in a post-freak-folk era. I’ve just been enjoying being at this stage of my life where I can reapproach the music that’s happening now as a consumer and just enjoy it. The last couple years have been great. Obviously the Cindy Lee record was insane; I had a whole phase with that, like many people did. There’s this Warp artist Clarissa Connelly whose album was really pretty, kinda weird, and wildly singular, like Metallica but played very slowly with acoustic instruments. I really enjoyed that Chanel Beads record record, the new Bad Bunny, Cameron Winter of course, and that Chicago band Lifeguard. Those kids are so talented. I saw them in a little club in Kingston, New York, which was so fun.
Taylor: Maybe it’s counterintuitive, but I don’t follow indie rock closely. It was never my genre of choice to listen to. So I’m unfamiliar with those bands, but I can speak to what it’s like incorporating bells and whistles to your music or punching up the arrangements. It’s important not to focus on the instruments themselves as adding complexity.
For example, I’m a saxophone player and several people have asked me to play a rock sax solo on their songs. Now, I don’t play saxophone like Clarence Clemens from the E Street Band. People ask from this place of thinking it’s just a cool thing to add. It’s like adding a lucky rabbit foot to your song as opposed to asking if it serves an emotive purpose. Why choose that instrument or this arrangement? It’s a form of overdressing when a good t-shirt and pair of jeans look great. This probably sounds funny coming from me because we add a lot to our music, but we removed what isn’t essential or doesn’t further the song. The goal isn’t to be superfluous with production ideas or arrangements, but to be intentional with what we’re conveying and how we do it. Study the greats and learn from them: those amazing Brazilian records, the Beach Boys, Scott Walker, all these masters of recording and arranging.
Taylor: I don’t know if it was any one moment rather than everyone picking up the project individually on their own. Not to overstate the obvious, but you have four sovereign individuals, and spending this much time together doing something is weirdly tough—tougher than you’d think. From the outside, you wonder why wouldn’t a musician want to be in a band? It turns out it’s complicated for most folks, or at least the three guys in my band. I’ve always thought it’s the coolest thing I could possibly do professionally. But I think for everyone else it’s tough.
Rossen: We still have the same management team and booking agency, so requests to play festivals or stuff have popped up, but the answer was always no. To some degree, we got to a point where we have this whole catalog and it’s been so long that we finally missed what it felt like to play with each other. With this new vantage point where three of us are parents and feel like elderly people, it seemed novel to come back. You can appreciate it in a different way than when you were younger and in the music industry. We stay in touch, but we lead such different lives now and haven’t talked about music itself in a long time, or what each other is listening to, or thinking about musically. Getting back to that place took work. Even the rehearsals themselves are a starting point for us again, and I think that’s what we needed: a starting point.
Taylor: Super special. We’ve been working hard and I think everyone’s having fun being together again. It’s very sweet. We’re remembering, Oh yeah, this is why we loved doing this. There’s hard times when you’re in what’s essentially a relationship for 20 years with many chapters: beautiful ones, exciting ones, hard ones, exhausting ones. So this has been very inspiring for me to remember how good it feels. It’s also a trip to feel the songs come out of your body after years and years of not playing them, that dusting-off process.
Rossen: Sometimes we’re rehearsing and I genuinely don’t remember what happened at that point in the song, which is kind of disturbing? [laughs] Some of these songs are pretty hard to execute. But yeah, being together again in the same room doesn’t feel that different. Well, except that a lot of the tension is gone because the pressure has lifted.
Taylor: It’s also a relief because I’ve had this recurring nightmare for the past seven years where I’m at a festival and our band is supposed to play, but I can’t find my bandmates, I lost my instruments, I don’t know what stage we’re on, and I don’t remember the songs. I’m wandering around this festival while people are trying to hang out with me and I’m telling them I have to play a show but don’t know where or how. Apparently that’s Ed’s recurring nightmare, too. [laughs] We have the same panic dream. We’ve both run into each other in our stress nightmares at the festival grounds, too.
Rossen: We haven’t really discussed that yet. I wouldn’t count it out. Honestly, this is just a lot of material to go through in a short amount of time, what with us doing five shows in New York. So we’re trying to relearn as many songs as we can in this short window. There’s not really much room for any other discussion.
Taylor: I’ve always been the excited one who wants to make more music; I can’t help it. I wish I could bring it to the band, but I don’t know if that’s an outlet anymore. You can’t tell grown men what to do [laughs] so I’ll just keep storing it away. There’s no plans to make a record just yet. We’re seeing how these shows go, how everybody feels up onstage, and enjoying the act of being a band again.
Taylor: For sure. We’ve been forced to review the old records and watch live videos just to relearn our songs. We haven’t listened to our music in many, many years. While dusting off this very old material, you can hear us as these young, excited kids; I can actually hear that excitement. I have the privilege of having been around for every single recorded second of our catalog as the producer, as I’m usually the recording engineer, so there’s also this feeling of entering a tunnel of kaleidoscopic memory. I hear all these elements and remember tidbits of past memories and experiences. It’s a lot to process because it runs the gamut.
Rossen: There’s different songwriting teams in the band, and we were often lost in our own little worlds back then, whatever it was we were going through. So it’s nice to come back now and hear Ed’s songs in a much different light. There’s ones I didn’t think about much at the time because I wasn’t the one immersed in it, but now I can hear this emotion in it in new ways and appreciate it more. That’s a special feeling as a bandmate. Similarly, there’s songs in the catalog that have my thumbprint and I’m staring at them thinking, Well, that wasn’t very good. [laughs] Some ideas didn’t hit the way you thought they would.
Taylor: Oh for sure. We’re learning many, many songs. We’re planning on switching the set for every night. So, for example, those five nights at Brooklyn Steel? We’re playing a different set each night.
Rossen: There will be a core of, what, 10 songs or so that we’ll probably do each night? But yeah, we’re trying to balance the songs that we assume are the popular ones or algorithmically favorite songs, coupled with more obscure songs that we maybe wouldn’t have touched at the time. That’s been fun to do. I’m hoping we get as many of those deep cuts in there as we can, dig out the stranger songs, mix them into the set.
Rossen: I always loved shifting between different roles and putting on hats. I could be supportive in certain ways. I can be the guitar player and sing the song because it’s my tune, and then move into a different role to support someone else’s song. Getting to shift modes is really enjoyable, especially live. I think it suits my personality because I don’t like to be the center of attention. That’s not me. It’s funny though; seven years passed, we get back in the room again, and it doesn’t really feel all that different. It’s like old times, except now we’re adults, so we’re not expressing our primary emotions in bizarre ways that are unhelpful to one another. [laughs]
Taylor: My favorite thing to do in all of the music-making things that I do is play instruments. And there’s nobody in the world who I love playing music with more than my bandmates. It’s everything for me. I love producing and recording, but what I’m really here to do is play – and with these guys in particular. I’ve loved playing bass or woodwinds and singing on these albums I’ve been producing, but it’s not the same. These guys? We just share so much: the history, the references, the appreciation, the things we understand about each other that get us stoked. There’s a shared history between us that makes it all the more meaningful to play together. I’ve missed it so much.