The night before this early February session, Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors played Iowa City – the one stop on the tour that they were genuinely worried about the turn-out. They drove the 45 minutes east to the Quad-Cities. David and the Dirty Projectors found a cheap motel in Davenport and Grizzly Bear stayed at a Holiday Inn in downtown Rock Island, one block over from our studio. Even so, the late night delayed all movement in the morning hours and by the time all of the coffees were ordered and consumed, we were all behind in our schedules. To make everything work, and to get both bands on the road – Dirty Projectors were off to Washington state and Grizzly Bear were to whisk themselves away to home – sacrifices were made. Our laidback atmosphere got crowded by the constraints at hand and we were forced to make the best of a strenuous situation. The reason any of this is important for you to know is because you’ll notice that the Grizzly Bear session is truncated to a mere three songs, not what you’ve come to expect from us. From the set up to our unfortunately premature ending time, we had one hour to accomplish what was accomplished and miracle upon miracles, these three songs escaped from the fray with the time crunch absolutely pristine and beautiful. The complexion of these three songs is marked with calm strides and pixie-like brilliance that make you feel as if you’re made up of wind chimes, icicles and roaring fires all at the same time. They display a delicate standard that should take days to make sound this graceful and royal. They made this music before noon, a feat in and of itself. This set was going to be four songs in length, but technical problems with a microphone created some nasty clipping near the end of the song and with the sand escaping us, we couldn’t make it right, to everyone’s disappointment. We all felt distressed at the outcome, but Grizzly Bear will come back for a five or six-song session sometime in the near future. We’ve all taken the rain check. – Sean Moeller

First song
He Hit Me (Grizzly Bear) [4.23MB] [13027 downloads]


– unreleased
I think we were really struck by the lyrical content and how dark it was. Dan had gotten the Phil Spector box set and he’d been listening to it a lot. He said, ‘I think we need to play this song.’ I’d never heard that one before. And a man singing it was really intriguing to us.

Second song
Little Brother (Grizzly Bear) [6.14MB] [11606 downloads]


– a drastically different take on this song; the original version appears on Yellow House
It’s the same song that’s on the album, but it’s just arranged differently. It’s so orchestrated on the album that we wondered, ‘How would we do this in the live setting?’ This is Dan’s baby. He re-arranged everything and made it real bluesy. It’s through and through his. We first started playing this last August when we were rehearsing in Paris. I think it’s now more engaging in the live setting. We’re really into recreating things rather than just playing them exactly as you hear them on a record.

Third song
Shift (Grizzly Bear) [2.98MB] [10705 downloads]


– original version appears on Horn of Plenty
I wrote this about the transition from one relationship to another. It’s about that shift in relationships. It’s about a rather quick transition.