Greg Graffin once told me he almost named his son Grayson. He went with Graham instead. I once told Josh Grier that Tapes 'n Tapes used to share bills with my best friend's band, Amateur Love. He remembered. Good interviews hinge on connections, be they as arbitrary as loving the same record or as ingrained as sharing the same background. When interviewer and interviewee slip into sheets of anonymous familiarity, both parties temporarily forget the moment will be read by interlopers. The interview becomes a conversation. People stop thinking about what they say. They start saying what they think.

It's almost midnight on the East Coast when Dan Rossen picks up his cell phone and says, "Hello?" He's in Brooklyn, at the apartment of his Grizzly Bear bandmate, Ed Droste. In less than a week, they hit the road with TV on the Radio for the first Stateside shows behind Yellow House, their gorgeous, creeping second album.

But these aren't the first shows behind the songs on Yellow House. They've been playing some of these tunes for a year, gradually melding a cohesive set from Yellow House's austerity and highly restructured material from Horn of Plenty, the "first" album, essentially a Droste home recording. Droste, Rossen, and I are talking about the dynamic that playing those songs live has built. Still…no connection.

"Wait, have you seen one of our shows lately?" says Droste, suddenly perking up, realizing that we once exchanged waves.

In fact, I have. I saw Grizzly Bear twice in April. Droste remembers my group of friends standing on the stairs outside of a local university's student center. He remembered us fawning about their set, vowing to be in Chapel Hill days later. We were there, too, and he remembers it.

The best connections, of course, are like the best bands: Completely natural and unplanned, much like a band that didn't expect to sell more than 50 copies of a record no one was supposed to hear in the first place. Grizzly Bear are one of those bands.

Pitchfork: Location and timing are obviously very important for Yellow House. It's named for where you recorded it, correct?

Dan Rossen: We recorded the majority of it in July 2005 in Ed's mother's house outside of Boston. We sort of finished it over the year. There was a lot of post-production and mulling over it-- six or seven months.

Ed Droste: Some of it was done in New York, and Chris Taylor did some post-production at his grandparents' place. It was kind of this thing where we got there and we had this period of time and we didn't have a label and we didn't know what we were doing. We knew we wanted to record.

We had a month of time where my mother wasn't there, and we recorded as much as we could. It was so intense and it was so hot that month that we had to take a few-months break and breathe and process the intense July month that was had. We had a really good time, but when that month was done, I don't think anyone listened to it or touched it until late September or October.

Pitchfork: So, it was recorded in the summer? That's surprising, especially given how wintry it can sound.

Dan: It's interesting to me, at least, that a lot of the music that I did, in terms of writing it, was very much done during the winter. We were writing and working on it long before we recorded it, so it kind of makes sense.

Ed: One of the misperceptions about the album is sort of what happens when a band evolves from an album that was a solo project of mine. There's the misperception that I am responsible for the writing and the thrust of the new album. Even in the Pitchfork review. I think his name was Mark [Richardson], who wrote the review, and it was a really thoughtful and wonderful review. But it was amusing for us because he was talking about, "Oh, finally Edward's voice is ringing true on the first notes of 'Easier.'" But that's Dan's voice, and Dan wrote that song!

We didn't break down every song in the bio, so it's understandable that people get confused, especially because everybody sings a lot. It was something that we were anticipating because it's annoying to be like, "Well, at 30 seconds, Dan sings." We wanted it to be casual, but I feel that-- if I had been left to my own devices-- I would have come up with something slightly different but in a similar vein to Horn of Plenty. Part of the reason there's been such a great response to the new album is largely due to the fact that it's a lot of Daniel's songs and Chris Taylor's great engineering and Chris Bear's drumming. It's such a debut for the band that it's just amusing. I'm not the genius behind it. Let that be known.

Pitchfork: Since this is the first album you recorded together, did some sort of definite group process or dynamic emerge by the time you were done?

Dan: I don't know about that. By the end, we got along better. We hadn't changed our working relationship as far as being open to everyone trying things or giving everyone a voice about what they wanted to do. We grew a lot in terms of working together. It was nice in a way because the last thing we recorded was the end of "Colorado", the second half, and it came together in a very cool, collaborative way. It was a very each-person-taking-it-in-his-own-direction kind of thing. It was a nice closer to the whole record because everybody had his own little piece.

Ed: A lot of people have asked whether, because the first album was more thematic, this album has a theme or if there was a process behind it. It feels very cohesive to me, but the origins of the songs and the lyrics come from so many people and places and times that I think, like Chris Taylor has been sort of saying in interviews and I agree with him, that there is not really a theme with the lyrics but the theme of the album is us figuring out how to work together and recording in that house, which is what brought it together in that weird way.

With the sketches that were there or the demo versions, they were so fragmented. We were kind of concerned, you know. "How are these going to come together? Are these really going to work?" It's sort of amusing to look back and think that it sounds like a whole piece that does work together.

Pitchfork: Some bands spend years-- or decades, even-- getting to the point where they can make a record and say something like that. I agree that it's cohesive. How do you think it happened so quickly?

Dan: Well, I don't know [Laughs]. It was very much a pressure situation. "No, we have to do this in a month. We have to use whatever we have and do it."

Ed: I don't know why we put pressure on ourselves. There wasn't really a deadline, and it wasn't like there was a label in the wings waiting on us. I don't know why we had this weird pressure thing.

Dan: I think we had our own little release schedule planned out. It's funny, to me: I hear it in the production, which sounds cohesive, but I still have a hard time hearing it as one thing. I guess that's because I'm conscious of all the steps and where everything came from. I'm really happy that it sounds that way to people. Maybe it does. I don't know. I still don't know that we have a process, either. I don't know that I want to have a process because I think it's a strain for a band. I want to make sure we're still open to do things however we feel.

Pitchfork: Getting your bass tone by playing a clarinet through a pitchshifter is a pretty unorthodox move. Was that a conscious decision to somehow be "different," or did it just happen?

Dan: I've known Chris since he was 18, since he was trying to be a jazz clarinetist or jazz saxophonist or whatever. For a really long time, he's had an interest in textural stuff and effects pedals. Honestly, he just plays the clarinet, and we've known him. We wouldn't have really chosen the clarinet at all, but that happened to be his instrument. That's kind of what we had to work with and what he had to work with, so that's what we ended up using.

Ed: When we were figuring out how to play the songs from the first album, there was a lot of, "How do we do this live in a way that's interesting and unique to the live setting and at the same time feasible, because there are so many textures and layers?" We didn't want to use samples, and we can't afford to have 14 people behind us doing all of these different things. Part of the fun for us, especially with the first album, was that the live versions of the songs are so drastically different. And, even with Yellow House, we do change things a lot, add parts or cut parts so that they are their own live creation.

But we knew what Chris could do: He played flute and clarinet and sang, so why not try and create a bass sound out of that and use what he knows how to do? I had never thought of the clarinet, [but] it's great because it is a unique sound that the bass can't reproduce. You can't get that really low, reedy, pitchshifted sound from much else. It's really interesting for me as the only person in the band with no musical education: There were a lot of things that the three of them taught me, and it was eye-opening for me to see how Dan writes a song or the way Chris uses an instrument to create a certain effect.

Pitchfork: Did you guys actually spend time together, watching each other write and learning about one another's process?

Dan: Not really, but it depends on the song. There were songs of Ed's that were kind of sketches, but were beautiful and simple. We all got to see the process of taking a really simple song and building and building until it turned into this huge thing. "Plans" is like that. It was the first song we tried to do, and we had no idea how to do it. It was almost like, "Well, what do we do?" "We try playing it on piano." Then we'd play it on piano, and we built it intuitively. Some songs happened that way, and there were others that were very thoroughly sketched out.

Ed: On the album, each song came from almost completely different places. There are maybe two that Dan composed that didn't get changed, and then there are ones that he composed that did get changed a lot that we reworked as a group. There was no formula for it: Some of them were written ahead of time, and some songs were figured out during the recording process.

Like, the difference between "Colorado" and "Little Brother" is so drastic because "Little Brother" was entirely fleshed out by Dan and ready to go, and "Colorado" was one of the sketches that Dan was talking about, a sketch of mine that was ridiculously barebones. If you heard the original, you'd be shocked. That turned into all four of us collaborating and making something much bigger.

Pitchfork: I've never heard those demos, but "Marla", the 78 rpm record your great aunt recorded and you guys rearranged, seems like a similar situation. I mean, the original is 103 seconds long, and yours is over five minutes.

Ed: 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.

Dan: I remember loving it and thinking it was a beautiful idea from the start. We were both like let's slow it down and put it underwater, and that was the starting point, to make it sound gloomy and dense. That one came together very spontaneously. I felt like the ambiance of the house added to it. We had this false start that we lost where we had parts recorded and we were not so happy with the direction it was going, so we just started over and tried again. That was a difficult one, but to me it's the best sounding track on the record. It's full, and there are these beautiful string parts that Owen Pallett [Final Fantasy] arranged.

Pitchfork: How did it happen that you guys decided to record in this big house in Boston?

Ed: Another thing that people get confused about-- and it's our fault for not clarifying all of the time-- but many people think this is the house that's in the album art and on Cape Cod, but the Yellow House is the house I grew up in the Boston area. There is a place in Cape Cod that my mother goes to that's also not the house on the cover, but near the house. Point being, she was there and vacationing. She's a teacher, so she gets summers off.

We realized that if we were going to do a record, we needed to get out of the city because there are just too many friends here, too many distractions. There was no space for us, and we didn't have money for a studio. This was the perfect place. We were able to record at all times of night or whenever we wanted to. We were able to set up and leave everything set up and just have this big Victorian house just sort of letting us live in it and record whatever we wanted.

Pitchfork: You mentioned not being able to afford a studio, but this album is doing well and Warp seems to be a good place to be. Chris Taylor did this whole record, but would you guys consider affording a studio for the next one?

Dan: I don't know if we all agree on this one, but I really like the idea of us doing things on our own. I feel like I really need-- and Chris Taylor, I think, also needs it-- that control. I really crave that kind of control where you can try anything you feel like and have all the time in the world to do it. I've tried recording in a studio before, and I don't personally like it. I don't like how it makes me feel.

Ed: But I think people think that's sort of like a "Fuck you" to the process of it, you know. "We're going to be lo-fi and record at home." But it's so not that at all. It's really just about what feels natural and what you feel you get the best results from.

Dan: It's just the ability to feel comfortable and take whatever time you want and do it when you feel like doing it. It's not really a lo-fi thing. Really, Chris Taylor now has a really nice set-up. We can make things sound great, and it's really just about being a control freak. I'm terrified of real producers. I don't like the idea of real producers.

Pitchfork: That's funny, too, because at the end of his review, Mark Richardson asked "What's Trevor Horn going for these days?" It doesn't sound like that's the direction you want to take.

Ed: [Laughs] No, I don't think so. I've read a few places where people say they wish Yellow House was produced better or that it sounded brighter. I don't know. I like the sound of the record. I think it sounds really warm, and it has a really nice aesthetic to it. I'd like to record on our own time, and I have full faith in Chris's abilities to do it again.

Although, I'm probably the least opposed to the idea of working in a studio because I've never tried it, and I'm curious to see what the results would be. Part of me likes the idea of having other people involved to work as neutralizing agents, to force you to work on schedule. But I do enjoy doing the home recording because I think there is a level of relaxation and comfort that allows you to experiment, when you may not feel comfortable dicking around in a studio when it costs you $5,000.

Pitchfork: Speaking of next time, you guys have been playing some of these songs live for almost a year. Anything new in the works?

Dan: Well, I don't know.

Ed: We have a new song we're playing in our set.

Dan: Yeah, we have a new song, but I don't know if I, personally, want to put it on a record [Laughs]. I don't know that we have plans exactly for our next record. I'm working on other things. I think we're taking a break from thinking about our next record. I don't know at all how it's going to happen. We've thought about it and played around with some ideas, but we definitely don't have any plans yet.

Ed: We kind of work best when we don't try to plan it, I think. We're going to be touring, and I find it almost impossible to write music when I'm touring. I'm not in the right mindset for it. But once we're done with touring and let everyone do their own thing for a few months, hopefully everyone is going to come to the table with new ideas. That's how I see the band working. I think everyone in the band definitely needs time alone to work stuff out. It can be really difficult to be in a room and be like, "OK, the four of us have to write a song together, now!" It just doesn't work like that, not really.

Everyone has his own process, and it comes together in the recording or in getting ready for the live show. I'm confident it will come together again, I just don't know how soon. I think we'll not have to be worried about promoting this album to do something. It's so time-consuming right now. It feels like every minute is taken up for the next six months.

Pitchfork: So Warp's not expecting you to be their rock Scott Herren?

Ed: Yeah, I think they understand we work differently than a solo electronic artist for touring and recording. It's a lot easier for Jamie Lidell to pack his computer and his mic and fly to L.A. to a show. I'm not saying it's easier for him to write music. I don't really know how an artist like Prefuse can write so much so quickly. I'm not judging it at all. I just know our creative process takes a lot longer. Everyone has his own way of working and there's no way to force that and see how quickly it can happen.

Dan: Yellow House came together in a really strange way, too, and I really don't think our next record will sound anything like it just because I know our process will be so much different. So much of that record just came together from having an endless amount of time to screw around with things, whether by ourselves at home or together, with no particular aim in mind or idea where it was going.

Ed: I think that the instrumentation and songwriting may be similar, but ultimately in the future, when the process will be different, I think the feeling will be different. I'm never into replicating something we have done. It's not like "Let's go back to the Yellow House!" That's just kind of silly.