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Grizzly Bear On World Cafe

Grizzly Bear
Tom Hines
/
Courtesy of the artist
Grizzly Bear

Deadlines and pressure can sometimes be the enemy of art. Take them away, and you're left with wide open space for creativity. That was the key for today's guest, Grizzly Bear, in making the band's new album called Painted Ruins.

Grizzly Bear's previous record, Shields, came out in 2012. They toured it for a year and a half, after which the band's four members were pretty fried. So, they took some space and left Brooklyn. Singer and guitarist Ed Droste, multi-instrumentalist/producer Chris Taylor and drummer Chris Bear all wound up in Los Angeles, while co-lead singer and guitarist Daniel Rossen splits his time between Santa Fe, N.M., and upstate New York.

In the interim, there was marriage, divorce, new dad-dom... a lot of fodder for new music — however cryptic any references to those events might be. (These aren't literal guys.) They are funny, though, as you'll hear in my chat with Taylor and Rossen. We talked about how Taylor got the writing ball rolling again and what puns ensue when a band named Grizzly Bear comes back after five years off the album grid.

But first, hear the entire band performing the song "Three Rings" off their latest album, Painted Ruins, in the player above.

Copyright 2017 XPN

Talia Schlanger hosts World Cafe, which is distributed by NPR and produced by WXPN, the public radio service of the University of Pennsylvania. She got her start in broadcasting at the CBC, Canada's national public broadcaster. She hosted CBC Radio 2 Weekend Mornings on radio and was the on-camera host for two seasons of the television series CBC Music: Backstage, as well as several prime-time music TV specials for CBC, including the Quietest Concert Ever: On Fundy's Ocean Floor. Schlanger also guest hosted various flagship shows on CBC Radio One, including As It Happens, Day 6 and Because News. Schlanger also won a Canadian Screen Award as a producer for CBC Music Presents: The Beetle Roadtrip Sessions, a cross-country rock 'n' roll road trip.