This is a site where admirers of the band can find information aside from the basic stuff on their label's site and the official site. Fan comments are no longer being collected.

News: Isota Records has released its vinyl version of Jittery Joe's (live Mangum performance), among other Orange Twin delectables. Also, the book about Aeroplane Over the Sea is out. It gives a great insight into the creative, spiritual and communal atmosphere that spawned the album and the people involved.
Neutral Milk Hotel began as the recording project of Jeff Mangum. There were three early cassettes that were only released via Elephant Six. These are Invent Yourself A Shortcake(1991... which is not related to the song of the same name), Beauty (1992), and Hype City (1993). After graduating from high school, Jeff moved from Ruston to several places including a stay in Denver with friend Robert Schneider (The Apples in Stereo, Marbles).
The first single he released in 1994 was called Everything Is (b/w Snow Song Part One). A bonus track, Aunt Eggma Blowtorch was added on the CD version.
The first Neutral Milk Hotel album, On Avery Island, was mostly a solo effort with help from various other friends, especially Robert Schneider (Marbles, The Apples In Stereo), Lisa Janssen (Secret Square) and Rick Benjamin (The Perry Weissman Three). The UK version of the album, released on Fire Records, has different artwork (done by Jill Carnes of Thimble Circus) and bonus tracks from the Everything Is single.
Not long after the release of On Avery Island the current line-up of the band came together. Puncture magazine ran a great article a couple years ago on how this line-up came to be:
Julian Koster was the catalyst of the 4 members coming together. After Julian's band Chocolate USA ceased to exist, he arranged for NMH to stay in the basement of his grandmother's apartment on Long Island, in New York. Scott Spillane (The Gerbils) had been working at a pizza joint in Austin, TX and living in a van. At Julian's urging, Scott (also a former resident of Ruston, LA) jumped on a Greyhound bus in Austin and came to Long Island. Julian then made Jeff get on a train to Chicago to visit a drummer named Jeremy Barnes (Bablicon, Marta Tennae). According to Jeremy, Jeff only played half of one song with him the whole time he was there, 'cause he was so freaked out at how expensive the the studio time was, but was happy enough with the way they sounded together. Nevertheless he asked Jeremy to drop out of school and meet the group in Long Island in 3 months. To the chagrin of his folks, Jeremy agreed. (Jeremy had met Julian when Bablicon played a show with Chocolate USA in Chicago. He had stayed in touch with Julian, hoping to work with him in the future.)
The group stayed in NY for several months playing lots of shows before settling in Athens where some of their old pals from Ruston had already landed.
The second album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, was the first record with a fixed line-up. The bulk of it was recorded at Robert Schneider's "Pet Sounds studio" in Denver in 1997 and was released on Merge records in Feb. 1998. This record features contributions from Robert as well as Laura Carter from Elf Power.
Holland, 1945 was released as a single by Blue Rose in October 1998, coupled with the previously unreleased acoustic Engine as a 7" picture disc, with fold-out poster.
After extensive touring in 1998, the band went on a break, turning down all offers for shows in 1999. Instead, the members went back to concentrating on other projects; Julian worked on Music Tapes, Scott worked on new Gerbils material, and Jeremy went back to Chicago to devote more time to Bablicon. Jeff spent time working on various projects with friends including musique concrete recordings with W. Cullen Hart (The Olivia Tremor Control, The Circulatory System).
Although all the members are still active with one another in other projects, it is unknown if they'll release anymore albums as NMH. But there are are plans to release a NMH rarities/b-sides album eventually on the label Orange Twin.

This is the official Web site for Neutral Milk Hotel, one of the founding members of the Elephant Six Recording Company. This site is done with the co-operation and assistance of the band. We encourage anyone who wishes to create new sites or provide additional, original material on the Internet regarding Neutral Milk Hotel.
Neutral Milk Hotel have released two acclaimed albums that have established singer and guitarist Jeff Mangum as one of the most accomplished songwriters of the decade. Hopefully, the information provided in this site will be of use both to people who have just heard the group and to those who have been interested for many years.
The current members of the band besides Mangum are Julian Koster, who plays the saw, accordion, bass, and banjo; Scott Spillane, who plays the trumpet, euphonium, flugelhorn, and guitar; and drummer Jeremy Barnes.
Thanks to Those Who Have Helped Matt Billings (Athens concert pics), Kristen Blake (articles), Jeff Mangum, Jason Kau (samples and free server space), Jim Romeo, Dianna Lyons (articles), Merge Records, Autotonic Publicity, and Dylan, Mike Runion, and others (setlists).

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I've talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn't have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.
Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum's honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album's world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he's running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: "When you were young..." Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad's shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.
Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk, licking Bernadette Peters' entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.
Then there's the record's disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank's lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record's historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3" mentions "a synthetic flying machine" our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci's 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in "Two-Headed Boy" of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau's industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What's it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in "Oh Comely," where he sings, "I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/ and will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.
Seven years it's been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it's not unreasonable to think that we've heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after "Two-Headed Boy Part Two." Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and one of Dylan's truest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.
-Mark Richardson, September 27, 2005 (nneutral milk hotel, milk, milk inc, breast milk, got milk, muscle milk, milk and cereal, milk shake, milk thistle, tit milk, child festival milk toronto, raw milk, goat milk, soy milk, milk glass, mother milk, milk cow, chocolate milk, milk and cookie, milk my cock, milk maid, boob milk, milk of magnesia, organic milk, milk allergy, nuetral milk hotel, milk bottle, fat milk shake, soy milk maker, goat milk soap, neutral milk, milk carton, milk snake, milk and honey, the face on the milk carton, milk chocolate, milk junkie, milk money, silk soy milk, coconut milk, pigeon milk, harvey milk, milk frother, milk junkies, breast milk storage, milk man, milk sugar, baby milk, muscle milk review, milk steamer, rice milk, milk jug, evaporated milk, got milk ads, dead milk man, gallon of milk, milk jug skeleton, milk crate, milk squirting, milk delivery, cytosport muscle milk, condensed milk, milk paint, chocolate milk maid, medication medication milk milk mother mother, milk can, black milk, ichigo milk, milk powder, picture of milk, milk squirt, mother milk tea, milena velba milk, milk a to z, milk tea, milk prices, evaporated milk substitute, milk sex, condensed milk fudge recipe, milk and milk product, benefit of soy milk, prairie milk, pregnant milk, carnation milk, milk thistle benefit, sweetened condensed milk recipe, skim milk, milk prostate, milk rap, powdered milk, westmoreland milk glass, whole milk, ass milk, selling breast milk, sweetened condensed milk, breast milk for sale, woman milk, milk bath, eagle brand milk, medication and mother milk)

Another new mp3, this time a live performance of a rare, unreleased song called "arms from you" (i think that's what it's called, anyway. you can hear jeff introducing it but it's hard to make out what he says). it's an awkward shambolic rocker. thanks to captain23 for sharing the bootleg from which this song is taken.
Added a few pretty sketchy tabs. More on the way eventually.
This isn't Natural Milk Hotel-related, but I urge you all to listen to this band Frog Eyes. They released a masterpiece almost on par with Aeroplane last year, entitled The Golden River. though the two bands don't sound alike per se, they share certain similarities -- the timelessness, the effortless songwriting, the idiosyncratic lyrics, the intense singer with a unique voice, and most importantly, the bizarre cover art.