Artists in residence

How a yellow house in Watertown became a creative haven for Brooklyn indie band Grizzly Bear

February 02, 2007|Caitlin E. Curran, Globe Correspondent

In Watertown is an old yellow house with a spacious, sun-drenched living room. The house is filled with antiques and generations of photographs. It's home to musician Edward Droste's great-grandmother's turquoise Steinway piano. And in the summer of 2005, for one month it became home to a quartet of Brooklyn hipsters bearing guitars, drums, amps, and electrical cords. Droste, Christopher Bear, Christopher Taylor, and Daniel Rossen left their urban apartments behind and came here to make an album.

The lo-fi indie-rock band Grizzly Bear, which plays a sold-out show at the MFA tonight, quickly settled in. "There was so much equipment around, you could barely walk," recalls Di Droste, Edward's mother and owner of the yellow house, in her living room on a recent Sunday afternoon. A former music teacher, she bought the house shortly before Edward was born, and raised him and his brother here.

Droste and his bandmates wrote songs and experimented with sounds, and soon they had what they were looking for: a collection of whispery vocals and quiet melodies that reference the likes of Elliott Smith and Nick Drake, punctuated by crackling distortion reminiscent of bands such as Guided by Voices and Slint. The album was released on the UK-based Warp Records in September 2006. The band called it "Yellow House."

It's a fitting name -- listening to "Yellow House" feels like sitting in Droste's living room, beside the slowly ticking grandfather clock, watching four musicians add swirling, distorted layers of piano, drums, and strings to songs that Droste and Rossen wrote.

" 'Yellow House' is a debut for us as a four-piece," says Droste, on the phone from Brooklyn. He prefers working with Rossen, Bear, and Taylor to working alone, he adds. "I like having them challenge my ideas."

Grizzly Bear was originally a solo venture for Droste. If "Yellow House" was a living room project, then Grizzly Bear's first album, "Horn of Plenty," could be described as a bedroom project. Over the course of 15 months, Droste recorded 35 songs in his apartment in Brooklyn. "The songs definitely represent the end of a relationship and the start of a new one," says Droste. "It started out not even really as a project. It was just something I was doing because I was learning Pro Tools," a software program for audio editing.

It may not have started as a project, but it soon turned into one. Droste recruited drummer Christopher Bear (his name's a coincidence) for the recordings, which he then sent to Brooklyn-based indie label Kanine Records.