“Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two” by Neutral Milk Hotel

"Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two" comes from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel's second album and, as it turned out, their last, released on Merge in February 1998. Jeff Mangum wrote the words and the music, and Robert Schneider produced, cutting the record at Pet Sounds Studio between July and September 1997.

Schneider's job was to give Mangum a better sound than the murky debut On Avery Island, and he skipped the usual pedals and effects boxes, getting his distortion by squeezing everything through heavy compression. Across the album, guitar and drums sit alongside singing saw and uilleann pipes, and Mangum's lyrics run surreal and opaque, drifting from nostalgia to love, with Anne Frank's diary as a guiding influence. Reviews at the time were only moderately warm; the cult came later, and so did talk of an indie rock landmark and one of the decade's finest records.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.