My Top 1000 Songs #797: Everything Is

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Neutral Milk Hotel's two albums (1996's On Avery Island and especially 1998's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea) rightfully retain their legendary status, intense listening experiences that need to be heard with reverence and only on special occasions to avoid them feeling ordinary.

But before that, Jeff Mangum, like the other musicians in the Elephant 6 collective, tried his hand at lo-fi pop singles that stumbled into greatness without the loftier ambitions of those later works. The 1993 single "Everything Is" takes lo-fi to new heights, the sound of an electric guitar played through a cheap tape recorder that totally overwhelms the recording levels, a stew of damaged, distorted fuzz that serves as the antithesis of everything deemed acceptable in music production. But it's helpfully glued onto a bubblegum pop song, it's chorus of "everything is beautiful here... I'm finally breaking free from fear" an unexpected burst of unabashed sunshine from the guy who'd be singing about the Holocaust a few years later.

Like NMH's other early cassette projects, the song starts off with some random dialog, but soon enough that deep-in-the-red-zone impossibly loud guitar mess kicks in and it's just glorious.

Live:

Mangum solo acoustic:

How would this sound as a more traditional grunge-informed alternative rock song? Here's a cover from Easter Island Statues:

Or some kid in his bedroom:

Or another bedroom recording: