The Atlantic

Grizzly Bear Capture the Beauty of Connection

The rock band’s fifth album, <em>Painted Ruins</em>, balances mysterious complexity with pure loveliness.
Source: Tom Hines / RCA Records

The inspiration for off Grizzly Bear’s spindly and hypnotic new album , came one night when the singer Daniel Rossen returned to a Los Angeles apartment he’d been renting to find a man sleeping in his driveway. The next morning, he looked out the window and considered the thought of the man looking at the same thing as him: four cypresses in the neighbor’s yard. “The basis of the lyric, that’s where it came from—the idea of displacement, and homelessness,. “Trying to connect with someone else’s experience, trying to find shared experience with someone that’s having a much worse time than I am.”

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