Back in 2000, deep in the dorms of New York University, freshmen Fred Nicolaus and Daniel Rossen formed Department of Eagles on a lark.  Samples, sound experiments and a record followed.  A year later, Rossen joined the band Grizzly Bear, while Nicolaus started working a 9-5.  The two friends kept in touch, and began sending songs back and forth, working on them whenever they got a chance.  Four years later, born out of the correspondence, was the album In Ear Park.  Featuring densely layered pop songs full of the melancholy of loss and nostalgia, the album was critically praised all over the place.  Fred Nicolaus took a break from his day job for the following conversation. An abridged version of this interview was published in Thrasher magazine.

If someone told you when you were at NYU that you’d be playing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, what would you say?
Well, I would call that person a liar.  The band is sort of founded on a platform of absurdity to begin with.  The weird thing is that when the band started it was a complete joke.  We made eight copies of the first recording we did and gave them to people on our dorm room floor.  It was a very low ambition project.  It has taken eight years.

What was that like playing on the show?
You’re there for seven and a half hours to do two and a half minutes of performance, so basically you sit there.  They keep it really cold, so you’re sitting there in an artic jacket in a green room and then try to come out and warm up your hands and play.  So there’s ample time to sit there and be a bundle of nerves. Daniel is in Grizzly Bear and they’ve played a couple TV shows so for him it was not that big a deal, but for me I’m sitting there progressively sweating more and more.  And then when you finally play there’s no palpable sense of playing for anyone.  You’re in a cold room, there are three cameras and a lot of bright lights in your face.

I had heard a similar thing for The Jerry Springer Show where they make the people wait for about eight hours and give them a ton of coffee so they’re super fired up when they come out there.
Yeah, I believe it.  There’s a real sense of relief, you’re pumped to be up there.  Wasn’t there some scandal where they gave them alcohol and stuff?  That seems kind of quaint now with the level that reality shows are at now.

When I was doing some research on the band I noticed a lot of really bad titles for articles, like “Flying With The Eagles While Staying In The Den Of The Grizzly Bear.”
Yeah, that was a source of much amusement in our camp.  I still have yet to see “Eagle Vs. Bear” but I think that’s just around the corner.  I think it’s kind of what you get if you have an animal name.  There are so many ridiculous punny headlines.  I’m not bothered by it at all, it just inspires amusement. 

I guess that begs the question of how you decided to name the band.
It’s based on a Belgium installation art piece from the ‘60s.  We used to have a really dumb band name, which was “Whitey On The Moon In The UK.”  It was a name that at the time we liked, which I can’t understand how we did, and another band, against all odds, was also named Whitey On The Moon and they were threatening to sue us.  We were about to release our first album so we had three or four days to come up with a new name.  We were in our art history class and there was this Belgium piece with that name.  We thought it was kind of funny and random.  It was before the whole big animal thing in band names.  The really weird thing is that just a couple months ago the woman who is the widow of the artist who did that piece got in contact with us.  She was swinging through New York and wanted to meet us, so we met up with this old Belgium woman. 

How did that go?
It was very bizarre.  It was stilted.  She was very pretty actually.  It was unclear to me what she wanted to meet about, but it was just like, “We should meet.”  I got there and it was her and her son and they were curious how we had heard about the artist and told us some stories.  We had done a show in Chinatown that was online and they wanted to meet us in Chinatown since they assumed we lived there.  She was really sweet and couldn’t have been nicer. 

I was thinking about the Animal Collective name and realized that they kind of started it, but because they weren’t specific they kind of avoided it as well.
I think what happened is that there have always been band names with animals, it’s obviously been around since the ‘60s and then there was one year that three or four bands came out with animal names and everyone started recognizing it.  The thing with Grizzly Bear was that it was kind of a joke.  They were completely unaware of that whole trend and then it blew up.

Do you ever get any Eagles of Death Metal comments?
Yeah, we do.  It’s kind of weird because it’s two side projects of more successful bands that both have the word “eagle” in them.  I think some review said something like, “If you buy one Eagle record, buy Eagles of Death Metal.”  It is a weird coincidence.

You recorded the album in a church, right?
Yeah, it was basically Grizzly Bear’s rehearsal space and they found it through another band who also rehearses there.  It’s in Brooklyn and is a huge church where they have a setup in the choir loft.  So all the stuff is up there and it made sense for us to record up there.  By the end of the recording process I was kind of used to it, but at the beginning it was weird tracking vocal tracks in front of this huge glass window.

You sound like a pretty chipper guy, but the album definitely deals with some heavy emotional issues.
Yeah, that’s Daniel.  He’s the downer and I’m the upper.  No, but I don’t know, I hope there’s not too much of that.  There are definitely some serious topics. 

Was it difficult to work so much with material that dealt with death?
Actually the way the record was written was over about three or four years, and during that time Dan’s father was dying of cancer, so Dan was writing about memories from childhood.  And even though I wasn’t dealing with those same issues I ended up writing about mortality and very nostalgic things, so the record ended up having a theme even though it wasn’t very intentional.  We never got together and said, “Oh yeah, let’s write about a skull and death, because that’s what this is about.”  It happened in a very natural way.  It’s weird, it’s not even really something you talk about while you’re doing it.  I was very conscious that was the direction we were heading in as far back as a year before we started recording, but I didn’t want to talk about it.  It’s something you can talk about after the fact, but you don’t want to be like, “So this is what we’re doing.”  It can kind of ruin the magic if you talk about it too much.

So at the pace you guys are at, when do you think the next record will be out?
2012?  It’s not even clear that we’re going to have another record. For a good four or five years I wasn’t even 100 percent sure that it was going to happen and was fairly sure it wasn’t going to.  So the kind of cool thing with Department of Eagles is that we work on it whenever we have ideas.  We’re not beholden to a regular band schedule like Grizzly Bear, which has its advantages and disadvantages.  I think one cool thing is that if I have a song I think sounds good I’m definitely going to send it to Daniel.  Providence willing we’ll have an album out in the next decade.

I was thinking you could put one out every election.
Yeah, it’s actually a very political record.  If you dig deep it’s there.  We actually predicted the Obama win.  It’s track three if you play it backwards.

I was looking at the website and loved the section where your mom had her students do drawings based on your music.
That’s my favorite part of the site too.  The funniest part about them is that I don’t understand this concept of a band being two people on a tropical island.  There were about twenty of them and almost all of them had an island.  It’s really weird; it’s a simple motif and I can understand why kids would be attracted to it, but I don’t know what it has to do with playing music.  Normally when you see people on a desert island it has nothing to do with music. 

I think my favorite was the one with the guy saying, “I know, I rule!” and the other guy saying, “Yeah.”
That one is great.

Have you decided whether that’s you or Dan that’s ruling?
That’s Dan and I’m the one agreeing.  At that point I don’t think the kids had met Dan so maybe it’s an extrapolation of his personality.  

How did your mom decide to do that?
Well, I don’t know if you have any relatives are teachers, but my mom is always working my brother and I into her stories.  So every time I go to visit the kids know everything about what’s going on in my life, like if I just broke up with my girlfriend or something.  There will be 5-year-old kids telling me “I’m so sorry.”