Climbing Trails and Dodging Dogs with Grizzly Bear’s @edroste
To see more of Ed’s photos, follow @edroste on Instagram. For more stories from around the music community, follow @music on Instagram.
We are crawling on our hands and knees through the dusty landscape of Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, which was not the plan. Ed Droste (@edroste), the singer for the beloved chorale-meets-indie rock act Grizzly Bear, may have one of the most mellifluous voices of the last decade, but his internal GPS needs a little fine-tuning. In the middle of our two-hour hike through the sprawling city park, home to the Hollywood sign, Ed lost the way, leading his friend Ryan and me to scramble up behind him on one of the park’s many fake out trails that only bobcats and CrossFit obsessives attempt. It’s practically vertical. Ryan and I are panting, our faces inches from the ground, but Ed, who’s been on a bit of a fitness kick lately, bounds quickly to the top.
He calls out: “Are you cursing me now?”
Need breath. Can’t answer.
“You’ll look back on this and say that you got a really good cardio workout.”
Credit where credit is due: Ten minutes later, endorphins rush in but fear rapidly supplants. Now on the trail proper, we run into a striking silver-and-black dog that looks straight out of Game of Thrones. One eye is ice blue, the other black. I ask if he’s one of those wolf-dog hybrids. Before the owner can answer, the reincarnation of Ned Stark emits a growl. We dart away from him and giggle from a safe distance about how we nearly got our throats ripped out.
Ed moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, New York, more than two years ago, and it’s exactly these kinds of wilderness adventures that have turned him on to the city, though he prefers them with less peril. “I love that there’s green space everywhere,” he says. “The fact that this park is 10 minutes from my place, it’s amazing. My quality of life has improved so much. In New York, I stayed out too late and slept during the day –– it just wasn’t that healthy.”
Though the Cape Cod-native is happy to call California home, travel is one of his true callings. There he is throwing up mock-gang signs in coastal Massachusetts. In another pic, he’s playing cricket in Jodhpur, India, then exploring a beautiful cave in Myanmar and a mist-shrouded bridge in Lucerne, Switzerland, which is where Ed’s boyfriend lives.
“It’s my favorite thing to do other than music. I’m always hyper-stimulated when I go to another country,” says Ed. “I post a lot of latergrams from my trips, if I didn’t capture something exciting around the house. Sometimes it looks like I’m on one long vacation and I have to clarify that it isn’t true.”
How does he afford this voracious wanderlust? By touring with Grizzly Bear and racking up miles. The four-piece’s most recent global jaunt in support of their fourth album, Shields, lasted a year and a half and ended last January at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Ed also documents his travels for Vogue; his latest column tracks his trip to India with a group of friends.
His taste in photography mostly veers toward elegant landscapes and architecture. “If I see another pic of latte art, I’m going to die.” As we stop for Ryan to take a picture of Ed posed in front of the cityscape, we talk about selfies. “I’ve been known to do a selfie or two,” he admits, “but I don’t like following people who only do selfies. After a while it’s like, ‘I know what you look like.’”
In addition to his travel pictures, Ed also likes to capture his life as a working musician. When the members of Grizzly Bear sequestered themselves at Ed’s mother’s house in Cape Cod for almost two months to record Shields in 2012, Ed regularly posted from their studio sessions and his daily hikes.
“It’s inspiring to have another outlet when you’re creating something,” he says. “It takes your mind out of one space and puts it somewhere else. When I look back, it looks like a snapshot of a certain time, with the colors I was using then.”
Ed may get the chance soon to document the band at work once again. Bassist/producer Chris Taylor, who just released a cookbook, 20 Dinners, moved to Los Angeles two months ago and promptly set up a garage studio. “That’s been a huge motivation for us all to get started again,” says Ed. The two have been working on ideas and sending them back to drummer Chris Bear and guitarist-singer Daniel Rossen, who live in Long Island’s North Fork and upstate New York, respectively.
So far, Ed says their fledgling sound isn’t a reinvention, but a slow progression toward something different. “We’ve always changed with each album,” he says about the next record, which doesn’t have a set release date, though Ed mentions early next year as a possibility. “I’m gravitating towards fun. I just went through a divorce. It’s been a tumultuous year but I don’t really want to write [about] that … Chris and I are like, ‘Let’s just have fun with this. Let’s not make it sad.’” Eventually, they’ll all have to meet somewhere to record. “I have a feeling they’d be down to come out here,” he says.
With any luck, Grizzly Bear will be blazing trails in the studio and the wilds of Los Angeles very soon.
––Margaret Wappler for Instagram @music
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