Let me tell you the story of my favorite record.

In the summer of 1997, a weirdo folksinger from Louisiana named Jeff Mangum, a few ragged musicians he called Neutral Milk Hotel, and his old friend Robert Schnei1der met up to record some songs Jeff had been kicking around for a few years. Schneider put out the resulting album on his own little label and Mangum effectively went into a hiding, from which he's never really returned. The record they made that summer is called In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and it's one of the most beautiful things in all of music.

Driven by Mangum's high, plaintive vocals and ethereal lyrics, In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is a tightly-constructed song cycle about death, God, Anne Frank, bodily fluids, dreams, family, love and beyond; in 40 minutes, Jeff creates a gorgeous, harrowing collection of earthly noise that escapes time.

His words are absolutely stunning, ranging from the very simple ("I am listening to hear where you are") to the opaque ("your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies"), but never failing to amaze. Even at his most abstract, Mangum's vocals have a profundity and an emotional resonance unlike that of any singer before him, and to hear him perform his songs is akin to hearing a prophet speak; there are hardly words to describe it.

Oh, and the music: bleak funeral dirges played on tuneless trumpets and triumphant bagpipe lines, swells of feedback and a chorus of trombones, all underscored by Mangum's simple acoustic strumming.

Aeroplane is psychedelic, it's punk, it's baroque, all at once, but in fact, it's too distinctive to really fit neatly into any of those categories. It's a terrible cliché to call music transcendent, but if any album of rock 'n' roll ever deserved that honor, it's Aeroplane.

The feelings people have for Aeroplane are unlike those one usually feels for other rock music; chances are, if you've never heard of Neutral Milk Hotel, it's because no one you know has either, since Aeroplane is the kind of thing people tell everyone they can about. These songs become your own and hidden meanings arrive with every repeated listen. Aeroplane is one of a small handful of records that gets better every time, even after hundreds of listens.

The sing-song fury of "Holland, 1945," the epic construction of "Oh Comely," the pop perfection of "Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2;" there are just no other songs like these in the entire canon of pop music.

It's fitting that Aeroplane is loosely based on the life of Anne Frank, because it has slowly become an artifact much like her diary, a singular remnant from an exceptional life. Mangum has said he's not sure if he can ever record another album. And, as much as anybody who's heard his music would love to hear more of it, it's easy to understand why he feels the way he does. Beautiful and singular, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is all he ever needed to give.