A chat with Animal Collective’s Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) on his latest album, Sinister Grift.
Hi Noah. How are you? How’s the tour going?
Noah Lennox: We have four or five days off and then we do the Rewire Festival. We fly tomorrow to the Netherlands and then after that we have a full month off. So we’re all a little exhausted, I think, but the shows have been going good. So yeah, can’t complain too much.
Like many people out there, I love your new album Sinister Grift. Can you go through the making of the album through three random memories that come to your mind that are associated with it?
Thanks! I think I first got an offer in 2019 or something to do a festival show. I don’t think I’d played a Panda Bear show in a little while, and I thought it would be cool to write a bunch of new songs for the set and present them. It turned out to be kind of a bad idea in so far as it was outside during the day, which is always a tough go. I think also trying to do a whole bunch of songs that nobody knows makes it more of a challenge. I thought I played really well, but I can’t say there was much of a response at the show. I’d written maybe five songs for that. I’d played them on just guitar and drum machine, pretty much. Then I guess in the next couple of years I wrote a couple more demos and then I started having this idea that maybe I had enough songs for a proper record. So I thought I’d maybe do it, and write a couple more ’cause I like to have more than enough to choose from. It works better for me to do that, to have more than I need. Then you can sort of pick and choose the sort of story of the album that you think works the best.
I asked for Deakin’s help because he mixed the Animal Collective thing called Bridge to Quiet, an EP that we did somewhere in the COVID time. I really liked how he mixed that one. I felt like he was developing a real signature sound to his thing. Somewhere around 2020, I built this little studio down the street here. It’s my own, my first really private space. I’ve been sharing spaces with other bands and friends for 20 years or so. It was always a dream to have my own little zone. I thought it would be cool to have a symmetry of doing the first big project in this new space with Josh since he and I started recording music together 30 years ago. Long time.
The original idea that I talked to him about was we’d record. I wanted to do a really straightforward set up as far as singing, guitar, bass, drums… A typical rock band set up. Or in my mind, it was more of a classic reggae band set up, like on Reset, where it was Pete’s idea to always do one extra percussive element on every track. Then we would slowly disassemble that or blur or morph it in some way. That was the original idea. The only song that you really hear that sort of original vision is “Elegy for Noah Lou” a little bit (and some others). That one really highlights what I thought at first the whole thing was going to sound like. As we started working on and recording the reggae band arrangements, we just felt like they didn’t really need to go anywhere else. They felt really complete or satisfying in a way that we didn’t think we needed to to go anywhere else with them.
I think perhaps because there was so much me on the songs already, since I’d played all the instruments and sang and everything, I really started to want outside flavors or characters on the thing. There kept being these places in songs where I wanted a proper guitar solo, and the first person I thought was Patrick (Cindy Lee), and lucky for me, he was down to do it. Everything just kind of slowly fell into place. But there were these really obvious points where I knew I wanted something that I couldn’t provide. So I started looking elsewhere. I’d asked Brian some time in the years before making it to make me essentially a sound pack. And we wound up using a lot of his sounds on the record. I knew I had Josh and Brian from Animal Collective on board. So I kept trying to find a place for Dave there, ’cause I really wanted to represent everybody. I can’t say there was a huge master plan for the thing, but as is very typical for me, I just follow my nose for the most part. If something feels like the right way to go, then that tends to be where I go.
As you said, you have many collaborators on Sinister Grift. Were there any other names that you wanted to include but somehow couldn’t?
Yeah, there was. There’s just one, and it was on the second track “Anywhere But Here”. My original idea for it was to have my daughter Nadja write something and to do the vocals. But then kind of halfway through, it seemed like it was going to make more sense to have somebody else do it. I thought about Pete for a minute, but then I asked Dean Blunt to do it. And he had it for a while and tried, but he couldn’t. As it happens, sometimes you can’t find your way into the thing, or you can’t figure out something that you like with something, which happens to me as well. So then I went back to my idea of asking my daughter Nadja to do it. And I think it’s for the best. I think it came out really good. But yeah, Dean was the only person I asked to do something that you don’t ultimately hear on the thing.
If you were to select two tracks from this record, one easiest and one hardest to shape, which two would they be?
I think “Just as Well” probably is the hard one. That was the one I was least satisfied with for the most amount of time. It’s more in the arrangement of it, but I think for Josh too, there was a contrast between a lightness in the song and the hard rocking edge of it that was really difficult to navigate. The thing that really brought it together for me was after we’d done a bunch of the initial recordings, I borrowed my friend’s Prophet-5 synth for a couple of weeks and just added little lines here and there on songs where I felt like it needed something. Those parts really made it make sense for me. But that was the one that I struggled with for a while.
As far as easy ones, probably “Defense” was easy. We didn’t have to try too many things with it. It just fell into place. Patrick’s solo immediately worked really well. He did maybe three or four other little parts that were just scattered around in the project. They weren’t really placed by Patrick, but he just gave me a bunch of stuff -to use or not to use, he said. And I think I wound up using almost all of it. There might have been one little thing he did that I didn’t use, but for all of it, I found pieces in the arrangement that I thought worked and it was just really kind of quick and easy like that.
You can play so many instruments. Is there an instrument that you would like to master more someday in the future?
I’d say brass, like a trumpet or something. I tried very briefly a couple times in my life to do that, but never could really figure out the sort of thing you have to do with your lips and your mouth. Maybe if I just had a little bit of instruction, I could work it out. But drumming probably is the thing for me where I always feel like there’s so much further I can go. I feel like it’s a work in progress all the time.
I can only dream of playing as much stuff as you do, so what you do already is quite impressive.
Thanks man. I feel like I play a lot of stuff, but I’m more like a jack of all trades and master of none. I feel like I do a lot, but I don’t do anything especially good. Everything’s kind of at a mid level for me. I think this is partly due to working with Animal Collective for so long. In the beginning I was really trying to support whatever Dave’s songs needed, and now Josh’s songs. I feel like I’ve developed that specific skill of somebody presenting a song and I just have to figure out a way into it. That might mean playing a variety of things, whether it’s drums or singing. I feel like I’ve had a lot of experience supporting somebody else’s idea or vision of a thing, and maybe that’s why I’ve ended up like this.
One of my favorite hobbies is to watch music videos, and I really like your videos as well. What is your relationship with that field, and do you have any favorites?
I grew up watching MTV. We have ESPN, the big sports network in the States, and those were the only things I would watch. I really like music videos that are almost gimmicky, with a real simple visual idea. Like that Justice video with the T-shirts. I love that. I like it when there’s a synergy between the video and the music where when together, they create a new thing. I think that’s really cool. I tend not to like the big budget ones with a story, the ones that are trying to be a short film. I really like Michelle Gondry’s videos a lot, like the Kylie Minogue one where she’s going around the city block and you see loops of things happening. All of The White Stripes videos are really cool. Those types of videos are the ones that I tend to kind of get into.
It’s a bit unfortunate that they just get a lot more attention -what the labels call- engagement if you have a video with a song than just doing a song. I wish it wasn’t that way, but that’s how people are I guess.
Let’s imagine we’re at a Musicians Theme Park 100 years from now, where every artist or band featured has their own memorial stone with a certain lyric by them written on it. Which one of the lyrics would you like to see written on your stone?
That’s a tough one. You’re springing it on me, so I’m just going to try to go on instinct. I may have a different answer if I thought about it for a couple days, but the first thing I thought was something from “Buoys”. All of that song describes the human condition from a point of view I feel like is very specifically mine. Probably something like “Lit from a light within, made from a brittle thing.” That whole stanza there I might go with. If I can think of Sinister Grift, maybe something like “My engine’s running, I can feel the miles.”
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