In January of 2009, Animal Collective released their ninth album, Merriweather Post Pavilion. After years of building a slowly-growing cult following, the LP defiantly delivered the shape-shifting outfit into the commercial consciousness, debuting at #13 on the Billboard charts. Most amazingly, it did so without sacrificing a single iota of the band's artistic credibility; it almost immediately celebrated as the pinnacle of their impressive career.
Interview: 1 September 2009
You have a brief window of not-touring. What are you working on with all your spare time?
“[laughs] The new stuff we’re working on we’re keeping secret right now. It’s for a DVD we’re doing with this filmmaker, so we don’t want to release the music, or even perform it live, and detach the music from the visuals.”
How different is making music to go specifically with visuals?
“We’ve been working on the visuals and the music pretty much simultaneously, so that’s been a guide in the composition that we’re just not used to. Like, we waited for some material to be shot, and we let that influence the sound choices that we made, and the length of the song; so it’s always been there as a boundary we’re working with. The director [Danny Perez] did the same thing: he didn’t work out exactly how we has going to cut a scene until he heard the rhythm of the song that we were working on. For so long it’s been in bits and pieces; it’s been three years we’ve been working on it. But, hopefully, that’s the next big project that we’re gonna finish up."
Be honest: is it nice to not be on tour?
"Yeah, it is. None of us are huge fans of touring a lot; we all have people at home that we'd prefer to be spending our time with. We love playing live and we love playing with each other, but the long bouts of travel can wear on us. A lot of it isn't very glamorous at all. We are fortunate that we don’t have to tour as much as some bands do. But the size band that we are, and the kind of music that we make, it’s definitely the main option for making a living these days.”
Are you surprised at the size band that you've ended up becoming?
“Very surprised! It’s always been a gradual climb; although I guess Sung Tongs was the first watershed moment. That was a big surprise, just to be playing for crowds of more than 50 or 60 people. Outside of New York, that’d never really happened before, so it was a big deal to us. Since then, with each record, things have stepped up in a way that made sense. We got a sense from the amount of people asking to do interviews, or the interest people were showing in the new record, it always felt like just a little bit more than before. [Merriweather Post Pavilion] has been quite a jump as well, I guess, but it doesn’t feel anything shocking. It’s surprising considering where we’ve come from, but it’s not something that doesn’t make sense to us or feels uncomfortable to us.”
So you haven't had any moments where your crazy popularity just seemed surreal?
“Oh, they totally feel surreal. We just played a couple of shows in New York and there were 6000 people a night, which for our own shows is the most people we’ve ever played in front of. At festivals now, we’re on the main stage, playing in front of 20 or 30 thousand people. That certainly doesn’t touch my ego; I tend to not even look out at the crowd so as to avoid feeling overwhelmed.”
For someone who ‘knew’ the band in the early days, as much as one could, there was a definite sense that you were steeped in mystery: wearing masks, trading only under your adoptive names. Why has that changed over the years?
“I think that, to a certain extent, that we couldn’t keep it up. With the internet you can’t keep a sense of mystery about you unless you work really hard at it. And we were never really trying that hard to keep up this sense of mystery beyond these very simple steps. We never lied about our real names or made any attempt to hide our real selves; we wore the masks for fun, for our own enjoyment, it was never really to conceal our faces or remain anonymous. We never tried to prevent pictures of our real faces getting out there. But after one or two tours of wearing the masks, it felt like it was becoming that gimmick that was being attached to us. If we were coming to town, the local city press would write about us as the guys who would perform in animal costumes. We never actually did wear animal costumes, but lots of people would show up expecting us to. But we didn’t do it for our reputation, we did it for our own enjoyment. So, we just felt like trying something different, so we stopped wearing the masks."
But wasn't mystery important to the band's aesthetic?
“We love mystery! We grew up on mystery, in the ’90s, listening to a band like the Sun City Girls. It was nice to feel like you didn’t know who these people were or where this music was coming from. Even early Pavement singles had that feeling about them; same with early Silver Jews 7”s. We always were attracted to that, but, these days, with the internet, all it takes is one time to sit down with a magazine and say, sure I’ll talk to you and you can take my picture, and then the mystery is gone forever.”
I was thinking about the death of mystery, and Jandek as the representation of that phenomenon. For 25 years he was the ultimate mystery, no one had any idea who he was, and now he’s just this dude who plays shows, and everyone knows his name, but there’s this sort of wink-wink in-jokery to keeping the mystery alive.
“Exactly. Everyone knows Jandek now. If you look at the dubstep scene in England at the moment, Zomby won't show his face, and tries to remain anonymous, and it’s gotten to the point where he gets worried about even performing live because of it. And Burial tried to remain anonymous but he ended up just outing himself because, with the internet, it just became this huge thing, his anonymity. When you have to work really hard at it, and it ceases to become this fun, interesting thing. Unless you’re really desperate to remain anonymous, it’s more work than fun to create that mystique now.”
Next: "Looking back on some of the older records, they felt inward-looking or more insular because we weren’t really a band that had fans..."
