Do you feel like your music has reflected that change in the band? That now it represents you more plainly as human beings?
“I think, as different as all our records are, a unifying theme across all of them is that we have always tried to make it really personal. Maybe, lyrically, now, it reflects more directly who we are and what’s going on in our lives, in a day-to-day basis, where some of the earlier records had maybe a bit more of a surreal quality to them. But, in terms of the choices of sounds that we made —even if this may not have been obvious to the listener— they were always really personal to us. We were always very conscious that the melodies and the rhythms had to reflect who we are, and our sense of humor with each other, and evoke imagery of places where we come from. Now, it’s more that those things are present in the lyrics, which makes it more obvious to listeners.”
As listener, it feels like the biggest change is that your music once seemed so insular, that all its energies were focused inwards, whereas now it seems like you’re projecting all your energy out. Have you felt that change?
“I think so. It’s hard to put my finger on when it happened or why it happened, or if that’s even really the case. 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, or people paying attention to us. It didn’t feel as if the music was any bigger than the four of us. We still try to keep that feeling, that it’s just the four of us, but because we work with the songs over the course of playing them live, they sort of develop now with a larger audience presence. Before, songs would develop in our practice space, or at a show in New York in front of 20 of our friends. Now, if we have some new songs we’re gonna try out, there’s gonna be 2000 people at every show. So, obviously circumstances lend themselves to our music projecting out, much more, to other people. That’s not something I think about, it’s just the best I can explain it.”
Has knowing that there’s this large mass of humans waiting to hear what you’re doing changed the way you feel when you’re making albums?
“There are certain decisions that we’ve noticed we are thinking about the audience in regard to. I think different people in the band have different theories on it. It’s mostly in regard to tracklisting; that’s where you have to put as much, if not more, thought into other people hearing it than just ourselves. I’m one of the more fiercely loyal-to-ourselves kind of people in the band; I try and really not care about anyone outside of the band hearing it. Whereas, others are more concerned about how people who don’t know the songs, or don’t even know us, will hear it. I think the arguments that happen within the band, from those two extremes, actually kind of help to arrive at something that’s probably the best of both worlds.”
If a listener heard Merriweather Post Pavilion first, then leapt straight back into Danse Manatee, do you think that they could understand the progression from the first to the latter? Or is that a pretty big leap for someone to make coming on board at this stage?
“I don’t know if there’s a universal answer to that. I think it would depend on how people went backwards, the jumps that they made. I think it might eventually make sense to them with repeated listens to our older stuff, as opposed to just one. When I was 14, hearing Crooked Rain by Pavement, or Bob Mould’s band Sugar, and then deciding to go back and buy some of the early singles right away, I was just completely shocked by Pavement’s more trashy noise stuff, or early Hüsker Dü hardcore stuff. I’d think ‘this it not for me,’ and put those records on the shelf. But, then, as I grew more familiar with the band, and maybe heard records that came out in between the earlier stuff and the present stuff, I'd see the link, see how this connection made sense, then be able to listen again and find that the elements in the earlier stuff were the same elements that I actually liked in the later stuff, but just buried, or yet to be fully developed. I’d hope that, if other people were encountering us now, and then going back and exploring our earlier stuff, they’d give it time to make sense. But I’m not sure people still do that these days.”
Do you still listen, now, to other people’s records as much?
“I think maybe I travel with music less; I used to always listen to things on airplanes, or long car trips. Whereas, now, if I do those things when I’m on tour, my ears tend to break, so I use that time for silence. When we’re not on tour, though, and I’m in my house, I’m pretty much listening to music from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. No doubts about it.”
And that still has an influence on how you make your own music?
“Definitely. I think some of the biggest changes in our music have come that way. I can point to every record and say ‘this is what we were listen to at the time!’ A lot of the stuff with Merriweather, and even some of the ideas with Strawberry Jam, and definitely with the Person Pitch record that Noah did [as Panda Bear], a lot of those ideas came from listening to a lot of hip-hop productions by Madlib and J-Dilla. And there’s a lot more influence of techno, which none of us had listened to before we moved to New York, at the beginning of this decade, right when the Kompakt label formed in Germany.”
Person Pitch reminded me a lot of those early Basic Channel records.
“Oh, yeah, we’re huge Basic Channel fans. Those sort of things really came into play. We try to take things we find inspiring from other people’s music. Sung Tongs and Here Comes the Indian have a lot of African, West African, West Indian, Caribbean influences. We try not to straight rip them off, but more like we take what we find inspiring about things, and morph it into something that feels a bit more personal to us, enmeshing it with something that feels more like it’s coming from our background. Something that feels more like it’s our own music.”
