Animal Collective’s Panda Bear Talks ‘Time Skiffs,’ The Transportive Power of Music, James Brown Drummers, and More

It’s been just about two decades since indie darlings Animal Collective hit the scene… and they’ve managed to remain as innovative and resonant as ever. 

First making a name for themselves as standard-bearers of the sincerity and creativity of the early 2000s indie movement, landmark albums like Feels (2005), Strawberry Jam (2007), and Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) put them on the map as trailblazers for popular music in the 21st century. More recently, albums like Painting With (2016) and Tangerine Reef (2018) have continued to be adored by critics and the band’s cult-following alike, while proving that the Baltimore-born quartet has only sharpened their chops over the years. 

Now, the band is back at it—this past February, they released their eleventh studio album, Time Skif s. 

The material for this new record had its genesis in 2018 when three members of Animal Collective—Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare), Josh Dibb (aka Deakin), and Brian Weitz (aka Geologist)—booked a special gig at the Music Box Village in New Orleans, for which they worked up a new batch of songs. Not long after that, they touched base with the band’s fourth member—Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear)—who had been working on a number of demos of his own. Linking up in Tennessee in 2019, the band began forging what would eventually become Time Skiffs (though, a few hiccups, like an international pandemic, did get in the way). 

Featuring a few new sounds (such as Portner playing electric bass and Lennox primarily playing acoustic drums), Time Skiffs demonstrates Animal Collective’s admirable ability to adapt and evolve over time. Yet, with sentimental themes of change, hope, nostalgia, and solace, the album perfectly fits into the band’s canon of uber-genuine songcraft. Exploring themes such as the passing of time and environmental degradation, the album effortlessly speaks to universal contradictions in our world with a precisely particular language and expression. To that end, it’s not only one of Animal Collective’s vibiest releases to date but also one of their most impactfully meaningful. 

Hopping on a Zoom call with American Songwriter, Lennox explained how the record came to be—discussing the challenges of recording remotely, revealing some of his biggest inspirations for working on the tunes, and diving into the philosophy behind some of their themes. Read the conversation below: 

American Songwriter: Y’all had your first leg of the tour this past March—how was that? Do y’all feel like you’re getting back into the swing of things? 

Noah Lennox: It was good. We were super lucky—one of us did get sick, but it mercifully wasn’t COVID. Having played all the shows, I feel really lucky that we didn’t run into any COVID snags of any sort. I know of three or four bands who had to postpone or cancel portions of tours because of it. So, we felt super lucky that the whole thing just kinda went off, you know?

Other than that, it was nice to do something that felt like the “before times.” People seem especially grateful—I think it’s in the same way, feeling good to do something normal again. It was a really good time. There was a really good energy to the shows and I feel like we played pretty good most nights. It was cool. 

AS: The material on Time Skiffs started coming together when the other guys in the band did those dates at Music Box in New Orleans—when did you get hooked in to the process? What was it like once all four of y’all got together and started to hash everything out? 

NL: I just started writing songs without any idea of where they might land or what they might become. I just kinda cranked stuff out. This was pre-pandemic, but even then, doing music is just kinda a way to get me from one day to the next. I don’t really like to build it up any bigger than that. 

So, I just had this backlog of stuff. I hadn’t really heard what the other three guys were working on. I just sent them a big batch of songs—kinda, like, crappy demos. They’re just enough to be an idea of what the song could become. I told them: “Whatever songs resonate with you, we can work on those.” I think I sent them around 33 to 35 songs. This was before I heard the Music Box stuff, which they were really excited about. After I heard that, and after I found out which of the songs I had done the guys liked, it became about finding a way to… not really make them sound the same, but make them feel like they were coming from the same place or a similar world. That was the work for the next couple of years after that. 

It was a long time. It was the longest time between when we first started writing songs and when we recorded them. The pandemic certainly played a big part in that… and continues to play, I should say. Having done the thing remotely… there were times when I was a little bit worried we wouldn’t be able to pull it off. I think I can speak for all the guys when I say that we were a bit nervous. But I think it came out pretty good.

AS: Y’all did get the chance to meet up in Tennessee once before the pandemic, right? What was that time like? 

NL: I feel that getting together, being in the same room, and hashing out arrangements is a super crucial element for us. Not that it has to be how everybody does things, but I feel like there’s something that happens for us where it really levels out the songs. Sometimes it’s through dialogue on what we think is working and what isn’t. Other times, the repetition just sorta leads you to a place without any sort of communication. You just start to feel what the song needs, what should happen, what works. 

We got together outside of Nashville somewhere around the summer of 2019. We spent three weeks just trying to put the pieces together from the demos, the Music Box stuff, and other bits and pieces that people had lying around at that time. We did a really short tour that October, and then got together again in January 2020. At that time, we were preparing to record in what would’ve been two months, so we were getting ready for that. Turns out we wouldn’t record the record for another eight or 10 months, and it would be remote. But, that was the thinking at the time, when we got together for that January session. We were just making sure that the T’s were crossed and all of that. 

I feel like those two sessions and how much time we spent together preparing was, ultimately, what allowed us to do it remotely. We knew the stuff so well. There was some stuff that changed arrangement-wise, but it was pretty minor. Although, “Strug With Everything” stands out because it was one that we hadn’t worked on so much beforehand. That one—especially the first half of the song—took a while to figure out. 

AS: What does it look like when y’all “figure out” something? Is it trial and error? Just focusing on the feel? 

NL: It’s more about the feel than anything. With Dave’s demos, it’s rare that the structures—the order of the song’s parts, the way things go—change. Mine tend to be a bit more flexible, but with his, we don’t stray very far from the demo in terms of “Four repeats of A-section, then two repeats of the B-section,” things like that. It’s specific. 

So, we focus more on the feel, especially in terms of the arrangement. It took some moments of “How about this?” where somebody would try something and send it around, and everybody else would listen. “No, that doesn’t feel right”—so we’d try something else. The new thing would work, but it would make somebody feel like they should change or adapt their part which they put on earlier… stuff like that. So, there was a bit of trial and error with that, I suppose. 

AS: Y’all demo more than you used to—does that feel like it’s streamlined the process? 

NL: Yeah, I think it has definitely sped things up. It gets everybody on the same page so much quicker, whereas before, we just had to go into the practice space after work or whatever and just keep hammering away at it until you got somewhere. The way we do it now, you can make a demo and have time to think about it and try things on your own. Then, when everybody gets together, you can give your best shot. It either works, and you continue on, or it doesn’t work. But you still have this language of the song to bounce off of, which makes things a lot easier, at least for us. 

AS: You’ve talked in interviews about how you took a new approach to your drumming style on this record—and listening to it, the new techniques have a great effect on the songs as a whole. What can you tell us about this shift in your playing? 

NL: That was really my thing—I just wanted to drum. I wanted to do, like, a… well, not really “imitate” a style, but there was a type of drummer that I wanted to see if I could figure out my own version of. It was way more demanding in terms of technique than the stuff I’ve done before. It was more about how I struck the drums and the type of tones I could get. I was hitting a lot less hard, almost trying to mix the drums as I was playing

them, rather than recording them in a specific way or mixing them in a specific way. I just wanted to play it in a way where if you just put a mic in a room, it’d already sound pretty good. That was my target. I don’t know if I hit it, but that’s what I was aiming for at least. 

It was a lot of practice. This feels super corny, but it started from a place of thinking about James Brown’s drummers, especially Clyde Stubblefield. I was trying to figure out how to play “Funky Drummer” and things like that—it’s like the most hacky thing in the universe. But, I just wanted to get that almost machine-like finesse with the hi-hat and the snare sounds, using a lot of ghost notes and things like that. I couldn’t do any of that stuff before. I was just practicing to the point where I could use those techniques to kinda define my own voice on the drums. I have a kit in my home zone, and being able to play drums for a couple of hours every day… I mean, I didn’t really have that luxury before. So, I think I’ve gotten better—maybe not on the creative side of playing drums, but certainly in regards to the machine-like finesse of playing. 

AS: The drum fills at the end of “Strug With Everything” stand out as a phenomenal moment. The fills remind of something Hal Blaine would’ve played, where just the slightest shift in momentum, the placement of a single hit, makes all the difference. How did you approach that? Was it something you thought about or just something you did after internalizing all that practice? 

NL: I was thinking about drum parts more in the sense of “What fits the song? What’s the perfect thing for the moment within the song?” rather than, like, “What’s the hardest thing I can play? How can I play faster?” 

Seeing drummers, like Brian Chippendale and others, who we’ve done shows with, these guys are just so much better than me. I was like “I’m never going to be able to do that unless I just do that.” But, even if I just did

that, I still probably wouldn’t be as good as these people. So, I thought that the way I could have my own voice on the drums would be to explore different things, think more about pattern and feel, and things like that. I’d say that sometime around the creation of Centipede Hz was really when I started thinking about that kind of approach to the drums. 

AS: It works really well—especially with Dave playing electric bass throughout this album, y’all’s rhythm section has a really great feel. 

NL: Dave’s bass playing is really cool—it’s really weird to me. He’ll do, like, melodic lines with the bass, which is the opposite of the way I would do it. It’s challenging in the best way to try to figure out a drum part that supports the bass, or what he—or Josh—is thinking with the song. His bass lines can often be a wrench in the system in the coolest way. 

AS: Do you think that, sometimes, that tension between how you would play something and how Dave would play something, for example, can be a positive creative force? 

NL: I think it can go any which way. I’m not sure it’s necessary to have tension in a creative relationship, but I think it can be really helpful sometimes. In the albeit somewhat-limited experience, I have playing with other people, sometimes there’s a tension because you can’t understand the other perspective fully. It becomes about trying to harmonize two disparate sides. Sometimes that produces results that are, at least, more interesting than if they were just one side or the other. 

AS: Throughout Time Skiffs, time—and time’s relationship with music—is a recurring, underlying theme. Music is so transcendent of time—it can transport you to your own past, or to a past you’ve never been to. It can take you “out of your body” when you’re really locked into it. What were the conversations y’all were having about this concept?

NL: My favorite story is one that Brian has from a time when he was talking with Trish, from Broadcast. They were having a conversation one time and Brian was saying that he didn’t like a certain band or piece of music because it felt too “retro,” and he was saying he didn’t like that element of it. Trish was arguing that that was one of the great things about music: it allows you to travel through time and maybe place yourself as if you were playing in another era or something like that. Seeing it in that light seemed really cool. 

Brian brought up that story once when we were in that outside-Nashville zone. Perhaps him talking about that conversation put that seed of thinking about time and music in our brains. Perhaps it doesn’t pop up explicitly in any of the songs, but at least a couple of the songs touch on that sort of conversation about time and music. 

AS: Do themes of music and time feel particularly resonate as y’all enter your third decade of working together as Animal Collective? 

NL: Unfortunately, it crops up for me just in terms of feeling old all the time. I’ll say that nothing makes you feel old like having kids—my kids make me feel old all the time. My daughter is about to be 17—when she was 8, she started getting into stuff that wasn’t just, like, the residue of stuff I was into. She was really blazing her own path. Immediately, I felt like I was on the outside looking in, kinda. So, yeah, I guess conversations or thoughts about time just crop up in terms of feeling super old these days. 

AS: Does feeling older impact the way you think about or approach music? 

NL: I don’t think so. I feel like—especially at this point—it’s become such a habit to think about music, thinking about what would be cool to do. It takes me from one day to the next. I don’t think I could stop. So, I’m sorta stuck with it, for better or worse. I’ll always be obsessed with trying to do something cool with music, at least from my own point of view.

AS: What is it about music that gives it that quality? What makes it so enduring as an outlet, as a source of emotional resonance, as a “time-traveling” tool? 

NL: I’ve talked to people who don’t think that all forms of creation are some type of communication, but, I don’t know… the evidence kinda seems to be piling up, to me. I’d wager that if you can put some sort of genuine emotion 

or capture some sort of feeling for yourself in a piece of music, then that translates to and resonates with other people sorta endlessly. The truer it is, the more it does that, I think. Authenticity and genuineness is such a weird and subjective thing. For sure, there are many people who think we’re total phonies. But I feel like if I can get something that resonates with me, that’s great—I’m going one day to the next. If it resonates with someone else, that’s just kinda like an added bonus for me. 

AS: Well, y’all are certainly a band that embraces that ethos of authenticity—there are so many lyrics from your discography that have that “endless” emotional resonance thanks to their ability to succinctly capture a feeling. A line like “treatin’ every day as an image of a moment that’s passed” from “Prester John” stands out as an example. How do you approach writing in that way? Is there an element of trusting your gut and hoping that it resonates with others? 

NL: That’s definitely part of it—there’ve been times where I had lyrics that I performed live a bunch, but then changed because I got cold feet. They felt too corny or something. So, it’s partly faith, but it’s a mixed bag of a few things. I don’t want to speak for the other guys—I’m sure they have a totally different process than I do—but for me, there’s usually some sort of nebulous idea or super basic concept, like “A song about X.” It could be an experience or an emotion I had or hearing somebody talk about something and being inspired by a sentence they said, just something small. Then, I’ll build up from that idea. Usually, from that nebulous thing, I can get one line, and then the rest of it gets built around that. 

For “Prester John,” that Treatin’ every day… line was the first thing I had, and then I went backward. Not a small part of it, for me at least, has to do with finding a specific rhythm for the melody, and then fitting words into that. I’ll stretch it a little bit, but often I’m pretty rigid about “I want the vocal to feel like this in the context of everything else going on.” So, I have to find words that fit the architecture. That can be limiting, in terms of the beauty or elegance of the prose, you might say. I feel like my lyrics can be kinda clunky if you just see them on the page. 

Honestly, sometimes I think there are lines that aren’t that good, they’re just kinda place-holders. But then they grow with the song for so long that you can’t really hear the song another way. So, there are definitely lyrics of mine that I think aren’t the best, but they became the song by default, almost. 

AS: You’ve said before that you see all the music you create as some sort of “conversation with contemporary music”—what can you tell us about this? How does that influence you? 

NL: I think that trawling through what’s currently happening is the most exciting thing for me. There’s sort of a special, really particular relationship people have with the music of their time, and it just feels like there’s the most room to grow there, there are the most directions you can go in, taking from the present. It’s hard for me to explain it beyond that. I just find it the most exciting place to start from. 

AS: I also know that something y’all were thinking about going into this album was the concept of an “American band,” and what that sounds and feels like. Tying this in with the idea of having a conversation with contemporary music, do you see something like blending older styles (acoustic drums and electric bass) with newer styles (electronics, hi-fi mixing, inventive melodies, lyrics, etc) as an expression of this? 

NL: Yeah, I feel like it’s a bit of a challenge. That’s fun. I can’t say we always nail it, but that’s one of the things that’s great about being in a band too—not everyone has the perspective that I have. I’m not sure any of the guys have the laser focus on current stuff that I do, they’re a bit more all over the place. They’re sorta constantly ingesting music of all times, whereas I’ll just kinda YouTube it for a couple of hours every day, it’s really concise. I just sit there and stare at the speakers for 10 minutes, stuff like that. I don’t really put on music when I’m at home or doing other stuff. So, I’m sure you’d get a different answer talking to them. 

But yeah, watching the waves of influence and consequence in music just sorta ripple out, and then surfing that, is really fun. 

Animal Collective’s new studio album Time Skiffs is out now—watch the music video for the single, “We Go Back,” below, and check out their upcoming tour dates HERE. 

Photo credit: Hisham Bharoocha