Cover Story: Animal Collective

There are so many albums I can credit for changing my life, but none have grown with me quite like Animal Collective’s sixth album, Feels. For over a decade, it’s been a guiding light during the darkest moments and soundtracked some of my most cherished memories, too. “Banshee Beat,” the first track from Feels that I became obsessed with and then devastated by, played on repeat after someone I was dating during my sophomore year of college ghosted me after I’d opened up to him about being sexually assaulted, because it resurfaced his own unprocessed trauma. I came to terms with carrying the weight of my heartache, finding comfort in its words when nothing else helped: “But I don’t wish that I was dead /Now a very old friend of mine once said / That either way you look at it / You have your fits, I have my fits but feeling is good / Confusion’s not a kidney stone in my brain / But if we’re miscommunicating, do we feel the same?”

Just like Feels was a balm during some of the heaviest experiences, it’s also been present during moments of joy. “Purple Bottle” became my go-to song whenever I had a crush, relishing that schoolgirl-like naiveté while bursting with excitement, making me fall deeper. Other tracks, like “Loch Raven” and “Daffy Duck,” have become fixtures during road trips with my partner. Feels is played year-round on our turntable, whether it’s while doing housework or spending a Sunday afternoon together. It’s an album that I’ve thought about passing along to my future children, like a family heirloom that’s there for them whenever they need it. Other Animal Collective albums have been a transformative part of my life, from Merriweather Post Pavilion to Strawberry Jam, but as Feels turns twenty, I’ve realized that there is something monumental that the band was able to tap into then: It’s a record that feels playful and allows you to reconnect with your childlike wonder, yet it’s also stunningly mature, featuring some of Dave Portner’s (aka Avey Tare’s) most profound lyrics.

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Feels came during a turning point for Animal Collective. After releasing Ark, their fourth album, in 2003, the band was still struggling to make a living from their music. They each had side gigs, including Lennox and Portner working for a shady moving company. Following Ark, Lennox and Portner made Sung Tongs as a duo, which went on to be critically acclaimed, beginning to set in motion the band’s streak of success. While they enjoyed the collaborative process of just the two of them, they realized it was time to return to the band’s original configuration, with Josh Dibb (aka Deakin) joining Portner on guitar to help shape the album’s textured sound.

“The entire guitar sound of that record is based on the way that Josh and I’s guitars go together,” explains Portner, speaking on Zoom alongside Brian Weitz (aka Geologist) from their respective homes. “We definitely had conversations back then and had delay units we really liked. Josh had an Ibanez analog delay from the eighties, I think, that we had used earlier when we weren’t playing as Animal Collective, and we really liked it a lot. So I think we were like, ‘Oh, we love the way that this delay sounds. Let’s incorporate that into the guitar sound.’ We talked a lot about the way that we wanted the guitars to go together and create this glowing [element].”

Dibb, on a Zoom call with Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) while on the road during their joint tour, remembers this similarly, noting that there was a “pretty conscious decision” for him and Portner to approach Feels with complementary guitars. “We were both really into finding old eighties and early nineties rack delays that were cheap things you could buy, like Ibanez rack delays were a thing, or Yamaha rack delays that usually you could pick up for fifty to a hundred bucks at the most, and run our guitars through them,” he says.

“I think we just got really into this very clean, delayed sound and the syncopation between Noah’s drumming,” he adds, “which eventually you’d had a delay on your tom mic we got into playing with all these delay times between each of our respective stations, and the dueling guitar thing between me and Dave became a theme pretty quickly.” Lennox interjects, “It was either stuff that was delayed in that rhythmic, polyrhythmic sort of way, or it was delayed so it was washy. I feel like those were the two.”

Portner recalls that Lennox, who he describes as someone who “has never been a gearhead,” envisioned Feels to be minimalistic, using just a floor tom, a snare, a hi-hat, and his sampler. It wasn’t what Portner was imagining for their next foray, but he went in with an open mind and accepted his bandmate’s approach. “I think, definitely, that [minimalism] was the plus of it all. That helped, or something like Brian playing the mini discs at that time. Those things are what created the sound of it all. It’s just a matter of making it work,” Portner admits.

The resulting record combined the essence of their previous two records, while taking Animal Collective into new, bolder terrain. “Somebody asked me recently on Instagram, ‘Why do you think at the beginning of the Feels songs, it sounded kind of more like Ark, and then towards the end, by the time you recorded it, it was more poppy and more like Sung Tongs or something?’” Portner tells me. “And I don’t think there’s really a specific answer for that. I think, whenever we have a new group of songs, it always just kind of starts out like a little bit of a mess. And it takes some jamming together. As many ideas from other places as we would bring, it’s also very important that we stay true to ourselves and have our own sound.”

While Feels was born during a time when the band had just figured out how to work together, maximizing their collaborations, it also emerged during an unprecedented moment for the group. Lennox, Portner, and Dibb were living in New York City, while Weitz had already relocated to Washington, D.C. after graduating from Columbia University to work in environmental policy. But in 2004, Lennox decided to move to Lisbon, Portugal, to settle down with his then-wife Fernanda Pereira. With Lennox being such a vital part of the band, his bandmates questioned if and how Animal Collective could continue without him.

Weitz recalls that Lennox broke the news over drinks at a bar downstairs from his apartment, where the bandmates questioned, “Is this the end, or is there a chance you want to come back?” The conversation was left open-ended, with Lennox promising they could try to work something out, as half of Feels had already been written. “During Feels, I think there was a moment where we did think, ‘Is this band going to end, or at least Noah’s involvement in it going to end, because he fell in love with this woman and wants to [move to Portugal].’ But after that, he did say, ‘Okay, I’ll come back and we can do a couple of weeks of shows and a couple of weeks of rehearsals,’” Weitz remembers. Dibb has a similar recollection, noting that the bandmates had “a bit of a question mark with Noah moving, because we weren’t making a ton of money at that point. So the idea that our bandmate was living an ocean away seemed like potentially a game-ender. How do we do this?”

What initially seemed like a threat to Animal Collective’s continuity turned out to be a blessing. Reuniting after being apart allowed them to appreciate spending time together, which they’d previously taken for granted. The distance from each other proved to be healthy for the band too, rekindling the joy they felt during their teenage hangouts. With the exception of Weitz, the Animal Collective members hadn’t spent much time apart between forming and making Feels. In 2000, Dibb, Lennox, and Portner moved in together in New York City, but Portner eventually got his own place. “Noah and I, living together and working together and playing music together, we’ve had our friction, and we’ve had times where we just can’t stand being in the same room as each other, because we’ve been in so many small, enclosed rooms together, and just the nature of what happens,” Portner explains. “Sometimes, you just realize that you’re not talking to your close friend anymore, or I would realize that like, ‘Oh, Noah and I just have been in a room together for a few hours and really haven’t spoken to each other at all,’ and that was part of the impetus for him moving to Portugal, to have some separation from it all.”

Dibb recalls this being one of the main reasons for Lennox relocating, noting that, up until Lennox left, the bandmates were “really on top of each other” creatively, but also in need of their own space to flourish. The success of Sung Tongs and finally touring for slightly larger crowds made the band realize they could make it work, even if it took some extra effort to make time with each other to create new music. “During Feels, with me living down here [in D.C.], Noah moving to Portugal, it just made all of the rehearsals and the writing sessions and then the tours and the studio sessions feel more appreciated and precious,” shares Weitz, “because you knew at the end of three weeks you weren’t going to see each other for a while, and then you just looked forward to the next time. I think that also played a big part in it being a fun time.”

DESPITE PORTNER AND LENNOX’S ADMITTED FRICTION, as life on the road while striving to survive as an emerging indie band wasn’t easy, their bond as both longtime friends and creative partners has only gotten stronger over time, bringing out the best in their work. That ability to understand each other during those tough, testing moments led to Portner penning “Flesh Canoe,” a track that on the surface reads as a love song but is actually about finding trust in Lennox and finding fulfillment by working alongside him. In an interview with CMJ, Portner revealed the song’s true meaning, which surprised Lennox.

Looking back at “Flesh Canoe” twenty years later, Weitz points out that Portner called Lennox a “young red bird” in the track as a reference to a red sweatshirt Lennox was wont to wear during their Ark tour, which bore a patch of a bird. However, Lennox still struggles to see how he inspired the song. “I’ve tried to read the lyrics a couple of times, but I don’t really get it,” he admits. Portner chimes in, clarifying: “When we talk about writing a song, I’d say it was inspired by my relationship with Noah. The lyrics that I ended up with aren’t necessarily all about Noah, because by that time I had fallen in love, and the chorus of a lot of what I was writing about was more about the relationship with my girlfriend, soon-to-be wife at the time, who also played on the record, so all the lyrics changed and morphed to having the theme of that, but the initial inspiration of ‘Flesh Canoe’ and probably some of the original lyrics that I had were inspired by my relationship with Noah.”

While Lennox was Portner’s initial muse for “Flesh Canoe,” much of the album was written about Kristín Anna, whom Portner went on to marry a year after releasing Feels before ultimately divorcing in 2008. While Feels is referred to as the “love record” because much of it was written while Portner was deeply infatuated, the bandleader and the Icelandic musician hadn’t officially gotten together. They were pen pals of sorts, emailing back and forth while Anna dealt with the dissolution of a relationship and Portner grew more enamored with her. “It was partly watching love fall apart and being observant of that via her and what was happening with her partner at the time,” says Portner. “Also, the combination of me starting to have feelings for her and just developing this other thing through long distance. It was just a lot of unknowns for me and a lot of me experiencing it at that time, not with her, just imagining what was happening.”

That’s partially what inspired “Banshee Beat,” a gut-wrenching song that, despite being written cryptically like many of Animal Collective’s tracks during this era, delivers a rush of devastating, heartbroken emotions behind it. Portner makes note that the lines “But what I gave you made him get mad / A little bit funny how a thing like that / Could travel from one mouth in through another” were based on him guiding Anna through the end of her previous relationship. “That’s all when you’re just communicating with somebody and you say one thing and this happens, and it’s all through communication,” he says. “A lot of my songs are just my psychological process of dealing with emotions, and especially that record. It’s just how I was processing a lot of that, because a lot of it was so unknown at that time because we weren’t together officially until after we had even recorded the record, actually.”

In a 2016 interview with Pitchfork, Portner said he wasn’t open to revisiting “Banshee Beat” because he can’t relate to the emotions behind the song. Since then, it was played during their Time Skiffs tour. Does Portner feel differently about that now? “Dave, you usually tell us, ‘I can’t, I don’t want to go there. That was long enough to spend there, and we should just move on,’” Weitz says to his bandmate. Portner explains that it’s not that he doesn’t enjoy honoring such an impactful time in his life, but rather finds it difficult to put himself in that mindset again as someone who has moved on from his previous marriage, now in a long-term “amazing love relationship.”

Anna inspired most of Feels, shaping it through her impact on Portner, awakening the overwhelming emotions that come with falling in love. Those emotions were captured forever in songs like “Purple Bottle” and “Turn Into Something.” Portner divulges, “That initial kind of spark, that crush high that I talk about in ‘Purple Bottle,’ that feeling is what initially inspired all the songs to kind of go in that direction. It’s something I felt at that time, and I was kind of thriving on it.” Some songs were written before Anna entered the fold, such as “Flesh Canoe,” “Loch Raven,” and “Fickle Cycle,” but as Portner notes, “that emotion [of adoration] really seeped in there. It started coming out and pushing the feel of the record.”

But Anna didn’t just shape the record through her awakening in Portner’s emotions—she also performed on it, adopting a moniker of her own: Doctess. As Dibb explains, Weitz and Portner had recorded piano loops while taking advantage of Portner’s access to NYU’s music rooms (despite having dropped out years prior), which Weitz took samples from and put them on a mini disc. But when it came time to record Feels, the band decided to bring in Anna to re-play some of the instrumentation Weitz had created and record additional piano over it. “I think there was probably some element of, up to that point, things had always been like this, it’s just the four of us, or in some cases the three of us, whoever was involved in stuff. And so it was a new thing to bring in outside energy, but also Dave was clearly so happy being with Kristín, and Kristín’s a really wonderful, joyous, and magical person,” Dibb says, to which Lennox adds: “She and Dave had just gotten together at that point, and they were really in love, doing their own thing for the most part. We all got along, we all hung out, but we didn’t know her super well at that point. It was all really new.”

With Portner and Lennox entering a fresh chapter in their romantic lives and the band getting into the groove of working as a quartet again, Feels marks a more joyful period in Animal Collective’s extensive history. The group recorded the music in Seattle for a month, staying in producer and engineer Scott Colburn’s home, which used to be a church and had its former pastor’s lodging converted into a guest house. Being signed to FatCat Records, the band had the opportunity to record in a studio with a producer without it being on their own dime. They knew Colburn as someone who had produced for bands like Sun City Girls and been in experimental projects they admired like Climax Golden Twins, so they could trust the producer to understand their vision without trying to sanitize it for the masses.

When Portner took a meeting with Colburn over dinner at Tacos Matamoros in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, he realized they were kindred spirits, as he was a big fan of Electric Light Orchestra, a band that Animal Collective also admired. Once it was time to record, he became “perfectly in sync” with the band, sharing a love for “crazy, weird B-horror movies” and preparing group dinners alongside his wife, Jay. The Animal Collective members think back fondly on the luck they struck with Seattle’s temperamental weather, as during the time they were there, the gloomy city was supposed to be dreary and rainy, but instead, they were met with sunshine during their stay. Another element that added to the blissed-out ambiance of Feels was that while rooming together in Seattle, the band spent their days stoned during sessions.

“I remember we toured for that record with Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance before we had actually tracked the songs. Both bands were a little thrown when we played them the record. They were like, ‘Man, on stage you were so wild and freaky, why is it so mellow?’ And we were just like, ‘I don’t know. We were stoned and drinking a lot of Budweiser,'” says Weitz. “No one was ever drunk, but it was just enough steady sipping of Black Label beer and Budweiser. We were just living in this idyllic household, being cared for by these lovely people that we were working with, and they were cooking our food.'”

“We had dinner with them all the time, and yeah, we felt like a family, the sweetest people,” Portner adds. “We just were very lucky that it all went that way.”

Despite being a new direction from Sung Tongs, Feels was instantly embraced by critics. It also marked the beginning of Animal Collective’s crossover into the mainstream, no longer being seen as too experimental to click with the general masses. “That was definitely the record where our publicist started using the phrase ‘most accessible.’ It’s a phrase that the press used a gazillion times daily. It was the first time I remember it being used to us, and I was like, ‘Oh,'” Weitz explains. “I remember the label and the publicist, that was in the one sheet or something. I was like, ‘Take that sentence out. It feels a little bleph. It’s making me gag a little bit.'”

Meanwhile, Portner points out that, during the time they made Feels, their peers and close friends were getting heavily into psychedelia, noise, and experimental music, while the team behind FatCat was “maybe into different stuff.” He recalls that, when the band handed Feels to label exec Dave Cawley, his reaction was, “It’s a good record, but it’s no Sung Tongs.” Luckily, Cawley “quickly came around to it,” despite Animal Collective having been cursed with having Sung Tongs, a folksy, experimental acoustic record, come out during the “summer of freak folk,” with the group being lumped in with the genre. While Weitz notes that the band loved a lot of the acts associated with that movement, they didn’t want to be part of it; instead, Animal Collective wanted to shine through their distinctiveness.

Feels sounding unlike anything else from that time is a major asset, one that makes it still sound timeless twenty years later. However, not everyone understood the direction the band was taking. A musician who wasn’t immediately enamored with Feels was one of Animal Collective’s heroes: Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. “[Malkmus] knew our tour manager, and he was a huge fan of Sung Tongs,” recalls Weitz. “He came out to one of our shows and he watched us. I don’t know what he thought of us that night, but I know our tour manager told us that he was like, ‘Are these guys ever going to do acoustic again?'” Thankfully, while Malkmus didn’t get it at the time, most of Animal Collective’s audience “hopped on the ride” with them and “seemed to be really open to hearing the new stuff and the new sound.”

Since Feels, Animal Collective have put out six more albums, with Merriweather Post Pavilion being their biggest, from peaking at #13 on the Billboard 200 to being interpolated by Beyoncé in “6 Inch” off Lemonade. But Feels is recognized by fans as a turning point for the band, one that showed the pathway to mainstream success without having to compromise their strong artistic vision.

Looking at the impact of Feels, Weitz recalls that, while playing a show under Motherfuckers JMB & Co. at record store the Government Center in Pittsburgh back in September, the young clerk saw that he was wearing a Panda Bear shirt and put on Lennox’s latest solo record, Sinister Grift, without recognizing Weitz as Lennox’s bandmate. When Weitz explained that he plays on the album, and the clerk realized he’s in Animal Collective, she showed him that she had a tattoo of the goat from the Feels album art on her calf. Similarly, Portner notes that while touring solo, he’ll have fans approach him and praise Animal Collective’s sixth record, with remarks along the lines of “I just wanted to say Feels meant a lot to me. I loved it a lot in college.”

Recently, Portner had to revisit Feels to compile all the live recordings for FEELSLive 04/05 and put together demos for the Feels 20th anniversary reissue. While listening back to the B-sides and demos, he felt pride in what the band accomplished as just twenty-somethings trying to figure it all out. “I couldn’t be more pleased with just what we were doing,” he beams. His bandmates feel similarly. Lennox remarks that it’s “probably in the top four or five” for him. But perhaps it’s Dibb who feels most emotionally struck by Feels, touched by how his childhood friends were able to come together and do some of the best work in their careers, fulfilling their high school dream of successfully living off music. “It felt positive. It felt hopeful. It felt exciting. There was just a lot of really good energy in it, so it’s hard to have negative feelings about it, and those songs still resonate with me,” he says. “A few years back, when we were touring for the Time Skiffs and Isn’t It Now? period, we pulled out a couple of those [songs from Feels] and did ‘Banshee Beat’ for the first time in many years. I nearly cried on stage the same way. That song is really effective to me. It’s really a beautiful song.”

Tatiana Tenreyro is Paste‘s associate music editor, based in New York City. You can also find her writing at SPIN, NME, PAPER Magazine, The A.V. Club, and other outlets.

COVER STORY | Animal Collective Can Laugh A Little

Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin speak with Paste about the lasting legacy of their sixth album, Feels, and how it became a turning point for them as a band.