Animal Collective:
Noah Lennox on the Anxiety of Fatherhood & the Unpredictability of Legacy
Words: Ryan Patrick Hooper
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Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox resides in the rolling topography of Lisbon, Portugal with his daughter and wife. His living room is soaked in the leftover sunlight of the day’s approaching twilight - the result of living in The City of Seven Hills - and his daughter’s wide range of toys are littered about the apartment. The town streets are relatively steep, turning a quick run to the grocery store into a journey in itself.

“The whole country is reminiscent of California,” opines Lennox, whose sleepy stoner tone is a perfect fit for his figure and face, but a far cry from the vocal stylings found on Animal Collective’s nine full-length albums and various one-offs and b-sides; those are a perfect complement to the swelling, electro-sampled and heavily esoteric nature of the cult-y band’s extensive catalog.

While Lennox can easily compare Portugal to a state from his country of origin, he is quick to admit his lack of understanding of the language.

“My wife speaks almost perfect English,” explains Lennox, who, as one of Animal Collective’s three multi-instrumentalists, can’t quite be pinned down to one musical responsibility, but is usually noted for his Beach Boys-esque delivery over a sonically-soaked background. “That's good in the way that we can communicate, but bad that I don’t have to speak Portuguese. I feel like I can say basic stuff, but I can’t have an in-depth conversation about physiology or anything like that.”

The same sort of philosophy can be applied to Animal Collective’s latest release on Domino Records, Merriweather Post Pavilion: rich layers quickly yield immediate and comfortable pleasures, but the search for complete meaning may leave you comfortable and a bit tired. While overly elaborate questions about recording sessions of yore and which combinations of pedals Animal Collective have used in the past often become fodder for journalists and curious musicians alike, Lennox and the rest of the band are often short on words - in most cases, they've just forgotten - about the exact configuration of buttons, knobs and strings.

But when it comes to family life, and the sounds Animal Collective leave in their progressive wake, Lennox is unusually social and open - a bit of his true nature shining through, he claims. REAX recently spit the technicalities to the side, and dug into the human nature buried underneath the forgotten combinations of amps and effects that have created many of their cult classics, and their most recent release.

REAX: With David Portner (Avey Tare) living in Brooklyn and Brian Weitz (Geologist) living in Washington D.C. for the past couple of years, was the creative formula altered drastically on Merriweather Post Pavilion?
Noah Lennox: I’d say the biggest thing was that instead of all being together to work on a given song or just play, and having things develop that way, it became everybody doing a bunch of preparation work on their own in their own spaces - making sounds, writing pieces of songs or full-fledged skeletal versions of songs. When we get together, everybody has this little library of sounds that might or might not work. If you try one sound or whatever you’ve been working on and it doesn’t work, you move onto the next thing you’ve been doing for the past six months or two months or whatever.

REAX: With such a change in process, do the energy levels suffer and the human aspects of connecting with other musicians disappear?
NL: It was a bit of a conscious decision on my part. I don’t know if the others were on this tip or not, but I remember starting to feel the way that we would do live shows … we would often create this manic energy in this really intense layer and get hyped up on stage. It was starting to feel like maybe it was a go-to move, and I wasn’t really into … doing the same thing all the time, you know? It was interesting to me, at least, to see if we could still go for something that still had some thrust or power to the music, but not rely on the hyped-up state of mind for the stuff to work. Some nights, we do it better than others, or some songs work better in that way than others. But at least on my part, there was a conscious decision to do something a little more subdued.

REAX: Apparently, you’re not afraid to try something radically new and different with your craft.
NL: It’s scary, but I feel like it is way cooler to try and do something different and have it suck then be much more lame and do the same thing all the time … even though you felt like it worked the first time, you know? Creatively, you are kind of killing yourself if you do the same thing again or again.

REAX: People do love the comfort zone, and when they find the right one, it’s tough to break away.
NL: There is something to be said for the signature sound. I’m not trying to hate on anybody who has their thing and does it really well. For myself, I’m restless creatively and I always want to use new equipment and try out new ways of writing songs. The surprise element of making it is part of what is fun to me.

REAX: Lyrically, I don’t understand everything on Merriweather. That being said, I kept sensing an underlying tone that dealt with family, relationships and monetary success - perhaps the dichotomy of those three elements.
NL: I feel like there are two big things that are … the main themes lyrically of the album, and it’s sort of curious because Dave and I were not like, 'let’s write about this. This is really on my mind, so let’s work it out.' In retrospect, there is a focus lyrically on family and our working lives and the relationship between those two things. That covers a lot of territory, but I feel like pretty much every song touches on one or both of those subjects - our personal lives and our professional lives, the combination and the relationship between those two things. Maybe not so cut and dried for every song, but …

REAX: What do you think made these topics continually resurface for the both of you as writers and musicians?
NL: It’s just where we are in our lives. For me, it is always just what I’m thinking about or what is important to me at the time. I’ve never been the sort of person who can write a song about a toaster. I can’t even finish the song if it doesn’t feel like it is important to me. Portner doesn’t have any kids, but I think we’re kind of old to the point where we are … looking at the last half of life rather than the first half of life, you know? Why did I get married? Why did I want to have children? It’s a pretty epic answer.

REAX: Being in a band is an up and down thing. You are not promised a steady income. You have to take a look at if you can start a family financially, and if you can execute such a monumental step like a responsible adult. Was there any anxiety that tagged along with such a premise?
NL: Yeah, big time. Later on, when my daughter was born, I was really nervous about that kind of thing, and it was always in the back of my mind, you know? As far as I could tell, it didn’t influence the kinds of things I would write about or the type of music I wanted to play. The way it did impact the professional side of my life is that it cranked my work ethic into high gear. It’s not like I wanted to write hit music even if I could. It was more like whatever I wanted to do, I have to really work hard at it … making sure that I was really covering my bases, professionally speaking.

REAX: Looking at how the rock ‘n’ roll economy is shaped, does 'covering your bases' mean making decisions with your music that you wouldn’t have made in the past - licensing, corporate whoring, etc.?
NL: In certain instances, yes. As far as touring goes, I’m way more up on going on a longer tour or doing more tours now than I was a couple years ago. We don’t really make any money on record sales. If I want to pay my bills, I have to go on tour. But no matter how bad it gets, we wouldn’t budge or change the way we do certain things. We don’t accept too many advertisements or endorsements. I wouldn’t say that is a subject we’re all 100 in agreement about, but the people in the band who feel strongest about it feel extremely strongly about it. We’re a very democratic entity for the most part.

REAX: An international committee of sorts at this point. Are you concerned about leaving behind any sort of musical legacy for your daughter?
NL: Personally, I could … give a crap about that sort of thing. My daughter does not seem too interested in what I’m doing musically. Maybe she will be at a later point, but I could care less to be honest with you. That’s not to say that I don’t value what I’ve been a part of or what I do, you know? It is really important to me, but it would selfish and vain of me to hope that my kid thinks I’m awesome and that I made these sweet jams. As long as my kids are psyched and happy people, I’ll feel like I’ve done a good job.

I’m not the kind of person who is bummed about being old or growing up. I’m pretty psyched about where I’m at and where I’m going. It’s just a different attitude and vibe when you are considering the end of the cycle rather than feeling like you are just starting out, you know?

REAX: Do you have any sort of thoughts on how Animal Collective will be remembered musically?
NL: That’s really hard to say. Take somebody like Nick Drake, for example, who probably died not thinking he would be remembered at all. It turns out that his music is a lot more famous than it was during his lifetime. You never really know how things will be treated and how generations and popular attitudes will treat what you’ve done. One possibility is to be completely forgotten. I remember thinking that the goal was to have a physical copy of our record manufactured with a barcode on it. Laughs The other goal was to play in Japan. I started considering that career trajectory when I was 17 years old. By the time I was 23 or 24, I had both those things. It was mission accomplished, and I don’t know what is going to happen from here. Everything since then has been relatively shocking to me. Knowing that, I couldn’t even begin to predict what is going to happen 15 years down the road. I wouldn’t be any less proud if it had ended after that first Japan show.

REAX: Have there been concerns about dealing with fans, being too personally exposed in interviews? Have you become more conscious of such supposed threats?
NL: I’m a pretty open person. I don’t really feel like it's in my nature to really hide stuff, but I will use tact as much as I can. I don’t want to betray my wife, my daughter or other members of my family in any way. I just want to talk about my music and myself for the most part. I would say that it wasn’t until the most recent album and what happened with that that any of us felt like this was beyond our comfort zone. Like I was saying, I haven’t really read any press. I cut myself off from all of that. It started to feel like it was making a difference mentally for me, and it never had before - just the volume of what was being said or the types of comments, both positive and negative, were so gnarly that I couldn’t go about things in a direct way, so I shut it down completely.

REAX: After the success of this album, do you feel any sort of expectations for Animal Collective’s next release - from both the financial and creative angle?
NL: Commercially, it is more difficult because it's not entirely up to me. It’s just about what we’re doing, and what people are excited about hearing, totally connecting to make commercial success strike. I don’t know if that is going to happen again like it is now, you know? Although I’ve thought a lot about that - and I feel like the fact of the sonic spectrum of the music being really broad, and that there is nothing super abrasive about it yet it is very full, is a very familiar sonic palette. The fact that there are really strong rhythms and strong vocals in each song is in tune with popular music these days. Even though there may be things about the music that are odd or not super familiar, we are presenting these things, these sorts of creative, weird ideas, in packages that are immediately familiar.

Animal Collective's shows in St. Petersburg (State Theatre, June 8), Fort Lauderdale (Culture Room, June 9) and Orlando (Club Firestone, June 10) are all sold out.

myspace.com/animalcollectivetheband