Deep Voices 125: Panda Bear

An interview with and playlist from Noah Lennox

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This edition of Deep Voices is an interview with Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear. The new Panda Bear album, Sinister Grift, is out today The above playlist is made by Lennox. In our conversation, we discuss the songs on the playlist, the new album, his lyrical approach, and his work with Dean Blunt. If you enjoy this interview, please consider a paid subscription to Deep Voices to keep this project going. Thank you!

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In 2009, Animal Collective released Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album that largely defined the indie rock zeitgeist of the time: a sparkling and rhythmic record whose standout track, a song about eschewing consumerism and coolness for love, “My Girls” was sung by Noah Lennox, the artist known as Panda Bear. “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status/I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls.”

Two years later, on Panda Bear’s third solo album Tomboy, Lennox sang on “Alsatian Darn” about the struggle to provide those slabs for his family, having then grown to two children. “What to do when the things that I want don’t allow for the handful of mouths that I’m trying to feed?”

I’ve always been attracted to the honesty in Lennox’s songs, in the open-heartedness of his singing, and in his simple, colloquial lyricism. Across a two-decade career, seven Panda Bear albums, a dozen Animal Collective albums, and untold remixes and collaborations with artists as varied as Dean Blunt and Daft Punk, he’s been a reliably unpretentious, graceful, and very catchy musician.

But is that all? As I listened to the truly excellent new Panda Bear album, Sinister Grift, I wondered if I had taken the depth of his music and the breadth of his creativity for granted. I revisited Tomboy and found it to be almost shockingly good, an undoubted peer to his previous, breakout album Person Pitch. These records are modern classics. On 2023’s Reset, a collaboration with Sonic Boom, Panda Bear wades out of the vocal fog and perfects a retro rock and roll sound (that album has a mariachi version, too). I had the same experience of genuine awe while listening closely to Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper and Buoys. On each of his album, Lennox has crafted a musical universe that pulls with equal passion from rock, pop, ambient music, and dub. The songs flow between genres as they please, though never sounding disjointed. Lennox is no dilettante. He’s an inventive percussionist and a guitar whiz and his voice—often accurately compared to those of the Beach Boys—is golden and booming. His music feels timeless and warm, immensely likable, and deceptively intricate.

There’s a lot of honesty and grace in his music, and that continues on Sinister Grift. The album features contributions from all the members of Animal Collective, along with a gang of contributors, including his daughter Nadja. In mixed news for fans like me who loved the intimacy of his lyrics, he says he’s fictionalized many of these songs. Still, the prevailing emotion is one of generosity.

I spoke with Lennox last week while he was in Atlanta on tour, the day before he headed back home to Portugal. In addition to our discussion about the album, we talked about the playlist above, which he made exclusively for Deep Voices. It features tracks from members of his backing band and some frequent collaborators, along with some high school favorites.

Why did you start the playlist with “Satan Is Real”?

After hearing that track, I really wanted to do something that had the same sort of setup, with a vocal refrain at the beginning, then there’s a talking or preaching passage, and then the vocal refrain comes back, and then another talking passage, and then it finishes with the vocal refrain. I hope I did my own version of it, but I definitely took the inspiration from the Louvin Brothers.

You’re talking about “Anywhere But Here,” the song with your daughter Nadja?

Yes.

How did you decide you needed an additional vocalist on the song and how did you decide it should be her?

I always wanted it to be somebody else. It just felt weird thinking of doing a spoken word thing myself. My original idea was to ask Nadja to do it, but my music isn’t really her thing and I felt like maybe she wouldn’t be down to do it. Then I asked Dean Blunt to do it and he was definitely game. But after a while, he said he couldn’t find his way into the track, which happens. I thought about Pete [Kember, aka Sonic Boom] for a second, but I eventually went back to my original idea.

I didn’t really give Nadja any instruction as far as what to write about. I just asked her to write something that felt meaningful to her in this time, in this moment. She wrote maybe three poems, and we chose the one that thematically seemed to work with the piece that I had done.

The lyrics are in Portuguese, so I did a Google translation, and they seem to be about our duty in life being to treat each other well, regardless of what you get in return. Is that accurate? I found it to be really moving.

I was quite surprised, because she doesn’t often talk in that sort of way about things, certainly not about life. I mean, she’s 19, so she’s coming out of the phase where mom and dad, you don’t really fuck with them so much. So, yeah, I was surprised, moved, and really proud, very, very proud of her. She and I have pretty different temperaments, I would say, but it’s one of those moments where I felt like I saw myself a bit in her, in a cool way.

Did you say that to her?

I’m sure I did. She wouldn’t want to hear it. She still hasn’t listened to the song.

Oh, wow. How come?

No interest. I said, “It came out really great. Do you wanna hear it?” She said no.

You have a lot of guests on this album. When you’re putting together a record with so many people, do you feel like you have an Avengers approach, where you’re assembling an unstoppable team?

It’s really about trying to make the song as good as it can be, but also it’s trying to find things to excite myself and the music in new ways. I suppose it’s about discovery. If I was just doing the same thing over and over again, I might get lost. On this [album], I can’t say there was a grand plan, it just grew very slowly. I asked Brian, who’s Geologist from Animal Collective, to do a sound patch for me. I knew I had Josh [Dibb aka Animal Collective’s Deakin] on board and so then I started looking for a place to get Dave [Portner aka A.C.’s Avey Tare] involved, because it felt weird not to have everybody. And then I just kept seeing moments and songs where I felt like it needed a different sort of flavor or perspective. Often there’s a seed of inspiration, and then it’s just about following my nose after that. Gradually, gradually. My songwriting feels like a photograph that slowly comes into focus.

You have a very strong voice as a singer. Do you think of that separate from the instrumentation as you’re writing?

Singing in the choir in high school is always something I loved a lot, especially noticing the effects of multiple voices singing different harmonies together. There’s something immediately powerful about that, how it felt to be in a room with 40, 50 other people, all singing at the top of their lungs. There’s a profound effect that that has that I feel like I’ve always been chasing with music.

But I think of [my voice] as just another instrument. I don’t really differentiate so much. I really don’t. I’d even expand further than that: The drumming, the singing, the guitar playing, the songwriting, Animal Collective, Panda Bear, the features and remixes, it’s all part of the same wave to me. It all just feels like part of the same creative trajectory. I think part of that is stuff I learn from the previous project always bleeds into the next thing.

What’s something you learned recently that you used for Sinister Grift?

Well, I think there’s definitely a through line with both Reset and the two previous Animal Collective records. All the samples that Pete brought to me for the Reset project have an early rock and roll sound I definitely hear on this record. And then, for the A.C. record, having done this more natural-sounding setup for all that music, I feel like there’s still residue of that. Even though I feel like this is a very kind of digital audio workstation record, you can tell the set up is just bass, guitars, drums, and singing.

Does it feel nice to have that kind of cleanness?

It feels good right now. Knowing how I do things I can’t imagine that I’ll stay in this place for long.

Does that have anything to do with the NRBQ and Bad Finger, two classic rock groups you put on this playlist?

When I was in high school, pretty much all I listened to was classic rock radio. I developed both a love and a vocabulary for that era of music. Curiously, I feel like it’s never really come out in anything I’ve done until now. I couldn’t tell you why it came out now, but I definitely see it all over the new record. So the NRBQ, the Badfinger that’s all in that zone for me.

Where do you hear that sound on the album?

I’d say “Defense,” explicitly. The guitar solo, the arrangement. It’s a bit more subdued on the record, but when we do it live it’s way more rocked out, perhaps a bit more garage-y. The samples that Rivka [Ravede, backing band member] plays have sound design elements that make it more of a contemporary thing to me, but I definitely hear the echoes of all this classic rock stuff in there. “50mg” is a bit of a hybrid of a country song and a reggae song. The first song “Praise” is very power-pop to me, very ’70s classic rock.

I want to ask you about something I read in an interview with you. You were talking about your own lyric writing and saying that you wanted to fictionalize your songs more lately. I feel like you’ve opened yourself to an audience over time, which I feel like has probably helped people feel close to you. As a fan, that’s how I feel. But over time, did that feel like too much honesty and intimacy? How did things change on this record?

I used to think that the best way I could try to communicate something was to be as honest as possible, as direct as possible. No metaphors, no flowery language, no embellishment, just straight to it. Around Grim Reaper I started slipping. Having children is such a shift of perspective. Suddenly the focus of everything you do is pointed towards another person. So I believe that had something to do with it, but I just feel like people really like stories, and to say something in an engaging way seems to grab people differently. Beyond that, I like the idea that the song can exist in a space between the audience and myself. There’s the hope that if it’s not so hyper-specifically mine then it may be able to belong to somebody else.

At the same time, [a lyric] has to start with something very meaningful, or something I felt or thought. But these days, I’ll let it grow into something else. There’s suffering in Sinister Grift that I know is mine, but the characters in the song aren’t me necessarily. It’s like an impression of something real, but it’s not real.

I feel like there are two particularly heavy tracks towards the end, “Left in the Cold” and “Elegy for Noah Lou.”

Yeah, yeah. I feel like the record goes from light to dark. It’s definitely a contrast.

Who is Noah Lou?

This is a sad story. Noah was the son of some friends of mine who tragically died a couple years ago. The title has nothing to do with the subject matter of the song, the song isn’t about Noah Lou in any way, it’s just meant as an homage, or to honor him. It’s been a minute, but I suppose because we share the same name, while I was writing the song, I just kept thinking about him a lot. I can’t say exactly why, he was just around. And because of that, I asked my friends if I could title the song that in a remembrance.

The song itself seems to me to be about a child considering his mother and how the dynamic of that relationship shifts as one grows older. There’s a longing in it for a kind of acceptance, or a searching for love. It was written first as a commission to be featured in someone’s film, but it didn’t get used. And it’s funny, because the character in the movie was supposed to be an amateur musician, kind of clumsy, and the song was meant to be emotionally vulnerable and kind of embarrassing. Not goofy, but clunky. The lyrics I’d written weren’t the same, but over time, it actually became super, super meaningful. I find this to be truthful, that if you’re behind a mask, sometimes deeper stuff comes up.

That’s very beautiful.

It’s sort of the inverse with “Praise,” which is a good example of what I’m talking about, as far as visualizing or mythologizing a very personal thing. “Praise” started out as a song thinking about my son in a lighthearted way, kind of being frustrated with him. The line about him not picking up the phone is a very real thing that happens. But then, over time, the song grew into something more generally about fatherhood, and then took another step to be more about the sense that, in being a parent there’s this realization where, no matter what the kid does, if he’s not giving you anything back, he’s not responding to your calls, maybe he’s acting up or whatever, there’s always this unbreakable fire that’s driving the whole thing. These two songs are mirror images of each other, in a way, insofar as “Praise” is of the father/son, of top down, dynamic, and “Elegy” is the child/mother, bottom up.

You have “Downer,” your track with Dean Blunt as the last song on your playlist, which is the only one that you perform on.

And I was reluctant to do that.

What made you pick this one?

I really wanted to choose a Dean track, because I love him. He’s one of my favorite things going.

How did you and he start collaborating? You should correct me if you disagree, but I feel like you have very different musical sensibilities.

It’s funny, I feel kind of the opposite. He’s one of the most kindred spirits I have creatively. I resonate very much with his freewheeling, anything goes approach. He has a very open sensibility about what he’s doing and what he appreciates about music. He doesn’t get too hung up about sound quality, which is definitely a signature of mine. Keeps his cards pretty close to his chest, which I feel like I do as well. Always, always has good ideas.

How did you guys meet?

I’ve spent maybe 20 minutes with him in person ever. We played at two festivals where we talked for a little bit, but most of our relationship has been online. He actually moved to Lisbon and we always were trying to make plans to hang out, but I was gone, or he was gone. We keep trying to find each other across the globe, but so far as it hasn’t materialized.

It’s almost like having a pen pal. Sounds kind of nice.

Yeah, super nice. It’s always refreshing to find somebody who you feel like resonates on your frequency, especially if you’re a weirdo like me.