Animal Collective Quotes
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I don't listen to music throughout the day very often. I don't own a record player. I don't really have a stereo system. Most of the music I listen to these days is on the web or on MySpace pages, stuff like that.
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I think it's cool to give people encouragement.
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In a lot of African music, the singers are just singing whatever they feel at the time - because the instrumentation is repetitive, they can come and go as they please. That's how we approach it. Not verse-chorus-verse.
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The most inspiring drummer for me is Stewart Copeland from The Police. The Police are the first band I can remember really liking, and Copeland is a guy who was playing in sort of a rock band, or a rock-pop band, but he didn't want to do the traditional kind of rock drumbeat. He was doing all these kind of reggae rhythms, and the reggae style is almost an exact opposite of the rock mold of drumming.
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Sometimes I have the idea right away, like, "Oh, this is what this song's about. This is how I'm feeling."
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It's not so much a philosophy as much as it is a pace. We need to be personally involved with every aspect of the records including the artwork, we want everything to have a similar aesthetic.
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It's weird, in New York, it's like the big theme of everything is folk music and interacting with people. Maryland is where the landscape of our music comes from, it was more like, let's walk around. People are saying that we are part of some sort of folk scene. We don't feel connected with it. We do live in the city, and communicate with people. It's all folk music.
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I definitely didn't have a lot of money. I had been fired from a record store. I was just trying to get by. I was on unemployment. I didn't have anything going full-time.
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I've had the idea since high school, of writing music just for voices, just a choir. I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing it, but I'd definitely be excited about trying to pull that off at some point. It definitely seems like an older-me kind of project.
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It's too bad music can't be like movies. For me, playing music and listening to music and creating music is very environmental. It creates a certain environment; it sets a specific mood.
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I have a hard time with extreme imagery. Like I can't watch horror movies or anything like that.
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After watching a couple of live performances of bands like Nirvana, I was really excited and inspired by how raw and powerful it was. I wanted to at least aim in that direction with the guitar and do my own version of it. I know it doesn't really sound like that on the other end, but I wanted guitar, heavy rhythms, and singing to be the stamp of the whole thing.
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Hell is a swamp, to me - not as something fiery, but as something dank, moist, and wet.
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I'm really into the idea of playing sit-down drums again. I don't know if it'll end up that way, but as of right now, that's what I'm interested in doing.
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At least for me personally, drugs aren't an essential part of having a surreal experience, or what you might call a higher experience.
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Around the time I dropped out of college, I decided to start taking what I liked about short stories and apply it to writing songs - to make these things that would change and keep going.
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When you create something you leave little crumbs of stuff that you've experienced or music that you've listened to.
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We're all living in different states and we all have different systems within those states. Even on the most basic personal level, it affects me.
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An important meeting point for me was realizing the similarity between a DJ set and a Grateful Dead set: I grew up listening to how the Dead would take a song and just jam on it, and then transition into another song.
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I feel like in a conversation if things get said and then repeated, it sort of becomes inherently part of the narrative whether you want it to be or not.
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I always thought it was important for my lyrics to come from a really honest place.
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I think we stumbled onto our own sort of lore back in high school. We weren't with the drinkers, we were more the psychedelic warriors. We sat around watching horror films.
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Doesn't every band sort of appropriate their influences into what they do? I guess that would be my defence: if you're making something, you kinda can't help being a conduit for other things.
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I have no interest in making music solely for a white audience. If that's what our audience is, I don't really feel responsible for that.