For as confident as Dave Portner and Noah Lennox sound on Sung Tongs, the path to the record may very well have been the most trying time for Animal Collective. “We were a little bit at odds,” Lennox (aka Panda Bear) said of the year leading up to the revered acoustic pivot for the band, which turned 20 earlier this year. “We were hitting it pretty hard. On the Ark tours, the van kept breaking down, and we had to spend a lot of money to fix it up.”

Everyone in Animal Collective was at either a major inflection or breaking point — Josh Dibb (aka Deakin) found himself going through a hard time emotionally on tour and chose to step away from the band to figure out his place musically. Brian Weitz (aka Geologist) also decided to pause his AnCo activity to attend grad school in Tucson. Portner (aka Avey Tare) had just gotten fired from his job at the influential Manhattan record store Other Music, and the building where he shared an apartment with Black Dice’s Eric Copeland caught fire right before the tour. On top of all that, Lennox’s father had just passed away. “It was a really tough time,” Lennox continues. “Maybe something was gonna have to change.”

After the band returned from that tour, they recorded the material for Ark together, minus the vocals, and then decided to take a break as a four-piece. They went back into the practice space shortly after, but nothing that came from those sessions was taking. Shortly after, Lennox decided to focus on making his solo record Young Prayer, made as a response to his father’s passing, and wanting some time to himself. It was the first of many times where the right move for Animal Collective was a brief breather away from their characteristic relentless reinvention, giving time for self-exploration that could pave the way for a group reset. “It was kind of a regular cycle we use to keep going,” Portner says of that time. “It was coming back to ‘What’s going on?’ vibes. Lots of early twenties situations going on, just figuring out what we were doing.”

“We kind of grind until we get burnt,” Lennox says, “and then we take a pause where we do other stuff and build our energy back up.”

When Portner and Lennox finally reconvened, they channeled the singing exercises and experiments they found themselves doing when finishing the vocals for Ark, and began considering working on something very — as Portner cheekily says — “guided by voices.” Portner began writing songs on his electric PRS guitar, with the intent that the record would instrumentally be rooted in guitar and drums. From this initial spark came three songs: “Spree,” “Who Could Win A Rabbit,” and an early rhythmic version of “The Softest Voice.”

What proved to be the most fruitful thing for the development of this era was the extensive touring that Portner and Lennox did, as they gradually began finding the right sound for this concept. Their first show with these songs, booked in “a sports bar/steakhouse kind of thing” in Virginia for an electronic festival where the two could barely hear each other, proved to be too chaotic for the crowd. “Somebody called the fire marshal, because of the volume,” Portner says with a laugh. “They put it through the speakers of the whole restaurant, so you couldn’t get away from us. They cut our set, which wasn’t even gonna be that long, after a song.”

At the same festival, the two ended up playing a second show at a teahouse that went smoother. “No government agency showed up,” Lennox quips.

It was at this point that Portner and Lennox had the idea of switching to just guitars as their main instrumental mode, in part because they could no longer afford to keep repairing gear. They still saw their earlier record Campfire Songs as an experiment that was separate from what they considered to be Animal Collective at that point, so the endeavor felt wholly new for the project. One early inspiration was African Brothers International Band’s African Brothers Dance Band (International), which Portner was gifted by a friend. “It just floored me,” he says, “the singing and the guitars. It was electric, but it fit in as an influence on wanting guitars in a trance-y way, blending together to make these rhythms.”

After leaning into the chaos during the initial shows, the two wanted to pull back somewhat from the effects-heavy sound of the initial performances. “Some songs needed to poke through more, beyond the effects,” Portner continues. “It was also a challenge too: ‘Can’t we do our thing with just acoustic instruments and singing?'” A short bout of touring in Europe also encouraged the two to go fully acoustic, if only to cut down on how much they would need to pack to perform internationally.

The idea soon came to make the acoustic guitars “sound electronic,” with Lennox citing the output on Kompakt and the work of Gas. “We would try to strum the guitar with a really light touch to get these weird harmonics,” he explains, and microtonal and drone elements came into the fray soon after too. This period marked the first time Lennox started bringing tunes he penned to practices, such as eventual Sung Tongs opener “Leaf House.”

The switch to acoustic guitars didn’t mean that Animal Collective were sanding down any of their idiosyncrasies. “Some confusion in there was always crucial,” Portner stresses. Lennox started using a DigiTech Vocal 300 (or “Voco,” as the two refer to it) for his vocal effects, and Portner began using cheap rack delay units (“because they would always break on tour”) to get warbly effects via modulation knobs. In the wave of the band’s longest US touring to date that followed — made possible by Lennox also quitting Other Music when the band saw their signing to Fatcat as a shot at making a living with music — they used this to their advantage, getting attentive audiences with the new material, growing increasingly tighter, and finely shaping the songs with continuous performances. At dates opening for the Icelandic band múm, however, Lennox recalls attention still being tricky. “Instead of bombing for two people,” he jokes, “we were bombing for a thousand people.”

And so came the floor tom. “We play in a room or a bar where no one is listening,” Portner says,
“and we would just go into ‘We Tigers.’ I would start screaming, and Noah would bang the hell out of the floor tom, and that gets everybody’s attention.” For Portner, the “folk” label quickly given to the band during this period threw him a bit. “I get it, we were playing with acoustic guitars. But we still wanted to throw in that chaotic anarchy. We may get to the end of this set, we may not.”

He mentions wanting the duo’s energy to feel more like a ritual than a band performing. At the last pre-Sung Tongs tour in Lisbon, the band encountered some interesting feedback about the material: “‘You guys are too introverted. You’re too in your own world,'” Portner recalls. “I was like, ‘That’s an interesting take on it.'”

Portner recalls getting a similar comment after an earlier show in Atlanta. “‘Wow, you guys do what I do in my bedroom. I would never play that for people.'”

“That was Johnny Jewel!” Lennox chimes in. The Chromatics frontman had set up the show for the band, and the words were meant as an expression of genuine appreciation for the duo’s fearfulness and confidence with the material.

Around this time, the two met musician and producer Rusty Santos, who was a fan of the band’s debut Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, and started working with him, with Portner comparing their dynamic to “hanging out with a friend.” After their touring had wrapped, they felt ready to record in September of 2003, but found it too hard to record in New York, in part because of the nonstop nightlife. Instead, Portner and Lennox decided to “get serious” with their craft, and traveled out to Portner’s parents’ house in Lamar, CO with Santos to record the material.

Working out of the unfurnished garage, they recorded in red light and called the space “Hades” or “Hell.” “That just had to do with setting a mood, really,” Portner said. “That just stood out as the color of the sounds. We have so many jokes. Even at that time, we had been going at it pretty intensely. When you’re around somebody all the time, you have your moments.” He alludes to “The Beatles, to throw out the most obvious influence,” to describe how he wanted playfulness to always seep in, no matter how hard the band was working.

“We were around each other all the time,” Lennox said, “but there was also a self-imposed pressure, like, ‘This thing has to be good,’ nerves about whether the thing was gonna come together. It was a high-stress environment.”

Despite the high stakes the two felt, they didn’t take much equipment, not even when it came to mics, even with the album being so centered on vocals. To compensate, Santos rented a Ribbon microphone (“a classic crooner microphone,” Portner adds), and found unusual ways of grabbing sounds via using distance from the mic in long hallways, or placing a microphone to a door to make a kick sound for “Kids on Holiday.”

It was when the two were putting the finishing touches on the record — taking the recordings to Lennox’s parents’ home in Colorado, and then back to New York — that the record’s magic felt most tangible for Portner. After adding vocal layering (“We called it ‘the cheeseburger’ at the time, because we didn’t know it was something a lot of people do,” Lennox says) to “Who Could Win A Rabbit,” Portner recalls listening back to it, having focused on getting the vocals as good as they could possibly be. “I remember being totally blown away, like, ‘Wow… that’s us.'” For Portner and Lennox, the magic hasn’t faded since.

Today, AnCo release a 20th anniversary Sung Tongs reissue and a live album documenting the band’s 2018 performance of the album at LA’s Ace Hotel. To mark the occasion, we went deep with Porter and Lennox on the making of the album and the stories behind every song. Below, stream the original Sung Tongs LP and the new live album, and read the track-by-track interview.

1. “Leaf House”

The sound at the beginning is such a different sound from everything else on the rest of the album. What even generated that sound?

DAVE PORTNER: I can’t remember.

NOAH LENNOX: It was Rusty’s Sony VAIO with the cracked screen.

PORTNER: Oh really?

LENNOX: In my memory, your idea for the start of the record was something that felt like you were dropping into the music. I think it was something he made quickly with a sample, and he did some sort of pitch sweep on it so it goes… [Imitates sound].

PORTNER: I often feel that way about a lot of records I make. Something about immediately starting… We knew, as soon as we recorded “Leaf House” that it would be the first song. There was just something very immediate about it. It was also Rusty encouraging that too — he really felt that way. Merriweather Post Pavilion, Sung Tongs, even [“Brown Thrasher”], the Birdsong [Project] track that Brian and I just did, all have something that drops into the sound. I think it’s cool that for Sung Tongs, it’s an electronic sound that attaches it to what came before it, to Ark. So it’s like, “Here’s a band that has been known to do electronic stuff suddenly going into acoustic stuff. It’s like an attachment to our past.

When you mentioned making these acoustic sounds almost sound electronic, this almost literalizes that thought.

PORTNER: Totally. I was also conscious of still wanting to have those sounds, mostly just because we like them. There’s still field recordings interspersed throughout the record, which we had live too — those Minidiscs of field recordings came on the US tour with us. As we would play, I would turn up a mixer and they would always be there. I feel like there’s always these background textures that complete the environment for our records. That was a lot of me walking around my neighborhood in Prospect Park and just using the Minidisc microphone we used to have, just to get a lot of location recordings. Then I affected them with that warbly delay effect, so they would be this additional texture we could have that would further create the environment we were going for.

Was this one of the first instances of Noah taking the lead on writing songs? To my knowledge, I think this is one of the first times you take vocal lead on a song.

LENNOX: I think it is? I mean, “Bad Crumbs” is kind of a song? But that’s the only other one [before].

PORTNER: But “Bad Crumbs,” to me, is very spontaneous. We just kind of came up with that one in the studio.

LENNOX: It’s barely a song.

PORTNER: More than any of our other songs, we wanted them to have a collaborative feel. Noah would write some parts here and there, or finish some parts out. I would write some parts and lyrics for his stuff. It was definitely blurring the lines the most we had ever done.

I should ask about the pivot the song takes at the end, because it gets at the playful energy we were talking about earlier. Do you remember when the song first took that turn, as you were developing it in the live shows?

LENNOX: I can’t remember. It sort of betrays our love of all things psychedelic. It’s a real sharp turn emotionally there. I feel like it’s a device — comedy or humor can be a gateway to dealing with stuff that’s a little more difficult, making it easy to chew or more palatable. I don’t think it’s something we ever talked about or discussed, but I’m pretty sure we would do it live like that.

PORTNER: I think it was also that we always liked wordplay, as the title of the record suggests. I can easily spin a word around.

LENNOX: “Ni hao” into “meow.”

PORTNER: It happens a lot with music, for us. You sing a word so many times that it just becomes another word. It’s fun to make it into another word. We used to play around with transitions that way, where we would be singing one thing and then the phrase would just switch into another. It was all improvised. That was just a way we’d be able to take one song and create another song out of it. It was natural for us to do. If we just keep repeating it, it’ll just become “meow.” At that time, I was catsitting for my sister, and I just decided to take the Minidisc player over to where the cats were, when I was gonna go feed them. When I walked into the door, I immediately turned the Minidisc player on and was just calling the cats: “Kitties!” That’s just the location recording of me, on the album, going into my sister’s apartment, calling her cats. I think you might even hear the cats meowing?

LENNOX: I didn’t know that! If you would’ve told me we recorded that with Rusty in Colorado, I would’ve been like, “Yeah, I remember that!”

PORTNER: Maybe we did do it live? But part of me thinks we didn’t do the “kitties” part live for a little bit, until later.

LENNOX: Now that you mention it, it definitely seems like the kind of thing we probably invented via performing, where were trying to do some transition and we improvised that one time and it just sort of became the end of the song after that. But now, it works for me as a way to counterbalance the heavy subject matter of the song. I was in my parents’ house when I was writing the song. It was after my father had died. I was just thinking of the house as almost like a being — the house being upset or downtrodden. It wasn’t filled with all its members.

2. “Who Could Win A Rabbit”

The story I always saw was that the opening chatter was just someone who was at a deli in your neighborhood, and it was just something the Minidisc picked up as you were recording.

PORTNER: Yeah, another instance of me just walking around. I would just put the Minidisc player and mic in my pockets, so no one would see that I was walking around with a microphone. I would go to the deli daily to get a coffee, and it just happened to be one of those times I decided to record.

That song is just very New York, our day-to-day life. Riding the subways, and how competitive and chaotic New York is — everybody on the train and going to work.

“Hungry bread and butter hustle.”

PORTNER: Yeah, it’s just this fast moving thing that’s got everybody going.

It’s funny you mention the subway, because I’ve been trying to put my finger on what the opening where the chords slowly rev into gear sound like, and it almost feels like a train picking up speed.

PORTNER: There’s definitely a train element to it — a train that’s about to go off its tracks, or already is. [Laughs]

You brought it up before we started the track-by-track portion of this interview, but this was one where it sounded like everything just kind of fell into place, and you were amazed when you listened back to it for the first time that you had made this song. I think you said it was just the way all the elements came together and how you were embodying the sound?

PORTNER: There are a few songs on the record like this, but I don’t think we had ever really done harmonies like this before.

LENNOX: Not that I can remember.

PORTNER: We’re harmonizing the whole song. We came up with it together, and wrote the lyrics together. It’s definitely one of those ones where I wanted it to [have that collaborative feel], because we were doing harmony together. It was also just how our voices sounded together on the recording. It was just great to hear recorded back, and know that we could nail it.

LENNOX: We had a lot of experience singing together at that point, so we developed an aptitude for it.

PORTNER: Yeah, there was definitely a desire, coming from the Ark period, to just get our voices to sound similar or different when they needed to be. Just thinking a lot about textures and tones of vocals.

LENNOX: I remember being really pumped on how the Autoharp sounded, and just being like, “Woah!”

I get a sense that the end portion, where you’re just messing with how the pops and clicks sound, spilled over as a transitional element from the live setting.

PORTNER: Yeah, that’s definitely about the transition. That’s all Minidiscs being manipulated again. When we just did the Sung Tongs tour in 2018, we started being able to do that vocally.

I think this also birthed your first music video? And it was also your first time working with Danny Perez. It’s a striking one, especially if we’re talking about the tonal duality you were working with the whole time — the mix of the playful with the sinister.

PORTNER: That would be Danny. [Laughs] If something takes a sinister turn…

LENNOX: Very much Danny’s sensibility.

PORTNER: A few of the music videos we’ve done with Danny started with a really simple idea that I’ve had in my head, and that was just a classic Tortoise and Hare race, but on bikes, between Noah and I. And then you give something to Danny and…

LENNOX: He runs with it.

PORTNER: He runs very far with it. [Laughs]

3. “The Softest Voice”

You have these two very upbeat songs right at the start, but then this feels like it’s here to illustrate this other meditative mode that the record works in. You alluded to drone elements earlier, and it really gets that across early on.

LENNOX: Yeah, this one definitely has that pop ambient flavor.

PORTNER: Definitely felt very song-y, but also this very ambient background piece. I feel like the third song on a lot of records I like is a mellower song. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is “Stop Breathin” on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, which is one of my favorite Pavement songs. That influences that kind of decision sometimes. For that reason, I probably just wanted the third song to be the mellower song. It’s a nice break, too, after two intense songs and, like you’re saying, it shows you the other side of what we’re capable of or where this album could go.

At the end of the day, it’s as strong of a song to us as the other ones, so it could go anywhere. The people that like our more upbeat stuff are kind of like, “Why do they have to have these meandering songs?” But, to me, they’re just as important and meaningful. This is a deep song for me. If you can’t appreciate it, you can’t appreciate it. It definitely might take a little more concentration, or you gotta put a little more into it. [Laughs] It doesn’t give you the bang for your buck, but it’s just as important to me.

This is one where you really lose yourself in the sound of this song live sometimes. The version on the Ace Hotel recording coming out is twice the length of the version on the studio record.

PORTNER: [Laughs]

I’m sure there were probably similar instances when you were developing it live initially too.

PORTNER: Yeah, and just getting the right takes. It’s probably one of my favorite songs on the record. It sticks out to me, in terms of writing and having the meaning it is. I can think back clearly on playing it in my apartment and us working it out. It’s just songs like that, that are so slow and spacious, where you’re so focused on what the other person is doing and can lock in so well… that’s why it becomes longer. The more we do it, the more we get into stretching out the vocals, and seeing how long we can take certain harmonies together. It just becomes something you want to experiment with and mess around with, and that can just be a fun thing — to make something last for a lot longer than you expect. Songs usually just go by so fast for me. I think Sung Tongs might be one of our longest records, actually.

There’s also the midsection of the song, where everything shifts tonally for a minute or two.

PORTNER: Yeah, just having the song travel a little and go somewhere else. Incorporate some different textures. The vocals get a little more affected there.

LENNOX: A bit of a detour in the song.

But then everything snapping back into place, and resolving in that very sweet main harmony.

PORTNER: The bulk of the song was just very reflective to me — me reflecting on being in my apartment, and where things were at. I wrote some of the lyrics closer to when we recorded it, because we had toured with múm, and “The Softest Voice” was referring to Kristín [Anna Valtýsdóttir], my ex-wife who was the lead singer at the time. “The softest voice sang to me all through last night,” meaning that we were on tour with múm and she was singing.

4. “Winters Love”

Part of my appreciation for where “The Softest Voice” falls in the record is how it leads into the opening of “Winters Love.” When I read up about the ways Rusty would have you play around with where the mics were placed in the studio, I wondered if that was the case with the intro here.

LENNOX: That was actually my demo!

Oh! [Laughs]

LENNOX: I can’t remember whose idea it was — I don’t think it was mine? I’d just recorded the demo of the song on my laptop.

PORTNER: I think it was my idea, just because I liked it so much. The bulk of the song became something remarkably different. It just had a different feel. I remember enjoying it so much from when you sent it to me that I was like, “We should use that.” But I thought it would be cool if it had the effect of listening to it coming from somewhere else, like out of a window or on a radio.

LENNOX: Or underwater.

PORTNER: And then, you’re suddenly in the room with us again, and the real song is playing.

LENNOX: It’s also connective tissue to “The Softest Voice” before it.

PORTNER: It’s like you smelled a great meal coming out of a window, and you’re drawn into the room where it is. Then you have the meal. [Laughs]

We’ve been talking about harmonizing a lot, but you two trade off the lead vocal part here about halfway through. What appealed to you about switching off like that?

LENNOX: I think it just felt like a cool change of pace, and something we hadn’t done before.

PORTNER: And also, like I was saying before, keeping it very collaborative, and for it not to matter whose song it was.

LENNOX: Also because it’s a round. It’s a set of chords that just repeats, so having the different voices makes it feel like there’s distinctive sections to it.

PORTNER: We also know what our ranges are and what vocal parts sound best for each other, so part of it had to do with switching here and there. The Louvin Brothers do that thing — being able to suddenly hit a part or range, but then go back into another part. This record in general was the start of us messing with that kind of thing, which then carried into Merriweather.

Were there any particular emotional or personal places you were in your lives that seeped into this one? This is one of the more joyful ones on the record.

PORTNER: I was gonna say, another reason for us both having parts is because… That one was obviously written in the winter of 2002 into 2003, and we were both dating people. I just remember being at practice once and there just being good vibes in the air. We just felt like that song should convey that — that good things were happening for us at that moment.

5. “Kids On Holiday”

Dave mentioned sometime in a past interview that this one came from an anxiety with traveling, specifically flying. What were you drawing from there with this song? And has that gotten easier over time, the more you’ve traveled for touring?

PORTNER: Oh definitely. I used to be very fearful of flying, to the point of backing out of a Japanese tour once. Noah and Josh just ended up going by themselves, because I was too afraid to fly. It was occupying all my thoughts, and did for a long time. Every time I had a flight, I would just spin out into very dark thoughts, and it would control my way of thinking for a week before I had a flight. It wasn’t just touring — for a time period in my life, it was every flight I would take. So I resorted to drinking a lot the day of the flight. I would not sleep the night before a flight, so I would sleep through the flight. And then I ended up having some bad experiences trying to do that, where I realized that’s not a very smart thing to do. I had to figure out something else. It was really just being forced to do it so much that it became something that didn’t bother me anymore, eventually, fortunately. I’m still not a huge fan of flying — just the experience of it. It doesn’t scare me [anymore]. It can just be a difficult thing to do.

That experience [of writing “Kids On Holiday”] goes back to being in airports and train stations. We were doing a lot of traveling around that time — bus travel, train travel. A lot of it was influenced or inspired by the short little week trip we did to Europe, which was our first tour in Europe. We did a lot of train travel, and we had our bag of Campfire Songs CDs that we were carrying around to try to sell, and our guitars. We were just hanging out with each other the whole time. It’s kind of just me singing to Noah, in some ways. I guess our holidays at that time were tours. You’re around a lot of people and see a lot of things. I’ve just always been an observer, recording the things I see. I like exaggerating other things when I’m writing. I’m just creating these psychedelic situations.

It’s got the most vivid imagery of any song on the album. It’s very easy to picture the specific scenes you’re conjuring. While we’re on the lyrics, how did you go about revising the one objectionable lyric in this for the 2018 tour?

PORTNER: Since it comes from observations and recording them, I think the context of that or the things I can think about seeing can change easily. The specific meaning behind certain things like that aren’t so deep that they can’t warrant being changed easily. In the original version, I’m not trying to poke fun or down-talk anything that I’m seeing. It’s a different age now. It heightens how young we were when we were making this stuff. It’s the observations of a 23-year-old versus the observations of a 43-year-old.

LENNOX: It speaks to how the lens you have can change over time.

It’s like observing a way you looked at things from the past, and looking at it in a completely different light, and realizing you can reapproach it from where you are in the present moment.

PORTNER: Yeah, and it heightens the learning side of making music. You hope that there’s a side of it where you’re always learning. Things can change by learning more. That’s musically, your philosophies, things you see, and things you write about. Because of the kind of band we are, I think that’s cool. I don’t necessarily believe that one version of one song is the final version of that song. It gets isolated and put down on a recording, but I feel like songs can have a life way beyond that.

LENNOX: The recording is still just a snapshot. It’s just a moment in time of a thing that’s alive and growing.

6. “Sweet Road”

You’ve worked in some unusual time signatures occasionally, but this is one of the more intricate. How did the song end up like that?

LENNOX: We don’t have the language to talk to each other about this stuff. [Laughs] We’re just like, “The line goes like this, and then it switches to this other part.” We know numbers, obviously. But that more technical side of language is not really in our vocabulary. It’s why we have to resort to “this one sounds like a red light.”

PORTNER: Songs will just come to me in my head in that rhythm or that way of singing. It’s more about how I would sing that line. Or maybe I was jamming on the guitar and that rhythm just came to me. It just happens, somehow. There’s sometimes where we purposefully do talk about how something should go a weird amount of times, and do something that’s not traditional. But then there are other times where it just feels intuitive — intuitive to the point where we don’t talk about it and we could very well mess it up later. Then we figure out later on what it actually is that we’re doing. [Laughs] There’s just these intuitive things that have always happened for us that become ingrained in songs and feel totally normal, so we don’t really question them, until something comes up and we have to question it to make sure we get it right. [Laughs]

LENNOX: It can be a tough thing when trying to talk about making music. A lot of times, people will ask, “What was the thought behind that?” And I always want to say, “There wasn’t any thought.” I feel like our whole thing is trying to have a sense about something. When it feels right, you know it. But it’s not something that’s like a mental exercise to conjure up a concept. It’s usually more following our noses.

It feels so natural and intuitive because it is. It’s almost like an ontological thing. To me, that ties into what the song is about — embracing the natural sweetness and following where the road takes you.

PORTNER: And there’s often a challenge that’s worth conquering or accomplishing. If we can accomplish that challenge — for example, with this song, hit that “I found sweet round” a certain amount of time and not have to think about how many times we’re actually doing that, because it is a weird amount of times that we do that and you have to intuitive know — a lot of times, that’s what making music and being in a band is about.

LENNOX: That was always something I remember you talking a lot about, especially in the first couple years. You really didn’t like any signals on stage or nodding to each other. You wanted us to play to a point where we just knew that the thing was about to change, all at the same time.

PORTNER: Yeah, that’s part of that challenge. In terms of making music with people that has that intuitive feel, that’s where I ended up coming from.

LENNOX: It’s like getting outside of your thinking mind, and trying to reach something deeper.

PORTNER: Reach something beyond, that’s more the unit working together to make this thing happen.

7. “Visiting Friends”

I feel like there’s a similar force at play with this song. It’s the emotional core of the record for me, but it has the most amorphous shape of all the songs on the album. It gets into that ambient/drone zone we’ve talked about, but I’ve always been fascinated by how much the lyrics feel submerged here. I read an interview where Dave was talking about using voice as an instrument, and the way voice is more about the textures here and you’re only getting half-legible lyrical snippets and how it exists in this soundscape reminds me a lot of that.

PORTNER: Yeah, and it’s influenced by a lot of tape music and sound poetry. We had been wanting to do that live and wanting it to feel organic, but also having that feeling of being a tape piece or electronic piece.

From what I’ve picked out lyrically over the years and this song’s title, and what you were saying about being a part of this specific community when you wrote these songs, what feelings or memories were you drawing from with this song?

PORTNER: As most of these songs do, it conjures being around New York and going to the park a lot. I spent most of my time either in my apartment or the park, and one bar around that time — Daddy’s in Brooklyn, which everybody who lived in Brooklyn would go to. We were all spread out a little more in New York at that time, because I moved out to Prospect Heights, which just seemed a little bit further and in another direction from where everyone else was. A lot of people were living in Williamsburg. I felt a lot more isolated around that time.

It was just about basic things. I think one verse is just talking about going to a friend’s apartment and watching TV and getting stoned. It was a common thing at the time — just hanging out midday. Living with Eric [Copeland, and going to the park. Really simple. It wasn’t a very crazy life. [Laughs] Just really basic, mundane stuff. Making a song about something really mundane and simple — visiting friends — was another part of wanting to make this record. Keeping it pretty simple, most of the time, in terms of topics, because that’s how a lot of people are going to relate to it, even though it can be seen as this crazy, otherworldly, chaotic electronic soundscape. We also really wanted to have a lot of soul and truth and who we were in there — what people who are 23 or 24 do around New York.

LENNOX: That’s why I always liked when people used the term “folk” to describe our music. It made sense in that context. A lot of our songs were just mirrors of what was going on for us — stuff we would think about, stuff we would experience. Little markers of where we were at in that place in time. A lot of these older records definitely transport me to those times, I think because of the directness of the messages.

Like you said earlier, it’s like a snapshot. And simplicity doesn’t necessarily have to sacrifice profundity. Things can have a degree of sincerity and meaning, even with the simplest approach. That’s what I think a big strength of this song is.

PORTNER: Like Vashti Bunyan, who we played some of these songs with. Her songs were really powerful to me as these very simple “this is what I’m doing today” or “this is how we live” songs, but very emotional and catchy, and satisfy something in me.

8. “College”

Everyone brings up the Beach Boys comparison here, so I was wondering what your own relationship to the Beach Boys was when you made this? Or if there were any other particular influences that brought you to this song’s sound?

PORTNER: The vocals are pretty much the guiding factor of all songs I write, and probably Noah too. The melody usually comes from the vocal firsts. When I’m writing songs, the vocals are there before most other things, and then everything gets built on top of that. With the Beach Boys, it’s definitely an important thing to bring up, and I can see why so many people link this song or this record or Animal Collective to that.

But there’s so many other vocalists and vocal music that inspired this record. Doo-wop is something that closely resembles the Beach Boys, just in terms of its Western foundation, which maybe comes a bit from gospel music too. I was listening to both a lot, at the time. My roommate had all these CDs of doo-wop classics — there were, like, 12 volumes. A lot of that is just people making the melodies and music with their voices. There was this one jam called “Rubber Biscuit” by the Chips that feels a little silly — they’re doing stuff with their voices that doesn’t feel very traditional — but the song was a pop song based on vocals and singing. That was the goal: to have a song on this record that was mostly vocals.

And yeah, we like the Beach Boys. I definitely wanted to do that anti-“Be True to Your School” anthem. But groups like the Everly Brothers and the Louvin Brothers…

LENNOX: The Zombies.

PORTNER: Lakshmi Shankar, the amazing Indian female singer, we were listening to a lot at that time. We had this CD that we wore out on tour that was these folk songs from Papua New Guinea that were people singing over acoustic guitars, with really simple harmonies. That all influenced this type of stuff.

LENNOX: African Brothers.

PORTNER: Francis Bebey, another African vocalist who inspires a lot of the more textural singing. I think, because the Beach Boys make the music that is Western pop music, and this kind of stuff mostly resembles Western pop music, it’s easy to be like, “They sound like the Beach Boys.” But the Beach Boys also sound like the Four Freshmen. Everything comes from somewhere else.

There’s a lineage.

LENNOX: You don’t get something from nothing.

PORTNER: And the Andrews Sisters were doing stuff in the ‘30s that was amazing. It’s definitely a lineage and not just the Beach Boys. [Laughs]

It’s also so easy to just quickly ascribe something to one particular group that’s had that titanic reputation.

PORTNER: Totally.

You’ve talked before about the song coming from your own experiences dropping out of college and pursuing music. How do you look back on the song’s sentiments, seeing it ripple out and resonate still?

PORTNER: I’m totally pleased. [Laughs] I certainly don’t regret dropping out of college. I do think it’s a message that still rings true, and I hope rings true for other people. I’ve definitely met other musicians along the way who told me that song resonated with them. I feel good about it.

LENNOX: I like it not exclusively as an anti-school song, but pushing back on the idea that there’s a set path for you in your life and you’re gonna be lost if you don’t hit these markers along the way. I think life is like, you’re constantly lost and looking for solid ground. I like that the song speaks to that.

PORTNER: Or, you don’t have to do what a lot of other people tell you is the thing to do. Just follow your own path. So many people lose their own way, lose what’s true to themselves. Saying “you don’t have to go to college” — the antithesis to “be true to your school” is more like “be true to yourself.” If you want to go to school, if that’s where your life path is taking you, you should do that. If you feel strongly about it, that’s where your soul knows you should go. People know or they don’t know, or people aren’t given the chance to really make that decision for themselves. It seems like Noah and Josh and I — and even Brian, who went through the whole school process and believed in it and knew what he wanted to do — we felt very strongly about it. We were fortunate enough to be able to dive deep and find what we wanted in our path, and unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t [able to].

9. “We Tigers”

LENNOX: The record goes a little weird at this point. Definitely goes into that confusion zone at this point.

Toward the top of this, we talked about this being a song in your arsenal that you’d use to grab a crowd’s attention during those live shows before the record. And it’s still arresting on the record because so much of Sung Tongs is otherwise guitar-based or voice-based, and this is very percussion-based. Did you end up just bringing it into the studio this way because of how well it worked live?

PORTNER: I felt like there was a song in there — just being influenced by electronic music, I think there was the feeling it could be a song like that. But I felt like having the cathartic, ritualistic [aspect] to the live shows needed to show up on the album. Writing the lyrics, it also felt like an anthem for our community. I was trying to make a point of heightening the primitive aspect of what we were doing, and making that a relevant or cool thing that could be okay to do. If you can’t play guitar or sing very well… there was a whole time period for us where we just used whatever was around the apartment to make music. It’s kind of coming from that frame of mind. You can do whatever you want to make music. You should just do it. Just pick up whatever is around and make a song. “Hey kids/ Let’s pick up sticks/ Let’s make a sound of our own.”

I had an intense Nirvana obsession around that time. I always liked Nirvana, and I always thought it was cool that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was this anthem for whoever was into Nirvana — “Load up on guns/ Bring your friends.” It’s hard to understand what [Kurt Cobain] was talking about, but it was very easy to understand what he was talking about. This is just our song. This is our community.

LENNOX: Like a gang, or a club, or a crew.

PORTNER: For “We Tigers,” we were Animal Collective, and I just felt like I wanted to make a song that was like, “It’s okay to be wild and crazy, and for things to be chaotic.”

LENNOX: Like that rallying cry for that spirit we were talking about earlier, where you’re trying to connect to something in yourself and with each other that’s deeper than what’s on the surface of your brain — the day-to-day banal thoughts — and reach for something that’s bigger than you. Kind of spiritual, to me.

That feels like it ties into just how many vocal ad-libs and Minidisc recordings are on this song specifically. I feel like that embodies that ethos too.

PORTNER: We have so many inside jokes that it felt like a good opportunity. We did a lot of the vocals together, which isn’t something we really did after that, actually. Because of the nature of the songs and the minimal side of things, we did a lot of the vocal takes together. So there’d be a lot of joking around while we were doing the vocal takes, whispering things in between takes. We just went back and grabbed a lot of those, and played on the inside jokes we have. I like when I find some weird, hidden subliminal message in the records I like — the little ear candy stuff that’s there in the background. I always appreciate that stuff.

10. “Mouth Wooed Her”

This record is almost entirely just you two, but then there’s a bit of Josh there in the very beginning. Do you remember when you recorded that bit with him?

PORTNER: I think he was just walking around the city with me. We’re both people that like taking long walks around, and enjoy walking around different places in the city, not even making a plan. I just happened to have the Minidisc going, and he was telling me about a dream he had, and that was just a snippet of the conversation.

There’s a few places we could go with this one. There’s the wordplay thing you mentioned earlier, and there’s the confusion zone you were mentioning with all the weird tempo shifts it has.

PORTNER: This song was one of those, too, that had that intuitive element. We were locked into this other thing — that spirit of the song beyond ourselves. You can either nail it or not get it. We were playing enough that we were able to lock into this song. Part of it came from an older song, right, Noah? There was something in the practice space where the… [Imitates the fast strumming harmony] …comes from.

LENNOX: I kind of remember that.

PORTNER: It’s a very fleeting memory to me now, but it’s part of a jam we did in the practice space, in the Danse Manatee days, probably. We had it on Minidisc, so it was something we heard back, and it was something I was always fond of. I just ended up being able to write another song around that, using that. I felt so chaotic as an individual then — so not together. I wanted to make a song that felt like that, almost this desperate attempt to keep things together, what somebody would consider as normal — trying to have a girlfriend, trying to make plans to have dinner, trying to not sleep late. I was feeling like it was a mess, and I wanted the song to feel that way.

LENNOX: It does.

PORTNER: [Laughs]

When you mentioned the origins of this, it conjured the image of another song almost cutting in.

LENNOX: I love that kind of thing.

PORTNER: We like the collage vibes.

LENNOX: That one Moodymann track [“Why Do U Feel”] is so amazing, when it mixes into that other thing suddenly, and then clips back into place.

11. “Good Lovin Outside”

This entire back section of the record feels really collage-y, especially this song. I assume all the field recording texture of this is just Minidisc recordings?

PORTNER: That’s definitely what that was. That’s just me walking through the park. Since it was “Good Lovin Outside,” I wanted to have that element in the song, of being outside, in the park, as the background.

LENNOX: Do I do sex noises on the recording?

PORTNER: No. I don’t think so.

LENNOX: Just live?

PORTNER: [Laughs] Yeah.

LENNOX: I couldn’t remember. I wanted to do something that was uncomfortable, both for me and the audience.

PORTNER: [Laughs] This is definitely one of my favorites on the record. The way it all came together, it’s not really something you can plan out. There’s just a lot of happy accidents, where we were locked in well enough. There’s just a magic to it and the way it ended up. I’m glad that worked out that day.

This one was the one that was hardest for me to single out specific elements to even prep questions for, because it’s all about the feeling.

PORTNER: Yeah, there’s a feeling to it, and we just lock into that. It just starts and moves. It was an opportunity to try and mess around with a lot of the different vocal things we were influenced by and worked on together — ways we were getting our voices to sound, and having the song move through these different vocal textures.

LENNOX: It was about following each other.

We’ve been talking a lot about winter for when you recorded this album, but given the song’s subject and your story, it feels like one of the warmer tracks on the record.

PORTNER: The tour that we did where we started using the Minidiscs was in the summer, so it was probably just before that, so it was like May when I recorded a lot of the background stuff.

The whole process sounds like it went through the full cycle of seasons. I remember reading that, when you took the recordings to work on in Noah’s family’s house in Baltimore, you had to wear jackets all the time because of how cold it was inside.

LENNOX: It was in the basement. It was mad cold down there.

PORTNER: See, I have very little memory of that at all. I can barely picture what the room looked like, but I don’t remember coats or mixing it.

LENNOX: It was pretty brief. We didn’t really spend a lot of time on it.

PORTNER: Yeah, I think Rusty did a lot on his own, because he’s one of those people who’s always tweaking things. Then we had a few days [in Baltimore], and then Rusty and I did another couple days after that in New York, just to maybe add in some final sounds. Noah moved to Lisbon…

LENNOX: Right after that.

PORTNER: Right after our touring.

LENNOX: I came here at the end of that October/November tour in 2003, and then May of 2004 is when I moved here. We must have mixed sometime in early 2004, right? We finished it and it came out… what, a couple months later? Amazing. Imagine that.

PORTNER: [Laughs] The good old days of the music industry.

Before everything was six-month-long press cycles.

LENNOX: Lucky if it’s six months. [Laughs]

12. “Whaddit I Done”

LENNOX: This is one of my favorite songs of Dave’s. I love this one.

This has always had this striking feel at the end of the record, having a song so heavy on these vocal effects. It’s so different than everything that came before. But it seems like it carries everything the record does at once — it has that confusion energy, but it’s subtly beautiful in some ways. The 2018 tour arrangement really unlocked that for me.

PORTNER: Nice. Yeah, it really is an emotional song for me and works without the vocal effects. For a number of the songs, it’d be like, “Well, we haven’t done that before.” We thought the song working off of that texture on the vocals could be a cool thing. I was also maybe a little uncomfortable with how my voice sounded so bare back then. Maybe if we would’ve done it now, we would’ve made a different decision. But it is what it is on the record. It’s kind of one of those songs on the record that kind of writes itself, at least in my memory. Every part that I wrote just logically, for some reason, came after the next part. I didn’t even really have to think about it. It was just something I had to say, all of a sudden, and get out.

You mentioned at the very beginning of this interview that you were messing with the Voco pedal around this time. As soon as you said that, this song was what I was picturing. Was that what you were using here?

PORTNER: The main effect on my voice was a Boss wah pedal, I think.

LENNOX: Are you sure it wasn’t the auto-wah thing on the Voco?

PORTNER: No, I’m pretty sure it’s whatever that gold Boss pedal is. It has one setting on it that’s like…

LENNOX: Like a tremolo.

PORTNER: Like a gated wah-wah. I think that’s what it was, because I think you mostly sang through the Voco. And then a lot of the orchestration for that one was all vocal stuff. It’s just a tendency for us to be like, “How can we make the voice a little more textured?” It was putting effects on it so it sounded a little more electronic, like an instrument. And because we had never done that one live, that usually makes something more of a studio creation. We build on it more in a studio when we’re not so used to it having a certain flow live.

LENNOX: It’s more open-ended. You haven’t nailed it down quite yet.

Did you always see it being right at the very end of the record? I think about how cleanly that last note rings out.

PORTNER: It just feels like an ending song to me.

LENNOX: It just feels good. I wish we could say we had some sort of master plan.

PORTNER: In terms of what you’re saying, the overall feeling of the song is this lonely, isolated feeling, and that’s a stark contrast to everything that came before it. It’s like you’re traveling through all these different people, and then there’s something a little lonely about that one, maybe because it’s thinking back on everything that’s happened. Lyrically, it’s about time passing. You’re suddenly up onstage playing for people and, woah, where did that time go? It rings even more true to me now, because so much crazy stuff has happened and so much time has gone by, for the band and for this record.

I find myself thinking about the path the record has taken, and the ways people have latched onto it. And this song is a lonely one, but you have all these people congregating together and experiencing these emotions simultaneously, and then it takes on an entirely different feeling all over again.

LENNOX: That’s what it’s all about. To me, that’s the purpose of all of it. Maybe the purpose of living.