On the eve of releasing their stupendous new album, Strawberry Jam, Animal Collective’s Brian Weitz – better known as Geologist – is, he says, ‘doing well’. Well, he’s doing better than he was; some month or more prior to the release of their new album, elements of it leaked on the internet, with fellow band member Panda Bear not holding back in his assessment of several tracks appearing online. Suffice to say he was not pleased.
“We all felt that way,” he says of six tracks instead of the whole nine that make up the album appearing online. “We make records to be heard AS records from start to finish. We know that’s not how some people like to listen to music, but at least the first time that’s how we want people to hear it. At that point there was nothing we could do to stop it, and we thought it was a shame that by the time the last few tracks come out people are going to be sick of the first couple.”
Getting away from it all prior to the release of the album, Weitz has – thus far – been unaware of the unanimous praise that has been heaped upon Strawberry Jam since its release, with the album straightening up the sound of the band to some degree, and streamlining some of the loopier edges found on previous albums such as Sung Tongs in lieu of a more song-focussed basis. “I’ve been sort of cut off from seeing if there was any hype based on the leak,” he says, “but every journalist I’ve spoken to since has been pretty positive [about the album].”
He says that the reason for the change was as much to do with a determination as a group to forge forward and never repeat themselves – much as Feels was very different to Sung Tongs, so too Strawberry Jam is a wildly different release to Feels. Keeping it fresh is the key to the band’s ongoing evolution.
“We spent so much time playing this material live,” he says of the songs that ended up on Strawberry Jam, “so that when it came time to start working on new songs, or a new record, or even a new live set, that’s the way it evolves – we always end up working on new material. Even if we get together and we don’t have a really clear-cut idea of what we want to do we sort of know what we DON’T want to do, which is repeat ourselves. We’d been playing in a certain style for a year, and it was challenging to think up something new.”
Writing the majority of their songs throughout their career specifically so that they can play them on tour – “We like to have an element of danger involved” – Animal Collective found the sound of Strawberry Jam through the exact same process, with a course of three tours throughout 2006 finding more new material that the band had begun to work on piecing together for an eventual album. “Usually after two or three tours in a year we have enough material for an album,” he confirms, “and on the road we start to think about it as an album and how the songs fit together, and how we can work on the sound of the album so that it sounds like one cohesive statement rather than just a bunch of random songs.”
Tried out on the road then discussed post-tour to determine the excitement level for the new numbers, Animal Collective then begin a process of refinement so that by the time they hit the studio the songs in question are in the shape that they want them to be in. It sounds like a very dedicated and determined way of creating an artistic statement, and a creative process itself that requires a great deal of time and thought going into it.
“We enjoy that process,” he avers, “and we’re all perfectionists so we enjoy that process of determining what the songs are supposed to sound like. I think that’s the guiding principle – we know when something has to change in it and the ultimate goal is to get the song to the point where you enjoy playing it every night and, at least in our minds, it’s the kind of song that you could put on a record that people could listen to over and over again or we could listen to over and over again.”
In other words, it’s the ‘perfect’ song.
Animal Collective’s near-perfect new album, Strawberry Jam, is out now.
