When Noah Lennox took his critically acclaimed fifth solo album as Panda Bear, Sinister Grift, on tour ahead of its February release, he brought along a newly formed live band. While Lennox made Sinister Grift largely on his own — with co-production courtesy of his Animal Collective bandmate Josh Dibb, also known as Deakin — he recruited four additional collaborators to bring his songs to life onstage, the first time he had ever done so for a tour of his solo material.
Panda Bear shared the road with Toro y Moi on the first leg of the tour and notably paid a visit to NPR’s Tiny Desk in April. Alongside bassist Tim Koh, keyboardist and vocalist Maria Reis, drummer Tomé Silva and Spirit of the Beehive singer Rivka Ravede on the sampler, Lennox, wielding an electric guitar, alternately floated and ripped through three tracks during the unfiltered NPR performance. The 15-minute set showcased the strength of his eternally youthful voice, and the remarkable cohesion among the players, who had been together for less than a year. “I thought about doing a band thing, kind of off and on for a long time,” says Lennox. “I wanted people in the city or close by so we could really just rehearse a lot.”
Much like his work with 2000s noise-pop darlings Animal Collective, Lennox’s solo music does not shy away from experimentation. But Sinister Grift, released on Domino Records, streamlined the delivery with stronger melodic payoffs. The lyrics, though at times intentionally lacking in detail, clearly showed an artist wading through life’s murkier stretches — which for Lennox, 47, included a divorce. “I’m seeing things in [the music] that maybe I wasn’t even aware of when it was coming out, you know?” Lennox says.
Ahead of the start of his second tour leg of the year, which kicks off Sept. 15, we caught up with Lennox over Zoom from his home in Lisbon, where he has lived since 2004, to discuss his album themes, his plans with Animal Collective, and how your kids will never really think you’re cool (even if you are).
You moved to New York around 2000 but moved to Lisbon in 2004. Do you get back to New York much?
We were there in February or March or so, just for a day or two. It’s super, super different. Here too. I feel like I saw Williamsburg do the thing, and then I saw Lisbon do the thing, maybe 10 years later.
Would you say you’re from Baltimore?
I was born in Virginia, and then my family went back and forth between Baltimore and Virginia, and then I was in high school outside of Philadelphia, and then back to Baltimore for a year, and then Boston for a couple years going to school, but I didn’t finish. And kind of in the middle of that, I went to New York for the summer, and my friends Dave [Portner, aka Avey Tare] and Brian [Weitz, aka Geologist] from Baltimore were there, and we played music back in Baltimore, and we just sort of didn’t look back after that.
I also grew up around Baltimore, moved to New York and never went back.
New York is tough to beat. It’s a tough place to be without a lot of money, but it’s kind of like, the more money you have, the more you enjoy the city. That’s maybe a horrible thing to say.
That’s 100 percent correct. I also added a kid to the mix, which kind of drives home the point even more.
Yeah, it changes the calculus a bit.
You have two kids, right?
My daughter is 20 and my son is 15.
Your daughter recited some of her original poetry for Sinister Grift’s “Anywhere but Here,” but I read that she didn’t want to listen to the finished product at the time. Has she listened to the song yet?
Not that I know of. She always said she didn’t want to. So…
It’s funny that even when your dad is a super cool musician guy, there’s still sort of that funny friction with your kid, who’s like, “Yeah, I don’t want to, I don’t want to listen.”
I don’t see myself that way. But I can assure you, they definitely don’t see me that way. It’s OK. It keeps you humble. But yeah, she took it really seriously. She approached it very professionally, I thought. She’s just not really interested in the music thing.
I also had to laugh when listening to the song “Praise,” where you sing about trying to get your son to pick up the phone.
Yeah, that’s where the first line comes from. It started as kind of a song where I was just sort of thinking about the dynamic between my son and I back then, [and it] kind of grew into noticing that there’s this sort of force that drives the relationship as a parent where, no matter what they do or how frustrating they can be sometimes, there’s always sort of this underlying thing that drives how you how you feel about the kid and connect with them. I guess it’s a song about unconditional love, [but it’s a] bit playful about it. There’s the whole “Again and again.” It really ruminates on the frustration of it.
You’ve said that Sinister Grift was written at a challenging time in your life. Could you tell me about that?
The thing for me was divorce, but it doesn’t come out super explicitly on the thing. You can see there’s pieces of it here and there. There are definitely allusions to it. But out of respect for the thing, I didn’t want to do anything super explicit or super autobiographical, but that kind of thing, it’s going to make its way in there even if you fight against it. But at least half of the songs don’t touch on that situation.
How do you decide when you’re writing a song how much of yourself to put into it, versus when to back off and say to yourself, these are just characters?
I’d say it’s mostly in the editing. I think of it kind of like a blurry picture, and as I’m trying to make that picture come into focus, that’s when the editing and changes take place, where I feel like I might try to make it move towards a place that feels less sort of specifically mine or about me.
At the same time, I think it’s important that the stuff carry this spirit or is reflective of something that I experienced or thought about, something that’s real to me. There’s a seed in everything, I hope, that is reflective of something real for me. I think the audience also kind of brings themselves into it, as I do with other people’s music. With this one, maybe a bit more than other ones I’ve done, I spent more time trying to make sure it didn’t betray anyone’s trust or just felt respectful.
Your album closer “Defense” with Cindy Lee is such a rocker, which doesn’t usually come out in Panda Bear music. Where did that come from?
It’s one of those things that I was always into, it just never kind of made its way out, I guess, or it never felt like the right time or something. I couldn’t tell you why this was the one where it really came out, but it’s always been there for sure. I mean, I am a bit of an older guy, so maybe I’m just in that zone.
Every member of Animal Collective was involved in Sinister Grift in some way. How did the full-team involvement for your solo album differ from how you all work on an Animal Collective album?
Typically, in AC, somebody brings a demo or a pretty fully formed idea of a song. It’s been a long time since we were really abstract with creating stuff. Almost always, we need to be together in a room to really put it together. We might do stuff on our own where we’re trying to figure out a part, but you really have to hear everybody doing their thing together to sort it out. So, similar in that sense, where everybody’s kind of trying to find their way, but very directed, not so much of a free for all.
When Dave did the thing in “Ends Meet,” I was like, “I really want specifically a noise solo,” and he delivered. Brian’s involvement, I asked him to make me a sound pack. I do a lot of features and remixes, and I like to have tools around. He maybe made me 100 sounds, and I asked him to make me folders of different stuff, like one folder of voices, one folder of swells. It was kind of blueprinted like that. And Josh had had, by far, the biggest involvement, and I’d say, a roughly equal hand in how the thing came out, insofar as he was really directing traffic in the studio and engineered the whole thing, and he mixed it.
Are there any plans, officially or unofficially, at this point, for a new Animal Collective album?
No, nothing official yet, but I feel like it’s probably just a matter of time. At this point, it’s kind of such a prominent routine in my life that when I’m not doing it, I just sort of feel lost. I’m not sure I’ll share and release music forever, but I’m pretty sure I’ll make it till I’m dead.
Are there any up-and-coming artists who you’re listening to these days?
Firstly, I would mention a bunch of the people who play in my band when we do the songs live. Rivka [Ravede], who’s in the Spirit of the Beehive, Tim Koh, who makes music by himself but also with Sun An, put out a really cool record. I think they have a new one coming out. And Maria [Reis] and Tomé [Silva] both do music and production themselves. I’m a big fan of all that. And I like Mk.gee. I like that Mk.gee record from last year a lot. I like the Cameron Winter record. And there’s also a, they used to be called Micachu and the Shapes, but now they’re called Good Sad Happy Bad. That was one of my favorite records last year. And Water From Your Eyes. Rivka and I saw them play here. They opened for Interpol.
Have you ever listened to sombr? A coworker of mine is convinced that there’s a striking similarity between you and this 20-something New Yorker on the rise.
I’ll check it out. I’ve definitely seen the name. I think somebody else actually recommended I check him out.
This is the first time you’ve toured your solo music with a live band. How does it feel?
It feels really good. I think we got a little bit lucky in that all the pieces fit together, both musically and personally. We all have a good time together, which I think goes a long way. Everybody takes it really seriously, is very professional about it. Everybody came to practice really prepared. It just made it really easy. They all make it really easy on stage. Super, super fun. Highly recommend it.
This is a random fan question: That song “Step by Step” that you did with Braxe and Falcon, what is that song about?
That was one of those ones where I feel like I knew something going on inside myself that maybe wasn’t on the surface at the time, this sense of foreboding that a big change was coming, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. I suppose there must have been some sort of feeling like times were tough all around and just wanting to make a song that felt like encouraging myself and others to keep going.
That was the song that my partner and I were playing when I had our daughter. We found it very soothing and inspiring. You know, keep going, step by step.
Wow! Thank you. I’m really happy to hear that. That’s 100 percent what I was going for. I’ll still listen to that one, every once in a while. It’s really rare that I’ll do that. When they sent me the, I think there was an EP of instrumentals that they did — and when Peter from Domino sent it to me, I loved that sound so much, I was like, “I’m gonna do this.” And I think in like two days or something, I turned it around. I was just really like, “I gotta do this.”
It spoke to you.
It really did. It was truly a compulsion.