Geologist on Going Solo, Croz Boyce, and the Future of Animal Collective

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Today's haps: I've interviewed everyone in Animal Collective so many times throughout my career that I've honestly lost track, and when it comes to Brian Weitz (aka Geologist) this marks his third time appearing on the newsletter. Back in 2022, he hopped on with Josh Dibb (aka Deakin) to chat the excellent AnCo record Time Skiffs, and the following year he came back around again to get deep on the also-excellent follow-up Isn't It Now?. Brian's having a simply incredible 2026 so far; earlier this year, he put out his first Geologist solo record Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?, and today sees the release of his latest project with fellow AnCo'er Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) as Croz Boyce. Both records are tangy, enrapturing, and further adding to a catalogue of left-field American music that is at this point quite possibly peerless.

I always love talking to these guys, and catching up with Brian this time around was a real treat; we talked for over an hour just a few months ago, and I'm honestly impressed by the fact that every time we speak, new insights are unearthed as to his creative and artistic POV as well as the history of his work inside and out of Animal Collective. Check it out:

How was your latest solo tour?
It was great. I enjoyed hanging out with the Bajas guys and seeing them play every night. The shows I did on my own were great. I was in the car by myself—and I'm in the car by myself a lot every day, but driving through D.C. and the Maryland suburbs is not the same as going down the West Coast. It was nice to be out there.

What were you listening to while you were driving around?
Oh shit, I wish I'd been better prepared for that question. I sometimes listen to a Dead show on the archive.org app, usually a show from that date or the area. When I was in the Oregon area, I listened to some of the stuff from Eugene in '68 that ended up being mixed into Anthem of the Sun. When I was up by Vancouver, I listened to some of that Pacific Northwest box set they did from the early '70s. I'm a thematic DJ sometimes, just because I need to get moving, especially if I don't have a hockey podcast to listen to. I didn't listen to many of those on the West Coast because the scenery was so pretty. I didn't want to waste it on people talking about the gold medal game and what happened in the locker room and all that stuff.

When I was in Oregon, it was raining, and I listened to a Grouper record. I listened to Screaming Trees. I love them. I tried to listen to that SST Anthology comp, but they took it off streaming, so I jammed Clairvoyance. I listened to Nomeansno when i was in Vancouver. Friends are always telling me to check that band out, and they still haven't quite landed with me, but I gave it another shot. I listened to a lot of Dead Moon, which is always good in the car. I listened to New Riders of the Purple Sage when I was going through the San Joaquin Valley. I didn't get service a lot, and I was in a rental car, so I had to rely on streaming—but a lot of times it was just kind of quiet. I did listen to If I Could Only Remember My Name by David Crosby when I was in Bolinas, waiting for a merch shipment to arrive.

I talked to Daniel Rossen forever ago about touring solo, and he made it sound fairly sustainable on an economic level.
He probably gets more than I do when I play solo, but it's very economically sustainable. It depends if you have to stay somewhere. At my level, with gas prices and the distance I was covering, I was out for 12 nights, and I only had to pay for a place to stay for four of them. The other times, I was staying with friends, and that really helps because hotels these days can be $200. If you have gear, you don't want to stay just anywhere, because I don't want to have to unload all my stuff every night. I need to make sure like it feels safe, so it helps to stay with friends. When i tour on the East Coast, if I'm in my own car, which is a family SUV, I just put all the seats down in the back and I'm either sleeping in my car or, if the weather's nice, I camp.

You mentioned hockey podcasts before. Ben from L'Rain told me a few years ago that the two of you were very into playing Gordle.
Yeah, Gordle ended, sadly.

That's a shame. What happened?
They got through all the players with five letters, and then they did six, and before they knew it there were eight or nine-letter names, and it was getting really difficult. Maybe people weren't engaging with it anymore. I even stopped. For me, I have a few things I have to do before I get to work in the morning, like reading news. I'm not super into a ton of the games, and I was never into Wordle—but I would do Gordle, and then I'd do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. I'd have to do those things when I'm having my coffee before I can really get into stuff, so it was sad for me when Gordle stopped. I had, like, really good stats on Gordle.

Ben also mentioned to me that you had written for Sports Illustrated in the past.
That's putting it generously, but I did.

Talk to me a little bit about that.
It started in 2015. I think I only did three or four articles, but it was around the time when—I mean, Sports Illustrated, I don't read it. I can't comment on what it's like today. I haven't picked up a hard copy of the magazine in a long time. But it was when they wanted to compete with Grantland. Someone Animal Collective used to work with, one of our managers, was at a sporting event and was introduced to the Editor-in-Chief. He mentioned wanting to start bringing in non-traditional sports journalists to cover the intersection of sports and culture. He was like, "I pitched you to him. Why don't you start writing about the intersection of hockey and music?" At first, I was like, "I don't get it." He was like, "Just go do it for a life experience, even if the guy thinks all your ideas are stupid."

So I made a list of things to pitch, and he picked two of my ideas and sent me to the hockey editor. I did two interviews with former and current players about their interest in music. I knew there was one guy who had won the Stanley Cup with the Red Wings in the early 2000s, and people would be like, "Somebody from that team used to show up at Wolf Eyes shows." So I tracked him down, and we talked about his interest in Detroit punk, garage rock, and noise music. Another time, I heard one of the guys on the Flyers, which is my favorite team—during the off-season he'd go out to clubs in Toronto and and DJ, so we talked about DJ'ing. When the Islanders relocated to Brooklyn, I wrote an article about the first home game between the Rangers and the Islanders.

For my first article, the thing that they liked was, I don't know how much you know about Philadelphia hockey, but in the '80s, there was a goaltender for the Flyers who was supposed to have won the Vezina Trophy the year before, which is the best goaltender award. He really looked like he was going to be something special, and he died in a drunk driving accident in '85. He was young, in his mid-20s. That's my first memory of the team. I was six years old when it happened. It was a big deal in the city. If you had a souvenir Flyers jersey that year, they all had a little black patch on them with his number, and my parents would never let me get one because he died drunk driving. It was a thing in my house, that you shouldn't be celebrated for getting in this accident.

So when I happened to be when I was in this dude's office, I was like, "Well, a month from now, it's the 30th anniversary of that car crash, and I used to fight with my dad all the time about whether I could get that arm patch on my jersey. Now I have a kid, and I could write from the perspective of that." They printed that, and it did really well, so they asked me to do those other three I just mentioned—and I don't think those performed as well.

I also wasn't getting any free tickets to games, which was, like, the only reason I was doing it. I felt like a charlatan. I was on a few hockey podcasts, and I hated it. Sports journalism is something people work really hard at, and I knew what it feels like to be in an industry that's cratering because of the digital realm—people not being able to make money from it anymore. I felt weird around all these people that have worked really hard at it. I was like, "Well, I'm not trying to take their jobs"—and they never paid me either, because they didn't want to cause any weirdness with their staff, so I was just doing it as a volunteer.

So I was like, "Well, the only thing I'll get out of it is some access to the hockey world." There was one time I asked Sports Illustrated, "I've written four articles for you guys at this point, here's a game I want to go to. Could you get me in?" They were like, "We could maybe get you in the press box, but you're not allowed to cheer in the press box. You and your kid would just have to sit silently." I was like, "Fuck that." After that, I stopped sending them ideas, and they stopped reaching out to me. It fizzled within a year.

Your son played guitar on the solo record you put out earlier this year. Last time we talked, you mentioned he was starting to get into music in general. Let's talk about getting him in the mix here.
Yeah, that was right when he started getting into guitar, because he was really into Birthday Girl, this band from D.C. We had this small acoustic guitar that was a borderline toy, and not in great shape—pretty crappy-sounding. But my wife got it at a thrift store to keep around the house in case one of the kids wanted to pick it up. Fall of 2023, I'd written this record when Dave and I were on tour doing separate solo sets. That was the first tour I played the Camel Lights material in early form. I hadn't settled on all the parts yet, but I'd written it.

I don't think I had the idea to put guitar on it yet, but it was around that time where Merrick wanted to play guitar after listening to Birthday Girl. He asked me, "What kind of music is this?" I was like, "Oh, this sounds like pretty connected to '90s indie rock to me." He went on Spotify and searched for indie rock playlists, and I came downstairs one morning and he was listening to Arctic Monkeys because he 'd typed in 2000s indie rock.

I was like, "Oh, you're listening to the Monkeys?" And he was like, "You've heard of this band?" I was like, "These guys are on Domino." [Alex Turner], we're not friends—I don't think he knows who I am—but he was in New York for a press tour, and someone from Domino happened to be coming to my birthday party in Brooklyn. He showed up, got drunk, and made fun of my tie-dye shirt that I was wearing. It was a moment for my son where I think he finally realized, "Oh, my dad's in a different world than I thought he was in."

After that, he asked me to take him to shows and play him records. He was also taking piano and saxophone lessons at the time, and they were really expensive. So when he asked for guitar lessons, I was like, "I can't do another one," because I also have a daughter, and she took music lessons. It's cooler to teach yourself guitar anyway. So I taught him how to play barre chords and how to read tablature. I was like, "I have a feeling YouTube will teach you any song you need to know." The first thing he taught himself was Dinosaur Jr.'s "Freak Scene." He was in a fight with one of his friends, and I played him "Freak Scene," and that resonated with him lyrically.

Really soon after that, I recorded Camel Lights in early 2024—I've been sitting on that record for a while now. I wanted to get that guitar that he taught himself on the record, and for "Government Job," I never came up with the hurdy-gurdy part that I liked. So I took out the hurdy-gurdy and tried to play some trashy barre chords, because that's all I can do on guitar. I just wanted the texture of that guitar, since I hear it in the house so much.

My son called me the day I was driving down to Asheville to record to tell me the guitar was hanging on the wall, and I was like, "Shit." He was like, "I can play it for you," and I was like, "You'll record the part?" He was like, "Yeah, just tell me what to play." I hadn't even really written a part, so I got to Asheville and I made a phone video and was like, "Play these chords." He didn't do it, but when I was going back down to mix the record, we have a lot of friends down there, so the family came down to Asheville with me. I was like, "You should just go in. That song is going to get cut if somebody doesn't play guitar on it."

So I actually got him into the studio, and we brought the guitar with us. At that point, he was way better at guitar. I'm not sure he enjoyed it. I think he enjoyed it. There were all these expensive guitars, and he was like, "You really want me to play our piece of shit from home? I can do a lot more." I was like, "No, just keep it simple and play it on that guitar." I wanted to enshrine the sound of that guitar, and I wanted him to get over that hump. I wasn't gonna keep that song on the record—I always liked the beat, but I couldn't figure out anything to do on top of it. Then, I liked what everybody did on top of it, so I kept it to honor the contributions.

Let's talk about wielding the hurdy-gurdy. It's a very specific instrument to build a record around, so to speak.
I got it initially for Time Skiffs and Isn't It Now?. I've been interested in it as an instrument since the late '90s, primarily in the experimental drone world. I always reference Keiji Haino's live sets. That's the first time I saw one, at Tonic in 1998, and it blew me away. Jim O'Rourke did a hurdy-gurdy record, Happy Days, in the late '90s. It also reminded me of stuff that John Cale does, as well as La Monte Young, Theatre of Eternal Music, and Tony Conrad. I've been faking it on this synthesizer, and Dave and I were talking about it one day because he put on this hurdy-gurdy record by another player that I like buit didn't know at the time, Valentin Clastrier. He plays experimental, free-improv hurdy-gurdy stuff, but also traditional Renaissance music. I didn't know the instrument could do that much. I was faking the sound of it with a synthesizer, and I didn't feel bad about doing that, because I like doing synthesizer drones—and I wasn't even trying to consciously fake a hurdy-gurdy, I was just trying to do some kind of a string drone in that same interval that the hurdy-gurdy is in.

So after we arranged those records, which was in summer of 2019, the plan at the time was to record all of those songs at once in early 2020 and sort them out later into one or two records. We couldn't do that, obviously, because of COVID. But in between, my plan was to get a hurdy-gurdy. I had no idea that they're not that easy to get, and how expensive they are. Luckily, I found this used student model that suited me very well, so I got one in the fall of 2019 and started [playing it] before COVID. I had to get it fixed, and the hardest part about the hurdy-gurdy, initially, is learning how to make it make sound. There's a few mechanical things you have to do with it before you can really get it to make noise that sounds good.

I found a guy in the D.C. area that plays at Renaissance festivals, and this guy in Canada, Ben Grossman, fixed my hurdy-gurdy and gave me one lesson—just to do these drones on those two records. At the end of "Car Keys," when we'd play it in the practice space, the drone strings of the hurdy-gurdy weren't in the key of the song, so I took them off and started playing melodically on it. It was the first time I interacted with it in a way that was more like a guitar synthesizer. I don't think that ended up on the record, because it felt a little too much like the Doors or something.

Around the time you and I spoke for Isn't It Now?, Dave said, "Do you want to go on tour with me?" I didn't want to play any of my modular synthesizer solo stuff, so I was like, "Maybe it's time I try to do the hurdy-gurdy ambient set." I spent a few days trying to write something, or at least come up with a vibe, and I didn't like it at all. I was like, "I don't think I could bring myself to do this every night for two weeks." I didn't feel like I was adding anything to the idea of an ambient or drone set that somebody hadn't already done with the instrument. I was even thinking about bailing on the tour and telling Dave, "I was going to do an ambient set to open up for you, and I'm just not going to be happy."

A podcast I listen to a lot is called You Don't Know Mojack, which goes through the SST catalog. There was an episode where they were talking about Black Flag's The Process of Weeding Out, and how you can hear that, later in life, Greg Ginn would just just solo over a drum machine. So I decided to break myself out of the rut I was in. I made a drum patch on my modular synthesizer, plugged my hurdy-gurdy into a distortion pedal, and I was like, "I'll just pretend I'm in Black Flag and solo like Greg." Within a couple of weeks, I wrote the framework of the whole record. Even though the specific riffs and melodic lines that I do on the record weren't set in stone yet, I was still improvising and finding my way towards the different phrases I wanted to do by the time I went on the tour. The concept of the record—I'm not even sure I knew it would be a record at that point—but, at least the concept of the live set, was pretty set in stone from that day forward.

Let's talk about the album title. The Bandcamp page bio mentions that it's a gesture towards when you quit smoking cigarettes.
There's a bunch of rituals, and one of which was saying that phrase on a daily basis. "Can I get a pack of Camel Lights?" was something I said every day. When I quit smoking, I thought how it was funny that—obviously, the main thing about quitting smoking is you don't smoke and you get healthier and you don't smell, but there's also other things you don't necessarily think about. There was a phrase that came out of my mouth every day that I don't say anymore, and I might never say again in my whole life.

For a lot of the time in Animal Collective, I was never sure how much longer it would go—and I didn't feel the way about having a career outside of Animal Collective the way the other guys did. I get most of my ideas out through Animal Collective, and I never had the urge to make a solo record. But then I started to do some solo stuff 'cause I got tired of waiting around for the whole band to get back together, and I did start getting ideas on my own that I wanted to get out. I'd be asked by fans or journalists, "How come you've never done a solo record? Everybody does it but you." For a while I was saying, "I don't really want to. I'm not going to do it just to do it. I don't want to do it for ego reasons, or so that I don't have to answer this awkward question anymore." Honestly, if I just don't have one in me, it just doesn't feel like it's in there. I put out some tapes of live sets I did, but I don't really consider those solo records. They're just documents of me working on stuff and being present with sounds and ideas. But once I wrote the live set, I was like, "I think I wrote a record." Now, if I say to people, "I don't have a solo record in me," I'll be lying. What would be holding me back from doing it?

Then it became a confidence thing—saying to myself, "Well, you don't sing. People don't want to hear an instrumental thing from an Animal Collective member." Or, "It's drone-y. It doesn't have interesting chord changes that your bandmates write." Even just the confidence to be in a studio and tell other players what to play—I've never done that. I've given the Animal Collective guys suggestions because we know each other. I can be like, "I like that," or "I don't like that." It's just my aesthetic taste. But to tell somebody, "No, play something different, because it's my song," I'd never done it, and I wasn't sure I was capable of doing it.

These things that you say to yourself—they're negative things we all say. "I'm not capable of something," "I'm not good enough." So I thought, "Now that I have this set of songs that I can see and hear, I have a vision for what I want it to sound like. I just don't want to say anymore that I don't have a solo record in me." All those things weren't true anymore, so if I said them, they'd be lies. It's like not saying, "Can I get a pack of Camel Lights?" anymore. The only way I could stop saying that was to quit smoking. It wasn't the motivation for quitting smoking—I thought about it after the fact—but I thought about what it would take to not say these things to myself. It was like, "If you don't follow through with this, it's out of fear. You just got to do it." Then, whether people like it or they don't, you can at least be like, "Well, no, I did have a solo record in me, and it came about pretty organically."

It wasn't forced. I didn't do it just so people would stop asking me that question. It was a very honest thing that took a lot of hard work, and I wanted to title the record something that would reflect that. I can be prone to self-help-y, new age-y thoughts, but I like to keep them pretty private. I didn't want to say something super poetic or flowery—that's just not my personality, and for better or worse, I'm a little embarrassed to let that side out. But this phrase was, to me, really beautiful and poetic. It is a little self-help-book-y, but I feel okay about it. I have had a few cigarettes since I quit, and they've always been fun moments that I didn't regret. It didn't push me back into being a cigarette smoker again.

I'm self-conscious about some of the sounds on this record being referential to my record collection. I don't know if it's true, but there was this story that Sonic Youth wanted to be on SST for a while, but one of the guys in the office was like, "They're not musicians, they're record collectors—and record collectors shouldn't be in bands." There was this idea that their records are going to come out sounding like the records they like, and I knew I was doing that a little bit on this record. But I was hoping that it was maybe more original. Is there a healthy way of engaging with things I liked from my past? Is there a healthy way of engaging with old habits that I might like? Sometimes, if you're too referential, it's a bad habit to be in as a musician. But sometimes, you can have a cigarette and it's not a big deal.

Bob Nastanovich lettered the back cover. Tell me about how that came into play.
I always wanted it to be handwritten, like a set list—because how the material is sequenced on the record is pretty much exactly how it was on the live set. Even a lot of Animal Collective stuff was born through live performance. When Animal Collective would go on a break for Noah and Dave to do solo stuff, usually that was when my wife and I would be like, "Alright, let's have another kid." We weren't having kids anymore, so I'd watch the other guys go on the road and I'd miss it. I wanted there to be some connection to both the fact that it was written to be performed live, and that my inspiration for even writing anything was to be in a space with people.—especially the dive bars and DIY spaces that my solo career puts me in. I miss them, and I haven't been in them in a long time because Animal Collective doesn't play places like that anymore.

I wanted the lettering to be look like somebody had just scribbled it out on a set list. When I was 15, I saw Pavement, and at the end of the night, their set lists were still on the stage after they walked off and I grabbed one. It was taped up on my wall. My parents had put a bunch of shit from a bedroom into a box and given it to me, so I went digging through the box and found the set list. I wanted the lettering to look like that Pavement set list I had on my wall, because that was the first set list I ever saw. Even when Animal Collective write set lists, I almost write it the same way they wrote it. The piece of paper I tear off is always the same size as that one. A band rips up a piece of paper and writes a bunch of chicken scratch: To me, it's the archetype.

I sent it to some of the guys I know in Pavement and was like, "Whose handwriting is this? I thought maybe it was Steve's." He's the one I sent it to, and he was like, "No, that's Bob." I played Union Pool, where Mark Ibold bartends, and I was like, "I have this set list, I'm going to send it to you guys because I want to see who's writing it is." He was like, "I can tell you without even looking at it. I can picture it in my head. I guarantee you it's Bob's handwriting." Bob and I had never met, so eventually they put me in touch with him. He did the liner notes, but when I asked him to do the song titles, I was like, "Well, that doesn't look like this anymore." The guys at Drag City were like, "You can send us that set list, and we can isolate each letter, make a computer font, and type it in."

You've got the Croz Boyce record with Dave on the way too, which is also great. Let's talk about how that came together. The title of the project, obviously, is a nod to David Crosby.
We all love David Crosby to different degrees, but Dave and I both really love David Crosby. I can't remember if Noah's a big fan, but I'm sure he respects the singing. When I even think of solo records like Camel Lights...there was this band White Magic, and we were very close with them and still are. We toured together in 2004, and it was super fun. The guitar player was Andy McLeod, who also played bass in Modest Mouse a little bit. He was the one that got me back into that kind of music after living in Arizona. He was like, "You know the Crosby record?" This was post-show, smoking weed and drinking beers. He looked around the room and was like, "When I do my Crosby record, I'm going to do it just like that."

The thing that makes it a Crosby record is that you bring in all your friends. It's about your community. You have all these other people playing on it. It's not just you. He was like, "Brian, you're going to come and do some weird fucking sounds and bird noises. Noah, you're going to drum." I don't think he's ever made a song, but I remember being really psyched. We'd always say, "I can't wait to play on Andy's Crosby record." But that was when I got super into listening to that record.

Even with Camel Lights, I was asking different people to play on it as the director calling the shots making room for all these other people to express themselves. It becomes something greater than you could do on your own—as opposed to the kind of solo records where you're like, "I have to play everything on it to call it a solo record." I definitely look to If I Could Only Remember My Name as inspiration for giving permission, as a musician, to be like, "I can't do everything as well as other people, so it's okay to call in favors as long as you're letting people express themselves." I just wanted to give Crosby a shout out for that.

In terms of Croz Boyce, we were a little sensitive if we should even tell that story. When David Crosby died was when Dave and I really started this record in earnest, but it wasn't like, "Well, now we got to honor the Croz." Dave had something to send me, and it was the day he died. so we were texting about David Crosby, and then he was like, "Oh, and by the way, here's like some stuff." He named the dropbox that, and there's some West Coast-y acoustic guitar vibes, so we were aware that if we kept the name, people were going to draw David Crosby comparisons. We were like, "Well, maybe we'll call it Animal Collective. Maybe we'll say, 'Avey Tare and Geologist Present.'" But Domino, weirdly enough, was like, "We're kind of into you guys keeping that as the band name." That would've been our preference, but we didn't think anybody was going to be psyched, and we didn't feel like having a discussion about it. But they were like, "No, we'd like it to do it that way."

To us, it's what we always wanted to do at the beginning of Animal Collective, which was to not really have a band name and be about the relationship between this group of friends. There's different places that each project can live and return to, but it doesn't always have to be the same thing. Eventually we were told, "You need an umbrella name," so that's where Animal Collective came from. So we were excited to do this record.

The genesis of the record started well before David Crosby died. I don't even think we were aware where it started. For the last 10 years, Dave and I have done stuff as a duo that came about because, even going back to our teenage years—before we met Josh and Noah and became good friends with them—Dave and I had our thing. A lot of the ideas from that friendship have been expressed in Animal Collective, but even through the first two Animal Collective records, Dave and I sometimes did duo shows in New York under a different name. Sometime in the early teens, we wanted to make some free music on Soundcloud, and we started doing it as New Psycho Actives. Sometimes the projects would be Dave doing a track and I doing a track, sometimes we played on both of each other's tracks. We hadn't done it in almost 15 years since Animal Collective really took off.

Around that same time, Animal Collective got invited to do this thing in the Amazon for Vice—when you were working for Vice. Noah couldn't come, and Josh was taking a break from the band at that point to finish Sleep Cycle, so Dave brought an acoustic guitar and I brought my modular synthesizer, and that's probably where it started—although I don't think we really realized it then, because those were still very vocal-forward songs. One of them was a song that Dave put on Eucalyptus. Then we did this track for the Audubon Society benefit For the Birds, and Dave sent around some acoustic guitar tracks to everybody in the band and I put my parts on them. I was like, "Oh, I love this, I have some ideas." I did modular synth and hurdy-gurdy on top of it, and Dave's vocals were pretty obscure on it. He wanted it to almost fit in with the field recordings of the bird songs that we were using.

There was a due date for it. It was COVID and we were still working on Time Skiffs. Josh was doing some other work, and Noah—like me—was a parent dealing with kids and being stuck in the apartment. I don't know. It got close to the deadline, and we had to ask Josh and Noah, "Should we mix this down and send it in? Do you guys think you're going to have time to play on it?" They both listened to it, and they were like, "This sounds done to us. You guys found something that sounds pretty good on its own." This just sounds weird to say—and maybe i'm not the best person to say it, maybe I'll have to leave this to the public discourse—but, to me, it almost sounds like what people think Animal Collective sounds like. We felt like it was a new take on what people might consider the classic Animal Collective sound. We're never sure there even was one, but regardless of whether it was, we really enjoyed making that song. Time Skiffs was partially fun to make remotely, and it came out really well, but there was also a side of it that, when people wanted to make changes, since we all weren't in the same room it took so much longer than it should have. Something that we could decide in 30 seconds would take a week. But this track was really easy and made us realize we could work remotely, and in a fun way.

The end of 2022 came and we canceled some tours—you and I spoke about it—and we're still not even sure what appetite people in the band have for the machine of Animal Collective touring. At that time, Dave and I got asked to do a installation soundtrack for this thing in Asheville, which we did as New Psycho Actives. That was really fun, and we were both searching around a little bit for what we were going to do in 2023. We knew Isn't It Now? was going to come out, and we thought we were going to be touring for that, but that was nixed. After Bug Mall, we were like, "Let's just keep making shit." Noah was finishing up Reset with Pete, and that was when we were like, "What about back when we made 'Brown Thrasher'? Maybe this deserves more attention in terms of a project with this setup."

Dave was like, "I'll noodle on an acoustic guitar and send you some some parts, and you can add what you want to it." That was over three years ago now, and the day that David Crosby died, he created the Dropbox folder and put the first acoustic guitar tracks in there for "Hanging Out with a Blueberry Pop." We worked on a couple of songs, and then we both had other things to do. Sevens came out and he was touring, Josh and I were working on a documentary film score, and I wrote Camel Lights and started playing in that band Motherfuckers JMB and Co. We both had a moment where we were like, "Is this gonna die on the vine, or should we pick it up again?" We both had some free time, so we worked on a few more tracks.

I had that Shaw Deal record come out and Dave and I worked on a documentary film score that had a deadline, so yet again time went by. We weren't sure we had an end goal in mind until last summer, when we were like, "Hey, if we finish all the open-ended ideas that are in there, this is the record." It was real organic, and there was never a deadline. We only worked on it when we felt inspired to work on it, because we were doing other things that were helping pay the bills. It could've just been something he and I kept private if it didn't turn into something we liked—but luckily, it did.

As you mentioned earlier, the way all four of you in Animal Collective are operating creatively in this decade is pretty close to the group's initial vision. The state of fluidity in regards to who's on what record—what does the future of Animal Collective, in that respect, look like right now?
You might get different answers from each of us, so I can only really speak for myself—and I know what's baked into this question, or least what people are going to try to glean from it, so I always make a point to say that the vibes are good. There's nothing bad in Animal Collective world. As I've explained to you before, it's hard to get all four of us to align our schedules and find the resources for travel and all that stuff. Different people have different appetites for it in terms of what's going on in their home life.

Also, I don't work with Domino for my solo stuff, but everybody else does, and we've talked to some of our fans privately about how we put out a lot and ask people to spend a lot of money—and we have a record label to spend a lot of money just manufacturing our stuff. It got to a point sometime last year where we had to make this calendar, because we can't all drop stuff on top of each other. Our records aren't really going to compete—people that are going to buy Panda's record are going to buy mine if they're big Animal Collective fans anyway, so it's fine. But we have to have those conversations, even with the record label in terms of their manpower to work a record and do press.

It's literally planned out through sometime into 2027 with solo and side projects—and the people that are at the front of the calendar get bored waiting for everybody, and they add another thing to the calendar like, "Well, sorry guys, I made something else with my friends, or a solo thing." That is the way we've always thought Animal Collective would operate, but when we were younger, we didn't envision us all living so far apart from each other. The model was Sun City Girls, who did everything themselves and didn't think twice about putting out 10 records in a year. That would be our ideal, but because we had to space things out, it hasn't worked out that way.

Speaking for me personally, for me to be happy, I'd like both things to be happening. I like being busy, but I also miss playing with those guys. I miss the Animal Collective touring, and I miss making records as a band. To me, it's not a stressful, burdensome thing, and I wish these things were happening in parallel. I know that even when I say that, people bring up real-world reasons why that's hard. You need to be devoting your resources to one thing and not ask your fans to overextend their resources to support you as a band. But I can't also go on forever just doing solo stuff. It doesn't make a living. I feel super lucky to do it, and the fluidity is amazing—it's allowed me to express myself. I play in different bands and with different people now. I don't think I ever thought I was going to do that. I thought the only band I'd be capable of playing in is Animal Collective, because they like me and they won't kick me out you know for not being as good as the rest of them. I found that that's not true, and I'm super grateful for it.

I just prefer the things to be happening at the same time. I have the time and mental capacity for it. I also don't sing, so my voice doesn't get tired. I don't get the level of physical exhaustion that other people get, so I wouldn't be empathetic towards that, but I get it. Also, I know I wouldn't come back as a primary songwriter. I certainly wouldn't come back as a singer. One thing that doing more stuff on my own has given me is a lot of empathy for what those guys have gone through as solo artists for much longer than I have. It's fucking scary and exhausting, coming back to a different project. Even when I play in Motherfuckers, one of the guys will be like, "Hey, I wrote this riff, these are the changes," and I'm like, "At the risk of sounding like an asshole, in this band I don't want to memorize anything. I just want to improvise. You can play your parts and I'll try and not step on them, but don't make me memorize anything." I do that enough in Animal collective and for my solo stuff.

There have been times when the guys come back from solo stuff into Animal Collective, and they're like, "Guys, I can't like write that many songs for this record. I'm exhausted. I just wrote a record." I used to be like, "Well, fuck that," but now I get it. So while I'd like the fluidity to still include the main band, I'm also way more empathetic to the level of exhaustion—both emotional and physical—that everybody has been going through for longer than I have. I have a lot of patience, and it doesn't cause anger. It might if I was just sitting here with nothing to do, waiting for the band to like ramp up again—I think I might feel angry. But now I'm like, "No, I get it."