Song Exploder - Panda Bear - Dolphin

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

Panda Bear is musician Noah Lennox. He’s a founding member of the experimental, genre-defying band Animal Collective, and as a solo artists, he’s released six albums. In February 2019, Panda Bear released the album Buoys, and in this episode, he and his co-producer Rusty Santos break down the opening song, “Dolphin.” You’ll hear the original demo, and how they drew inspiration from music from all over the world. songexploder.net/panda-bear

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they remained. My name is Tau Winn. Panda Bear is musician Noah Lennox. He's a founding member of the experimental genre-defying band Animal Collective, and as a solo artist, he's released six albums. In February 2019, Panda Bear released the album, Bowies. And in this episode, he and his co-producer Rusty Santos break down the opening song.

Dolphin. You'll hear the original demo and how they drew inspiration from music from all over the world. To the seed of the road. This is Panda Bear. Dolphin was first written on a guitar, and I hadn't really played guitar in a long time. But there's a song, Te Zeta, by a guy named Mulatu Astateke. And that was kind of my springboard, the guitar in that song. If you listen to the song, I feel like you can hear the inspiration for a dolphin.

The vocal line mimics the saxophone. I'd made demos in my practice base in Lisbon, Portugal, where I live. Just going through the song and making little adjustments to it and going do-do-do-do-do, like that kind of stuff. I always had some sort of electronic element to the music. I always wanted that to be there to steer it away from just being like a straight singer-songwriter, type of thing. I wasn't super interested in doing that. And it's a big reason that I wanted to work with Rusty. Hey, it's Rusty Santos. I'm an engineer, producer, mixer based in Los Angeles, California. Rusty recorded the Song Tongs record by Animal Collective with us. Song Tongs is a record that we

recorded in 2003. And then I hadn't really seen him. I stayed in touch with him. We would email once in a while, and I was always admiring the stuff he was working on. And then I remember my friend in Lisbon sent me a photo of her and Rusty, and I thought to myself, there's somewhere else in the world, like at a festival or something like that. But she's like, no, he's here in Lisbon. So I was like, let's hang out. I hadn't seen him forever. And he told me then he was doing a bunch of Latin trap productions.

And immediately I was like, I'd like to push it somehow into that sort of space. We had a vocal take and the guitar. Those were kind of like the first elements that we put in there. To the sea. No one told me that water was a major theme of the record. To the end of the road. So I think that really just dialed it in right there was like this record was about water. We had a thing called the Digitact.

It's more like a sampler than a drum machine, but there's a lot of stock drum machini-type sounds in it. Just a quick and easy way to get really basic rhythmic stuff going. And my friend Liz, who I work with on music, she gave input on the arrangement. There was a kind of snary sound initially, and then Liz suggested a water drop sound. And that really becomes sort of the defining characteristics. sick of the song. There's a lot of suggested rhythm as if the rhythmic structure was there and then we just

removed it from the song. Like there's almost no kick drum on the record. So I feel like the rhythms are more implied than represented. So this is white noise. Comes from just like a straight up white noise sample and then automation. So automating the frequency sweeps, automating the volume. So turning it up and it hits a reverb and you have the reverb trails going out. And it sounded like the ocean.

Like a lot of things on the record, it's both organic and synthetic in that it sounds like the ocean, but it's engineered. And the sound of the record comes from the interplay of those two themes. Another thing that Rusty was super into was 808 samples. When you think of 808, you think of like big energy, like turning it up. But in the case of this, the 808 is using a way that I've never used them before, which is pretty subtle. Those samples sort of define all the low-end stuff that's going on on the record. There's no baselines, really. It's all just pitched and tuned samples of 808s for the most part.

It's kind of like a cloud to me, almost like a pillow that the rest of the production sort of sits on. At that point, we knew it was going to be the first song in the record, and we didn't just want to start it with the drum sequence. So we were looking for some sort of introductory sound. That's from Gallagher. Definitely from Gallagher, yeah. Old video game, like when there were big cabinets in arcades and stuff. It's from that.

It's very laser-like. One of the things I talked to Rusty about before going into the studio was wanting to do a vocal that was more kind of intimate and singular. Could it be? I didn't want to do a whole bunch of harmonies. Has it always been so? So quiet I remember doing the vocal takes

and hearing the stuff with the auto tune and the vocal production that Rusty was doing and feeling like excited about where it was going. When I looked back at the project, the vocals are called Scratch One or something, meaning like that was supposed to be a scratch take and it never left the main vocal. Well, that's always the trick, right?

Yeah. You always tell the performer, lay one down, just. It says like a blueprint. Yeah. And on the second voices, we pitched them down by seven. And when those hit the auto tuner, it sounds very synthetic. Those second voices are all taken from the main vocals.

It's all one vocal take. So the harmonies are all just made from the pitch shifting. Autotune was originally made for modeling the ocean floor for depth finding. it was taken from ships. So the person who made autotune was already in this kind of maritime minds and thinking equotically just really fits the vibe so good of the song.

In terms of the lyrics, I was just thinking about what makes us do certain things and how those impulses, if left unchecked can kind of lead us down unsavory roads. And for a couple albums, I like to talk about human beings as animals, and I just figured the dolphin was a sort of good symbol for that. The emotion I wanted to have injected into the music

was something really kind of caring and embracing and loving, even though that sounds kind of cheesy, but I felt like there was people getting into divisive feelings, mainly in politics, but also in other places in the world. So I wanted to make something that was kind of like a salve for that sort of movement. It's kind of like a love letter to weirdo, And yeah, that's that's it.

And now here's Dolphin by Panda Bear in its entirety. To the sea, the end of the road, has it always been so, so quiet? I would always be, give you a hair, gonna creep, gonna switch off the screen, gonna switch off the screen, Unblind And I'll always find you Outdown apart Clever Bay As a cataport tree

So spry In the space between It listens to the edge of a clear Us the aisle Us the frustrated crowd So, Fire. Let it all be fine. A clown among the feet.

Visit SongExplotter.net for more information about Panda Bear and Rusty Santos. You'll also find a link to buy or stream the song, Dolphin. Song Exploder was created by executive producer Rishi Kesh Hereway. This episode was produced and edited by Christian Coons. Carlos Lerma made the artwork, which you can see on the Song Exploder website or on our Instagram. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of fiercely independent podcasts. You can learn about all of our shows at Radiotopia.fm.

You can find Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder, and you can find me at Tao Get Stay Down. My name is Tao Wyn. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.