This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the third entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.
“Take Pills,” Panda Bear
We’re all hermits now, to a certain degree. I grew up a musical hermit. While the village of my peers went about their errands singing along to Mariah Carey and N’Sync and Ludacris, I lived in a hobbit hole on the edge of town, listening to oldies. (Maybe you can remember the bumper from your local oldies station. Mine is Good times and great oldies: Oldies 95! To-PEE-ka!) Notes and riffs from contemporary tunes drifted past my cave door, and some like OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson” and Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time” drew me out to dance, but for the most part I was busy in the dark, dusting off relics from Motown and psychedelic rock and the British invasion.
Whether my hermitude was a product of actual preference, or simply an effort to be in harmony with my chauffeur, who refused to listen to anything past 1973 without a skeptical grimace (hi, Dad), I don’t know. With this listening partnership came an ear for bricolage. Riding in the front seat along the capillaries of Midwestern interstates, I was taught to appreciate the components of songs just as much as the sum of their parts; the vocal techniques, the chord progressions, the out-of-the-ordinary instruments. At fifteen, the last year before I got my learner’s permit, we had a morning drop-off ritual: two cereal bars to-go, windows down (weather permitting), and George Harrison’s “Apple Scruffs,” one of my favorite songs off tour-de-force solo effort All Things Must Pass, as well as a lesser-known Beatle single called “The Inner Light,” also written by George. My dad always says that among the post-1970 solo efforts of the Fab Four, Harrison took most advantage of what made the Beatles special (the genius sound engineering of Sir George Martin, for one*), and that All Things Must Pass feels like a logical continuation of The Beatles (the White Album) and Abbey Road, with its sweeping orchestral ebbs and flows and an emphasis on instrumentation and quality, like a chef who prioritizes his ingredients over his personality. (It should be noted that The Beatles’ first whiffs of instrumental experimentation on Rubber Soul were partially inspired by the sitar artistry of Ravi Shankar, The Kinks [who we’ll cover later], and Donovan, who, according to my mother, also belongs on this playlist. You’re not wrong, Mom!)
The deconstructed ingredients of Beatles songs, the drop-off rituals and highway music lessons, the hermit’s cave echoing with the rotation from Oldies 95: all led me to a deep love I didn’t know I had of repetition, of song structure and production. Following the breadcrumbs of the familiar, I began to creep out of the 1960s cave. It started with The Grey Album, the hip hop masterpiece by Danger Mouse, combining samples from Jay-Z’s Black Album (itself a sample-heavy work) with the White Album. Then there were the beats of De La Soul, Danger Doom and Madvillain, Gorillaz, and even Girl Talk, an understandably divisive mash-up artist who combined contemporary hip hop and dance tracks with classic rock. This would soon expand into a general enthusiasm for sampling and electronica, indie psychedelia, and atmospheric albums, anything with some sense of patchwork patterns, anything where the sound is recognizable but slightly estranged. Like the acoustic guitar, beat looping, and clandestine recordings of The Books, or the distorted synth, Beach-Boy-harmonies, handclaps, and off-kilter rhythms of Animal Collective. These artists poked windows in the hobbit hole, letting the air of the moment in, swirling the dust motes of past and present, blurring memories and genre.
Now, in a different kind of hermitude, I try to remember to open my doors and windows every once in a while to avoid stale air and malaise. Those of us with depressive or anxious brains might find the refrain of “Take Pills” familiar. “Surely there’s no substitute for company,” Animal Collective member Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) sings, and advises himself, “Take one day at a time / Everything else you can leave behind / Only one thing at a time / Anything more really hurts your mind.” Inspired by his difficult relationship with the dull blade of anti-depressants, Lennox used a 303 sampler to make Person Pitch, “inspired by hip-hop producer Madlib’s work under the Quasimoto moniker… which eventually birthed the swirling, chromatic hues.”
The sampled percussion is also a vivid, echo-y slice of the mundanity of being inside. The song opens with what sounds like a fuzzy recording of some sort of machinery, a whispering hiss and click that resembles the quiet chorus of appliances in a still house, the hums of fridges and gurgling of coffee makers. Eventually the hushed clicks build and break, morphing into an upbeat, layered menagerie of cowboy backbeats, staggered choruses, muted explosions.
As “Take Pills” fades, we hear a train leave the station. Like anyone struggling with their mental health, and all of us uncertain of the future, we might try to “take one day at a time,” to not let the weeks slide so quickly past our windows. From some distant corner of my musical cave, George begins to sing with the sarod, shehnai and pakhavaj: “Without going out of my door, I can know all things of earth. The farther one travels, the less one knows.” And Panda Bear’s train plods on into the next song, its sounds muddying the difference between inside and out. We’re invited to wonder where we’re going, and if we’ll ever find the familiar again.
*A reader (…okay, it was my dad) pointed out that this makes it sound like George Martin produced All Things Must Pass, and he’s not wrong. I meant to say that George Harrison kept up the multi-layered, cross-category feel of Martin’s production style though, yes, it was Phil Spector who produced All Things Must Pass.
