Avey Tare, as one of the front men of acclaimed band Animal Collective, is a consistent producer of critically acclaimed music. In his personal career, he’s come back from a 4 year break with the varied, sometimes-opulent and sometimes-stripped back “7’s,” and played an early tour show at Savannah’s own Lodge of Sorrows. Afterwards, he generously took the time to sit down with SCAD Radio’s own Megan Atwell.
Megan: Hello SCAD Radio. This is your general manager, Megan Atwell here today with…
Avey: Avey Tare, Dave, Davey Tare.
Megan: Davey Tare. Is that where it comes from?
Avey: Uhhuh.
Megan: Gotcha. Well, thank you so much for sitting with me. I appreciate it.
Avey: Thanks for having me.
Megan: First of all, you said this is your first time playing in Savannah. How are you enjoying it?
Avey: I enjoy it quite a bit. Yeah.
Megan: The scenery is very different from a lot of places in the United States, right?
Avey: Yeah. I’ve been to Savannah a lot of times. I’ve just never played music here before. So, it’s good. I made a point of being like, I wanna hit Savannah.
Megan: Well, I’m glad you did because when I saw that I was like, woo, because I have, personally quite a history with your solo work. I actually got into Slasher Flicks before I got into Animal Collective.
Avey: Oh, nice.
Megan: On that end, how do you approach working on your solo and spinoff work as opposed to working on group projects with guys?
Avey: For me, it usually started just from relationships I had with people, friendships. Doing stuff on the side. I mean, that’s how animal collectors started too. And collaboration has always been a really big part of playing music for me. A lot of the things I started doing outside of Animal Collective were just other collaborations, and, that one (Slasher Flicks) was just based on, you know, close friendships, and relationships. My girlfriend at the time was in the band and happens to be a wonderful musician. And Jeremy is a wonderful drummer. I didn’t really know Jeremy that well then, that’s when we first started getting to know each other. But I knew him as a drummer and the ponytail and, and had seen him do some other things around Baltimore and just loved his drumming. So, I just thought it would be good, having time to do that just started happening on my off time from Animal Collective because Noah started doing Panda Bear stuff solo more and so, that became like, our pattern, where it’s like we’d have this time off when he would go do that. So, I just started writing. I have him always writing songs and yeah. Just seems to work that way.
Megan: Yeah, that’s, that’s funny that you mentioned a pattern. Cause it was kind of funny to see Time Skiffs drop and then immediately Reset from Panda Bear and then 7’s from you. I was like ‘okay, we’re getting a full cycle’. Was there any overlap, speaking of Time Skiffs, in the time producing this album and 7’s?
Avey: Tracking ended for times skiffs when the pandemic was really hitting hard, and quarantine was still in effect. We had finished tracking Time Skiffs, and it really came out of being just a little bit depressed. I was cut off from collaborating with people again, and collaborating most importantly with Animal Collective. We didn’t plan on doing Time Skiffs at home, obviously, we wanted to get together and do it in the studio. And I had done Cows on Hourglass Pond, my previous solo record in my home studio too. So, I was just kind of like, ah! I’m tired of being alone in my studio recording music, you know? So, Adam McDaniel, who’s become a close friend of mine in Asheville, has a great studio called Drop of Sun. And I was just kind of like, I need to collaborate, you know, let’s just get together. And we’d worked on Cows, he mixed Cows and we had done stuff here and there together. So, we just, in a very relaxed manner, started being like let’s schedule three days here and work on some stuff. I started just writing songs again, around the house, and came together that way.
Megan: Have you found that some of the creative decisions that you make on your solo projects inform what you’re doing on the next Animal Collective record?
Avey: Maybe only if I think about it, which I don’t really. It’s just to do something in a conscious moment, not because I’m thinking about it like “I want to do something different,” but more just like I feel emotionally, or, you know, organically, like it’s time to move on to something else. Yeah. Cause that’s kind of what I thrive off of and what Animal Collective thrives off of. It’s just like a new challenge. And like going somewhere different, sort of an intuitive push. I think I–and the other guys as well–feel like I can do stuff on my own that I maybe wouldn’t do with Animal Collective, you know? Because we have different tastes in a lot of regards.
Megan: Yeah, of course. I wanted to ask about the tracking of 7s; It feels like it almost goes through three different movements on the album. There’s that first opening kind of naturalistic poppy section and then it’s sort of percussive, meandering, then it goes out into some, ambient sort of development towards the end. Was that intentional or did it just kind of happen that way?
Avey: I think because of the nature of the songs, to me, it felt more like a yin and yang kind of thing. It’s more like two movements to me, but I can see what you mean, how Hey Bog is kind of like the centerpiece. Hey Bog was the first song that I had. So everything was based on really wanting to release Hey Bog and have that on an album. All my other solo records kind of have been based off of just having all the songs and having this vision in mind. And this one came together more in like a very quick, you know, I just have these songs. Everything kind of had to be based around Hey Bog as the centerpiece. It just ended up that way, that there were three songs that were more poppy and good vibes to me. They kind of went together. And then there was like the darker kind of part of the latter part of the record where those songs kind of went together to me, and Sweeper’s Grin I actually wrote playing Hey Bog naturally. You know, Sweeper’s Grin is basically on this open, like one-chord thing that it’s kind of two chords, and they just came organically out of Hey Bog. So that’s kind of how it kept it on record.
Megan: You can definitely sense that. I was actually gonna ask about that, about how much each of the songs kind of influenced each other.
Avey: Yeah. I mean, Hey Bog definitely influenced Sweeper’s Grin. The rest were kind of all independent, and it was kind of more like having these little individual worlds and wanting them to just fit all together rather than thinking they were all one cohesive movement.
Megan: There are seven tracks on the album, and the title is 7’s, right? So, what came first?
Avey: The tracks on the record. It just seemed like… a lot of how I see the world, the universe, is in signs and symbols and things like that. It just started happening that way where it’s like, I wanted to release the record when I would be 43 years old, that added together would be seven. All these sevens just started coming up and I like repetition and numerology, and so I was just like, I want to push that and go with that.
Megan: Yeah! I mean, seven’s a very significant number in like every context everywhere. I wanted to ask, too, what your creative process was like for these songs? Cause there’s some kind of sound collage elements with the natural sampling and stuff like that, and then on others, they’re very open and atmospheric. How did you start each of these?
Avey: They all kind of started differently. A lot of them started on acoustic guitar. Cloud Stop Rush started on acoustic guitar, so I wanted to go into the studio in a very relaxed, kind of open-minded way, because there’s also just a lot of fun stuff to play around with at Drop of Sun, and Adam really likes experimenting with sounds and collecting sounds too. We work really well together in that way. I think it was just sort of like, go into the studio every day with a couple ideas and what can we do today? And if we accomplish that, that’s good. And I don’t know, I just like to collect sounds and like to use alternative kinds of things for percussion, not straightforward. I like a lot of samples and that kind of thing. So it was kind of more like finding a balance and just what fit with the songs, you know?
Megan: I wanted to ask about the cover art too. I believe Abby Portner?
Avey: No, I did it.
Megan: You did it! Really?
Avey: Yeah, I do collaborate with Abby a lot. But my visual art has just been something that’s progressed over the years and started because I was sort of the person that hung up all the flyers in New York and that kind of thing. More just cause I took it on, you know, and I was interested in it, and doing visual art has always been this very cathartic thing for me. It’s not like music, but it’s very attached to music because I like putting on music and making visual art. But I don’t think a lot about it, you know, as much as I think about music. Whereas music’s become this thing I’ve done for so long, it’s very heady. Visual art for me isn’t like that. I think it’s more intuitive where I just sit with things for a while and they sort of come to me and it’s very subconscious or something like that. I’ve just been working with collage for the past couple years. I like to mix mediums a lot, I’ve done mixed photography, and I’ve done a lot of the album Animal Collective album covers and they’ve all been kind of like a mixture of photography or watercolor and just blending a lot of things together. And now I’m just doing that in like a very hands-on cut and paste, like collage kind of thing. I had done something that was a little bit more to me, like straightforward collage with the Times Skiffs album cover. I just wanted it to be something a little bit different. I wanted it to be more imagery, I guess… Like concrete imagery, but also, like a dream. Kind of like a dream image, you know?
Megan: Now I’m curious, which of the animal collective covers did you do?
Avey: Fall Be Kind, Feels, uh, Strawberry Jam-
Megan: Spirit?
Avey: I didn’t do the original Spirit, No. And I didn’t do the new one either. I did some of the inside writing stuff like that. I kind of have the ideas sometimes behind a lot of the covers, like Sung Tongs. I described the image I wanted to Abby. And I don’t really draw, you know, so that’s more illustrations, more her thing. I like her style. So that’s the kind of thing where I’d be like, I want this weird collage kind of illustration of these two animal collective fans that are like dead punks, like, you know, I have this new punk kind. And so that’s where that came from. So yeah, sometimes I just have the ideas, but I can’t put it to paper, you know? So I kind of get somebody that can, same thing with our music videos. Sometimes I’ll have an idea, but I can’t make music videos. I mean, I made a couple, but yeah.
Megan: I remember when I was younger, I saw the music video for Floridada and it put me on my ass. It was crazy. I was like, whoa. I got to give compliments to the chef because Strawberry Jam is one of my favorite covers of all time, so awesome.
Avey: Yeah. I was really into micro-photography at that point in doing a lot of it, like water curses as well. Combined like macro photography and collage textures.
Megan: I love how meaty it looks. It looks like bruised tissue. On I guess a personal note, Animal Collective has been working together for so long. How do you guys maintain a healthy collaboration and not end up in that sort of toxic space that a lot of long-running artists do?
Avey: I think because it’s always been friendship first for us. Yeah. And it’s more like we’re family, we’re brothers, and I think always just realizing that to keep it going. We all need our own space. I think it was really Noah that kind of pushed us in that direction, he’s a person that needs a lot of solo time to be creative. I think he’s a very creative person. I respect him a lot. And so, wanting him to have that space and just not getting caught up in the industry and the need to tour to the end, tour till we can’t do it anymore. We’ll do it for a short amount of time, and then when we feel like we need a break from it. Then we take the break and we’re fortunate that at our label, nobody really minds. The people around us that we work with really respect the way we go about things, so I think we’re very lucky.
Megan: That’s fantastic. And it’s definitely cool to know that you’re doing that because it definitely feels that way. It doesn’t feel like you’re churning out albums just to put them out, they all have very distinct feelings and styles to them, and they all feel like a step in a different direction.
Avey: Yeah. It’s just like when it feels like the right time to make a new AC record at this point, then then we’re all game for it and if we’re not, then don’t.
Megan: Thank you so much for talking with me, I appreciate it! Once again, SCADRadio, this has been Megan Atwell with Avey-Davy-Tare, thank you for listening!
