In a lot of African music, the singers are just singing whatever they feel at the time - because the instrumentation is repetitive, they can come and go as they please. That's how we approach it. Not verse-chorus-verse.

I just had a really crappy time in school and I spent a lot of time writing songs and not doing work. I started talking to Noah - Panda Bear - about recording a really solid album, spending a lot of time on it to get it to sound exactly the way we wanted it to.

The melody and the structure of a song always comes first for me, so the emotions behind it can sometimes be a challenge: What am I feeling about this song? Where did the melody come from? I want it to be heartfelt.

Things have changed. The suburbs are developed, but other parts, like where we recorded Spirit and Danse Manatee are still woodland and farmland.

I didn't really know why I wanted to go to college. I didn't really have a reason to go there other than the fact that everybody else was doing it.

We're all living in different states and we all have different systems within those states. Even on the most basic personal level, it affects me.

I think we stumbled onto our own sort of lore back in high school. We weren't with the drinkers, we were more the psychedelic warriors. We sat around watching horror films.