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 Tao Nguyen.
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 Bay 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.
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 Astatke.
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 Dolphin.
The vocal line mimics the saxophone.
I'd made demos in my practice space in Lisbon, Portugal, where I live,
just going through the song and making little adjustments to it and going 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.