Long before he found his own Animal Collective, Panda Bear was just another middle child living in Maryland.

My mother’s side of my family is definitely full of Baltimore people. If you go way back, then they were originally German immigrants and, apparently, my mother’s grandmother was a social climber who lived in a suburb called Catonsville. She spoke German, but I’m told that they always wanted to hide that fact because it was looked down on at the time. I can remember being really young and going out to my grandparents’ house, the same house my mom grew up in. My grandfather, Albert, was an engineer and my grandmother was a housewife; they were both pretty religious Catholics. We called my grandmother Grey—just one of those funny grandparent names.

My father’s side of my family was from Frostburg and, whereas my mother’s side seemed to be from a more mixed ethnicity, my father’s relatives were straight-ahead Scots, fresh off the boat. Frostburg is a really small town in Western Maryland, up in the mountains close to Virginia. It always seemed like a sad town to me. There’s not much going on. My father was super poor growing up; his father worked in a tire factory and my grandmother, Belle, was also a housewife.

My father is an only child, and my mother has a sister, Barbara, who lives in New York on the Upper West Side. Apparently, she was a tough kid. I heard she beat up some kid in high school, but not in a bully sort of way.

My father’s parents were also religious so it is curious that neither of my parents kept in that tradition—they sort of splintered off—and I wasn’t raised under a religious umbrella.

My parents met in therapy, and I have an older brother and an a younger sister. My brother, Matt, is a tennis pro; he was always an athlete. He dabbled in a whole bunch of different sports and settled on tennis, though he sometimes wishes he had focused on tennis at an earlier age. Competitively, it seems that if you’re not obsessed with something from an early age, then it’s hard to keep up with others who have always followed that path. He still competes, but his livelihood comes more from teaching rather than competition.

My younger sister, Allison, is certainly the smartest of the three of us. She always felt older than my brother and I; she was working in book publishing for a while, then had kids and took some time off. She’s also my closest ally—the closet to my side of the tracks in the family. I was the one that everybody worried about all the time—maybe they still do—but she was never worried. I’ve always felt like the weirdo in my family.

My mother was always into ballet—The Nutcracker and Giselle are her favorites—but there wasn’t a whole lot of music playing at home besides that. However, my father would play Top 40 ‘80s hits in the car when he would drive me to school, so my earliest music memories are one of those two flavors. I’m not the type of person who listens to music in the background a whole lot. When I listen to something, I stare at it with my ears. That’s a habit I got from my parents. When my mother would put on music, it was deliberate—I’m just gonna sit down and experience this thing.

My parents were both lone wolves—solitary, isolated people—and certainly not the most social beings. I recognize those tendencies in myself; I’m pretty comfortable being alone. But also, I feel like it’s not the healthiest way to be—to cut yourself off all the time. I’d wager that’s why I appreciate living in a city so much. There are all of these forced interactions during the day. I would be a little bit worried about myself if I lived in a remote location; I wouldn’t really talk to anybody, which doesn’t seem particularly healthy to me. Growing up in my household, “solitary” was kind of the norm; I had to first realize the value of a community, before trying to cultivate one of my own. And, I’ve been super lucky to have found certain people—most importantly, the guys in the band and people I’ve met through them. That’s how I’ve cultivated my social circle, and a lot of that has been by happenstance. I’m not great at making friends, and I’m grateful that these people have serendipitously come through my life.

My son is eight years old and, especially with what’s going on with politics in the U.S., he might have a skewed perspective on the States since we live in Lisbon. So, I try to talk as honestly as possible about my experiences—the people I’ve met and things I’ve noticed. I try to give him some perspective that feels a bit more real and more fully representative than what the media feeds to younger people these days.

Animal Collective co-founder Noah Lennox, who records as Panda Bear, released his sixth solo album, Buoys, in February via Domino. He currently resides in Lisbon, Portugal.

This article originally appears in the April/May 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.



