FloriDada

Album: Painting With (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • This heavily percussive track is full of summery beach imagery and even contains a brief snippet of the Surfaris' 1963 surfing tune "Wipe Out." "It's sort of inspired by hating on people from Florida," Animal Collective's Avey Tare explained to Newsweek. "I was driving in LA and flipping through the radio dial and came across a morning radio show where they're just talking all the time. They had a segment called, like, 'Dumb Things People Are Doing In Florida.' It kind of bothered me."
  • The song is a comment on people's exaggerated responses to a broken world. Animal Collective's Panda Bear explained to Consequence of Sound: "In the long-term, you start to see more measured responses to events, but in the short term, it's always really hyperbole one way or another. I feel like there's very little you can control with this stuff. I'm not going to cry about it. You make the thing, feel good about it, put it out there. There's not much you can do with it beyond that."
  • This features minimalist saxophonist Colin Stetson, who's worked with Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, and Tom Waits. Panda Bear told Uncut: "We were into this idea of using an instrument or a quality of a sound that we hadn't found a way to do so before, in a way that we found pleasing. Saxophones – and wind instruments in general – are something we always found challenging to fit into our music, so it was a fun challenge to do that this time.

    But we're all big fans of Colin and like the way he uses his instrument idiosyncratically. He's a good traditional player, but he also has a unique way of using the instrument.

    We knew we wanted this specific part of the song to feature saxophone, so we ran the part and he set up his saxophones, three or four of them – some of them are really big – and he ripped for an hour. He was looping and playing over it, he did seven or eight layers of stuff. Then we chose bits from that."

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