Stop Daydreaming, Dude

Animal Collective “What Would I Want? Sky”

The first three minutes of “What Would I Want? Sky” is a clattering big-beat reverie that simulates the feeling of drifting off into thought while the world is a busy mess all around you. The second half of the song reckons with that state, with Avey Tare questioning his emotions and attempting to snap himself out of a melancholy haze. It’s not a song about sadness, though — it’s about attention and awareness, and a desire for focused thought in a head full of distractions. The shift from one section to the next doesn’t usher in a sense of clarity, but the song takes on a firmer shape while retaining an ethereal density. The vocal arrangement mirrors the lyrical content nicely, as Avey’s confident, straightforward performance cuts through a Grateful Dead sample that seems to scroll through the track on a horizontal line and a harmony part from Panda Bear that gently floats upward on vertical trajectory. The unlikely harmony seems to be part of the point: It’s extremely difficult to get our minds to be entirely focused, but we can at least try to keep our thoughts balanced, and to have them work together rather than dissolve into a distracting cacophony of emotions, concepts, and digressions.

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