Animal Collective’s ‘My Girls’ and the 2008 financial crash

I don't mean to seem like I care about material things/ Like a social status

On a fresh winter Mississippi morning toward the end of February 2008, Noah Lennox had locked himself inside an old gas‑station‑cum‑woodshop recording studio in the small town of Oxford. He was working on Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album that would shake up the indie-pop scene for the next decade to come, and he wouldn’t leave until it was done.

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away in the world’s financial centre of New York City, the US Federal Reserve was concocting a plan to inject $236bn into the American banking system, in a desperate bid to halt an unraveling of the global banking network, soon to leave an indelible mark for national economies and far-reaching social consequences to this day.

The meltdown of the surety in the American housing market which triggered this banking crisis would see trillions of dollars lost, legacy banking giant Lehman Brothers go broke, and more than a million people plunged into “deep poverty” almost overnight in the United States. It would come to be known as the “Great Recession”, marking the most severe global recession since the 1929 Wall Street crash.

In a time defined by the rise of Facebook, the launch of the first iPhone and emerging meme culture, Lennox - still boxed in that recording studio as one quarter of the experimental sound navigating music group Animal Collective - had just finished recording a song for the album which for many people would come to exemplify the devastating impact of the financial crash. 

My Girls was named the best song of 2009 by a handful of respected music mags for its layering of psych-pop drenched synths and fractured structure, melding indie with its burgeoning electro-pop partner. There is euphoria, mystery (especially in the sampling of the planetary sound of Saturn for the song’s intro), and a feeling of belonging in the syncopated rhythms and rising synths.

But importantly, the lyrics came to define what millions of Americans were desperate for as the Great Recession began to bite and they increasingly failed to meet mortgage payments: “four walls” to call home - a sense of security and safety for families to abide by the American Dream. 

… With a little girl, and by my spouse/

I only want a proper house

Four years before the American housing market collapsed, Lennox shared the news that his father had passed away from brain cancer. The ordeal is sonically expressed in an album of his solo work as Panda Bear. Young Prayer’s songs are title-less, and almost lyric-less, as Lennox’s vocals float, reverberate and eventually escape the ether - an audible processing of grief recorded in the house where his father died, while he was dying. Lennox told culture mag The Wire, “I wanted to be like, ‘it’s been really good hanging out and learning from you, you’ve been a really good man and set a good example”.

Back in that compact recording studio in 2008, Lennox channeled those motifs into My Girls, swearing on his “father’s grave” he will “provide” for his own, as he contemplated a life with his own family, a wife and daughter - his girls. After a lengthy synth build-up, Lennox is heard intoning that there “isn’t much” he feels he needs, chiming with his later cry of not caring about “material things”. Here Lennox laid the groundwork for millions of people in the States who would feel the same way, impacted by a recession that saw 8.8 million jobs lost and more than three million homes in forfeiture in just two years. 

Much of the pop scene elsewhere served to distract the nation from the ongoing financial crisis. The number one songs in 2009 and 2010, as the effects of the recession became highly visible to those outside of Wall Street, saw heightened BPMs and themes of hedonism mixed with attempts to blissfully ignore the biggest squeeze on household finances for 80 years. Just Dance by Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling and Boom Boom Pow, and Kesha’s Tik Tok spent 34 out of 52 weeks holding the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.

My Girls, on the other hand, resonated more thoughtfully with listeners and without knowing it, Lennox was yearning for a simple life that those impacted by generational inequality also came to yearn for. Bad luck to be born on the wrong side of Reaganism and rampant banking malpractice, the nation responded to Animal Collective’s harken back to simpler times, when housing costs represented a sane percentage of one’s income. 

The song dominated the indie airwaves in 2009 and helped Merriweather Post Pavilion reach No. 2 on the US Top Independent Albums charts, its popularity zoning in on the American experience at the time. The resonant lyrics, ‘with a little girl, and by my spouse, I only want a proper house’, would come to define a generation. 

… I don't care for fancy things/

Or to take part in the freshest wave

Blinking in the California morning sunlight, Novella Carpenter launched another bucket of slop for the pigs she was rearing in an abandoned concrete garden, in the middle of Oakland, in the middle of 2009. 

She and her boyfriend were squatting in an apartment they had found on a derelict parcel of land on the west side of the city, an area that came to be known as Ghost Town. Fed up with the trappings of modern life and its rampant consumerism, they had made a vow to grow their own food, rear their own livestock and live their own way, even in one of the state’s largest cities. 

Carpenter’s experiences in urban farming are documented in her bestselling book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, which details the tribulations of DIY farming in an urban landscape. During the recession it boomed, selling tens of thousands of copies showing that Carpenter was not alone in seeking a simpler life - people wanted to switch off from the society that produced mass excess and a housing crisis created by wealthy bankers.

“We would go dumpster diving,” Carpenter said. “And especially in the fancier neighbourhoods it was just crazy. The excesses, what we would find. We'd find these whole pizzas, one time we found an entire dumpster full of peaches.”

In the days before the recession, Carpenter remembers the economy being in a good place. Her temperature check for the state of the nation’s finances? Availability of vegetable oil in nearby dumpsters. She and her boyfriend had been making their own “biodiesel” from dumpster dive findings, running their car on the leftover vegetable oil from restaurants and supermarkets.

“It was like, if the oil dumpsters were full, the economy is doing really good,” she said. “People can afford to buy oil and change the oil bins often. So we would always have the better oil during these good times.”

But some time in 2008, the oil in the dumpsters started to run out, and in 2009, Carpenters book hit the shelves.

“I remember my publisher was like, ‘oh, this is such a cute book. It's zany and wild’. And then the recession hit and all of a sudden it wasn't cute, people were using it as a guide or a tool for survival.

“For me, it felt like free falling. You just saw the system break. And in America, it was like watching Hurricane Katrina, you're like ‘yeah, help isn't really on its way’. And so people had that sense of ‘oh, I better do it myself’.” 

Carpenter says herself that her book would not have done as well if it were not for the recession. The “simplicity movement” - which has surged again in popularity in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic - is an attempt to reach back in time and hold something physical - like our forebears did - in the age of the digital. It accesses a desire to shed the greed and consumerism that encouraged the financial crash in 2008. People wanted to be self-reliant once more and step back from a system they could not control.

Lennox’s final, memorable, and iconic verse in My Girls lays this out for all to see:

I don't mean to seem like I care about material things

Like a social status

I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls (ahoo)

Its repetition amplifies its significance - it is the true essence of the song - and its meaning is ancient, present, and prescient, as we venture forth into the unknown digital landscape disconnecting us from the roots we have laid down for millennia.

… ‘Did You See The Words?’

Matthew Murphy was 19 when Merriweather Post Pavilion hit the charts in January 2009. He was also homeless. Just after graduating from high school, Murphy was sleeping in the back of his car in Nashville, Tennessee, or at a friend's house when he could. The teenager was making the best of a bad situation in the wake of his parents' separation that had left him without a permanent home. 

Though his homelessness was not a result of the financial crash and subsequent mass home foreclosures, Murphy was still, without realising it, sharing the same experience as an increasing number of Americans.

“I was having family troubles at the time,” he said. “Getting kicked out of my parent’s house was a depressing period of my life. And a track like My Girls had a kind of positive vibe. 

“He's saying in the song, ‘I don't really care about anything, just give me my family and a home to live in and I can be happy’, right? And so I think for me at the time, I would say that I didn't relate it specifically to family, but the home perhaps would have resonated a lot more - just give me a place to be.”

Murphy wouldn’t hear the album until the latter half of 2009, in the midst of an acid trip. It was the first time he had heard Animal Collective and it would come to shape his musical interests in the years that followed. As a self-proclaimed “full bore Animal Collective kind of psychopath”, Murphy’s introduction to the band was probably not dissimilar to lots of its fans.

“I remember we watched a movie and the movie was over,” says Murphy. “And we're like, we're pretty high up. And I go to the bathroom, and I come out, and my friend is sitting on the bed, and he's just got his headphones on listening to music. 

“I'm thinking ‘that's kind of weird, we were just talking a minute ago. Now he's just gone to listen to music on his own’. So I was like, ‘hey man, like, what are you listening to?’

“And he responded with ‘did you see the words?’. And it's like, ok, well, I'm high on acid? What does that mean? 

“And he’s like, ‘did you see the words?’ And I'm like, I don't understand. And he gives me the headphones and that's essentially the moment where I became an instant fan of the band and their music. I remember thinking ‘it's crazy man, these guys are next level’. I really thought it was very profound work.”

Did You See The Words is the opening track on Animal Collective’s sixth album Feels and its title was a funny mid-trip misunderstanding - not just in the vivid, hallucinated imagination of Murphy’s friend. Feels came two albums before Merriweather Post Pavilion and is similar in its vergence towards janky, discordant, and euphoric chords. Appropriate for LSD experimentation, you might say, especially given the bands’ noted psychedelic experiments while making their music.

Murphy said he wasn’t really able to process what was going on in his life at this time until a few years later, but his memories of the time are music-centric. And the influence that Merriweather Post Pavilion had on the indie-pop scene was seen in the emergence of other big acts at the time, like Grizzly Bear or The Dirty Projectors.

He eventually made his way to college in British Columbia nine years ago and has been there ever since, recently he opened a pizza parlour in Kelowna. After his father passed away a few years ago he returned to Lennox’s reflections on family passing - in the shape of Panda Bear and Animal Collective - to help him through the tough time. He says he took from it the mantra that “tomorrow's another day”. 

“Just learn to be happy and express yourself,” he said. “Take what he taught you and learn to grow.”

… I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls (ahoo)

Lennox and the three other members of Animal Collective, Dave Portner, Brian Weitz, and Josh Dibb, grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where they met at high school in the mid-1990’s. The spike in foreclosures that had enveloped swathes of the United States took some time to set in there. But when it hit, it hit hard. 

It was not long until Baltimore became one of the cities synonymous with the housing crisis, as foreclosure filings in the city increased by more than 38 percent to 6,200 between 2008 and 2009, according to the University of Baltimore’s Neighborhood Indicators Alliance research. Novella Carpenter’s book tour took her across the whole country, she said by far the biggest turnout was in Baltimore.

But the city garnered notoriety for other reasons -  it became the first to successfully sue Wells Fargo, one of the banking giants at the centre of the national mortgage collapse, for discriminating against African-American and Hispanic borrowers by steering them into high-cost, subprime mortgage loans - the very essence of the crash. When the foreclosure crisis struck, Black and Latino borrowers were disproportionately affected.

Two whistleblowers who worked for the bank admitted its strategy of targeting minority communities who would be more likely to accept high risk loans, stating in sworn affidavits that employees had referred to Black people as “mud people”, and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

In July 2012, the city of Baltimore announced it had reached a settlement with Wells Fargo, to the tune of $175 million in compensation for minorities that had been stung by the banking scandal. More than 1,000 Baltimoreans were each set to receive average compensations of $15,000, according to the Justice Department.

Much like the bubbling onset and long delay until you feel the reward in My Girls (some argue it doesn’t really drop until the 3.16 mark), American homeowners had to wait some time before theirs. It may not have been pretty, but some banks at least did have to pay for their greed and malpractice. US banks have paid more than $36 billion in civil penalties for their conduct related to the 2008 financial crash. A drop in the ocean, really, compared to the damage caused and depth of financial resources available, but if there is any moment in the financial crash that can be compared to the emphatic “ahoo” that heralds the song's remaining euphoria, at that 3.16 mark, it is this. After years of struggle some citizens did receive just recompense.

Lennox himself has said My Girls was not intended as a recession commentary song, nor could it have been given the recording took place before the truly seismic shock waves were felt, but the sentiment of “four walls and adobe slabs for my girls” is one that he says was “more pertinent” during the grips of the crisis. And peeking just ahead of its time at a landscape littered with social media apps and convenience innovations minimising human to human interaction, the song tacks with those who are less happy to walk the path capitalism has laid down for us. My Girls remains the band’s most popular song by far, amassing more than 55 million listens on Spotify as of April this year. 

Adobe slabs are the one of the oldest known forms of housebuilding, made from mud and earth, they can be traced back to more than 7,000 years ago making Lennox’s desires not only pertinent in the time and place of the 2008 financial crash, but also, completely timeless.