i heart panda bear

"Take Pills", from Panda Bear's Person Pitch, is a sample and loop-based swirl that fits squarely within the psychedelic-pop sound that his primary group, Animal Collective, is known for. Thick with reverb, dreamy harmonies, and unusual found-sound stimuli, it's a track with all the markings of a "drug song." So why does the mantra of the final section begin with "I don't want for us to take pills anymore?" In a recent interview with Dusted Magazine's Rob Hatch-Miller, Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) clarified:

"That song is pretty explicitly about anti-depressant drugs, not more recreational kinds of drugs. I was on anti-depressants for a while and my mom continues to be on them. Melancholy and depression is kind of a theme in my family. The song is about appreciating what they did for me at the time but wanting to get off of them, and to try not to rely on them if I could. And that's not to say that I think nobody should be on them, like I said they really helped me out for a while. But for me personally I just wanted to try to get on with it, and it's kind of me talking to my mom about trying to get her off of them too. I used to see a psychiatrist and he was like, "You're going to have to be on these drugs for the rest of your life, it's just the chemistry of your brain." That kind of bummed me out, so I really wanted to prove him wrong. He was a nice guy, but he was wrong.

The song, then, acknowledges the utility of prescription medication as a temporary fix, but reflects discomfort with it being a permanent solution, a common obstacle facing people who are recommended to go on antidepressants. As a replacement for pills, Lennox instead recommends a sort of holistic type of advice, to "take one day at a time" and "only one thing at a time," the popular idea that a temporary amount of time on medication is enough to get one's brain chemistry sorted out, and that healthy living can stand in for pharmaceutical treatments.