Young Prayer is the second solo album released by Animal Collective member Noah Lennox (stage name Panda Bear.) The album was a critical success, even being labeled "Best New Music" by Pitchfork. Notably, none of the songs on the album has a title because Lennox wanted the album to be "one nugget of sound. I put the track markers in there just to separate the sections."
The songs were all written around the time of the death of Lennox' father. About this fact, Lennox said:
| “ | It was more a gift to my father when he was sick and I wanted to make him happy if I could and I wanted to cheer him up and I wanted to tell him that he’d done really great in his time. I was pretty fucked up but I wanted to keep going and I wanted to have strength and I suppose that comes out in the recording. I wouldn’t say it was therapeutic though, at least I never thought of it that way. | ” |
In another Interview, Lennox got into detail about this:
| “ | he did get to hear the roughs of the album’s songs, if not the finished version. That was recorded in the room he actually died in, so it was especially intense. With Young Prayer, I wanted to tell him that he had taught me really well. 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’. | ” |
The whole album was written in a very quick process and recorded with Animal Collective member Deakin in "two or three days or something."
According to the artist, it "is very classically influenced. All the weird baroque flourishes and stuff in terms of the way I’m singing. And that was definitely intentional, I set out to do something that sounded like that."
The album was produced and mixed entirely without Lennox by Rusty Santos and the rest of Animal Collective. Though it was changed quite a bit during the post-production, Lennox was "very happy with the way it sounded" when he received the result.
Read more about Young Prayer: Track Listing
Famous quotes containing the words young and/or prayer:
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive.”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 21:22.