No More Runnin' by Animal Collective

Album: Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

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Dave "Avey Tare" Portner told Pitchfork Media how the band penned the songs for Merriweather Post Pavilion. He explained: "The songs for us are written in really different ways. There are some songs that I still like [to do] on acoustic guitar or on a piano. 'No More Runnin'' I wrote on the piano. I just wanted it to sound differently. But other songs are written just listening to a sample play over and over again, and just developing the structure that way."
Avey Tare explained to Pitchfork why he wrote this song on a piano: "Around the time of working on this record, I spent a lot of time at our old practice space, which was in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. My wife Kristin and I bought a piano and kept it in that space, and I really like playing the piano a lot. It's probably my favorite acoustic instrument, sound-wise. It was just a matter of me sitting down and writing one piece at a time, basically. Sometimes you sit down with an instrument and songs just come really, really fast, and one like that or 'Bluish,' they came really fast when I picked up the instrument."
Some critics have likened this song's sound to that of a 1970s pop rock band such as Fleetwood Mac. Avey Tare commented to Pitchfork on this: "Noah ('Panda Bear' Lennox), actually, says a lot of my songs remind him of Lindsey Buckingham... I like Fleetwood Mac a lot, in terms of older bands or pop bands, they're one of the greatest. Tusk, Rumors - the Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, that whole lineup has definitely been an influence on me. I wrote an e-mail to the dudes when I sent a demo of 'No More Runnin' to them that I saw it as this beach-side or lagoon - we talked about lagoons a lot when we were making the record - and just how I saw it as this guy sitting next to this really shallow lagoon with frogs and other things going around him. Just to get this really lagoony, laid-back, hazy feeling going with it, and sad, too."
Dave "Avey Tare" Portner told the French magazine VoxPop: "This is the song that we have changed the least in the studio. We tried many things, but that did nothing to the original version. We left it almost unchanged, keeping it slow and mellow."

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