Deakin

After spending the better part of a year touring behind their popular breakthrough, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective passed on an offer to fly to Africa in January and participate in Mali’s Festival Au Desert. But the band’s Joshua Dibb, or Deakin, had forgone the bulk of the Merriweather touring, so he decided he’d accept the challenge—to assemble a solo repertoire, to raise enough funds to afford the trip, and, after years in one of America’s most popular and acclaimed bands, to make his solo debut.

It’s not that Deakin hadn’t always had his ideas; indeed, he remembers weekends in grade school, when he and Noah Lennox, or Panda Bear, would visit one another and play their separate home recordings. While Panda Bear has since enjoyed solo success, Deakin didn’t consider it so much until late last year.

“When Animal Collective started becoming a more serious thing like 10 years ago, I put that stuff aside because I felt like Noah and Dave [Portner, aka Avey Tare] were such strong songwriters,” he says. “Recording was always a community effort, but their ideas of melody and structure were central.”

Deakin hopes to start releasing solo material early next year, though his plans to develop and document his material fully have been slowed by a half-dozen other projects during Animal Collective’s year off: He and Portner recently worked on new music with Tickley Feather and Prince Rama, and tours behind the Animal Collective film Oddsac and an installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York have kept him traveling. He hopes this upcoming tour, which begins at Hopscotch, will allow him to finally form the songs as he’d like to release them.

“For me, a lot of the ideas I have are amorphous in the way that I play songs, and I’ve moved parts from one song to another,” he says, explaining that the project has been crucial psychologically because it’s given him the space and time to work apart from the band. “I feel like I haven’t reached that point where I know how they all work yet.”

Animal Collective will resume work next year on its new project—or “era,” as Deakin puts it. He has no idea what that might sound like. —Grayson Currin