For the past 17 years I’ve struggled to find an album that hits me harder than Merriweather Post Pavilion. I assumed every music fan must feel the same, until I played it for one of my closest friends and he just didn’t connect with it. His explanation was simple: “You like it because you’re romantic.” He was right, about me and about the album. This record has always felt like a place I return to, something soft and glowing and full of meaning, long after the blog-era noise around it faded.
The album art seems to sway and flow as your eyes move across it, an illusion crafted by Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka, whose series of motion illusions use repeating shapes and subtle contrasts to make a flat image appear alive.
I assure you this is a still image:
That repetition mirrors the music beautifully: Merriweather is built from loops and layered samples that circle back on themselves, patterns repeating until they feel less like production tricks and more like tides. What Kitaoka achieves visually, motion conjured from stillness, the band achieves sonically, letting small, simple elements swell, overlap, and ripple forward as each track drifts into the next dreamy vignette. Each song seems to unfold into two or three different layers of moments.
At its core, this is a romantic album: a glowing ode to love, family, routine, and even death.
Finding Love
If Merriweather Post Pavilion is a romantic album, its romance doesn’t begin with certainty, it begins with longing. “In the Flowers” is the feeling of being away from the person who softens the world and makes it breathable. When the album came out, that idea was becoming very real to me. As my wife entered the early stages of her battle with complex regional pain syndrome, the frustration and longing became painfully literal.
The song’s fantasy, leaving your body for a night, wasn’t just Avey Tare imagining an ecstatic reunion after time apart. For me, it became a wish that she could escape a body that had suddenly turned hostile. While the song speaks about missing someone and wanting to dissolve the distance between them, I found myself wishing I could dissolve her pain, even for a moment. I don't think I could imagine an entire night. It seems so long ago now, but in the middle of such an extreme crisis minutes feel like weeks. My longing wasn’t just to be with her, but to find some impossible way to lift the weight she didn’t deserve to carry.
That first half of the track, quiet and suspended, felt like the waiting room of our life at the time, holding time still, bracing. And then the explosion hits: that sudden burst of sound where everything leaps into motion. The music breaks free and I fully embrace it every time, letting my emotions go with it, sometimes bringing me to tears. The song became less about my own desire and more about hers: a longing not for closeness, but for relief. It captures how longing can swell into an almost unbearable frustration, and how that weight can finally break into something like joy, hopefully “in time,” just as the song promises.
After the longing of “In the Flowers,” “Bluish” is the moment love steps closer, soft-focus and slow-breath, impossibly tender. In the album’s romantic arc, “Bluish” is the first moment of true closeness. If “In the Flowers” is distance and dreaming, “Bluish” is the world returning to touch, quiet, physical, unmistakably intimate. It is the sexiest song on the album, not because it tries to be, but because it doesn’t. Its sensuality comes from suggestion, from the tiny gestures that say more than grand declarations ever could. It is that “catching an ankle in 1805” kind of sexy, an intimacy born from noticing, not from display.
Avey Tare sings as if he’s tracing a lover’s outline in the dark, voice lowered, edges softened. The lyrics linger on tiny details, the private observations you only make when you know someone deeply. There is something deeply intimate, and quietly thrilling, about those images meant for one person alone. It is effortless for me to fall into that feeling, to slip into that private glow while dreaming about my wife.
What makes “Bluish” especially potent is how traditional its appeal is beneath the psychedelic haze. Remove the filters and textures and what remains is a classic love song, a simple and old-fashioned celebration of affection and closeness. Its romance is the kind built in quiet moments, in the shared space between two people who already understand each other’s gravity. It is the opposite of spectacle. It is courtship rendered as lying alone together in your apartment.
And in this way, “Bluish” acts as the emotional hinge for the album’s first arc of romantic love. “In the Flowers” dreams of closeness from afar. “Summertime Clothes” finds it in motion, two people stepping into the humid night because being together makes the world feel electric. And “Guys Eyes,” with its honest tug-of-war between instinct and devotion, frames love not just as desire but as choice. “Bluish” is the heart of it all: the moment affection becomes physical presence, steady and intimate.
Family Time
If the first movement of Merriweather Post Pavilion is about romantic love, then the next is about what happens when love expands into a home. For me, that shift became real in 2013, when we welcomed our daughter into the world. “My Girls” had always been a beautiful song, but once I held my child for the first time it became something else entirely. As I looked into her face, something fundamental in me rearranged. I stopped caring about my own success and felt, with a clarity I didn’t know was possible, that my purpose had changed. From that moment on, I didn’t need anything for myself. I only needed to provide for her success, for their success.
That quiet but seismic reorientation is exactly what “My Girls” captures. Panda Bear’s insistence that he doesn’t care about material things, that he wants only “four walls and adobe slats” for the people he loves, isn’t a rejection of ambition. It is the realization that ambition itself transforms once you have someone depending on you. The song isn’t about having less; it is about wanting differently. It is about the fierce, overwhelming instinct to build a life sturdy enough for others to thrive inside it. And it is such a banger sonically that Beyoncé sampled it for the song “6 Inch” on her album Lemonade.
Merriweather grows up alongside the listener. The romance doesn’t disappear, it matures. Love becomes responsibility, tenderness becomes provision, and the dream of closeness becomes the reality of creating a world where your family can feel safe and whole.
That evolution becomes especially clear in “No More Runnin.” This song highlights that turning point, the moment where the uncertainty of early love finally settles. The questions, the hesitation, the wondering if you’re choosing the right person — by this point in the album, all of that has softened. We have reached the moment of getting what we were “hoping for,” echoing the song’s own refrain. It is the stability that allows the next phase of life to truly begin.
That is the beautiful trick of this album: even the most ordinary parts of family life take on a kind of glow. Animal Collective can make something as simple as getting a child ready for school feel like its own tiny hymn. You hear it in “Daily Routine,” where exhaustion and devotion blur into one, and again in “Brother Sport,” where love becomes loud encouragement, a push toward healing. Family life isn’t just a theme on this record. It is a whole emotional landscape, and the band walks across it with the same wonder they once reserved for dreams.
Anxiety and the Edges of Love
As Merriweather Post Pavilion moves further into adulthood, romance takes on new shapes. It is no longer only touch and tenderness or even the instinct to protect a growing family. Romance becomes something quieter and harder to name: the willingness to stay open in the presence of fear.
“Also Frightened” is the album’s first true tremor of anxiety, a question whispered as both confession and reassurance. It is the kind of question we have all felt rising in our throats as we step into marriage, parenting, even the shadow of death. “Are you also frightened?” The beauty of that line is its vulnerability. Fear becomes romantic not because it is dramatic, but because it is shared. Romance in this phase of the album means admitting you’re scared and trusting someone enough to ask if they feel it too.
Death flickers at the edge of this record, not as darkness for its own sake but as the shadow that gives devotion its weight. Part of the emotional force behind “My Girls” comes from loss. Panda Bear’s father had passed not long before the album’s creation. Understanding that context deepens the urgency of wanting to provide, to build a life sturdy enough for the people you love.
That thread of unease continues in “Lion in a Coma,” where the restless mind wrestles with instinct, expectation, and identity. The song feels like pacing while hinting at unconsciousness. And while the title is certainly a play on lying in a coma, it is also a symbolic image to think of such a large animal disarmed and asleep. disarmed and asleep. The delirium is so strong that even the king of the jungle is tamed. Yet even here, romance persists. The struggle itself becomes a sign of commitment, the recognition that love asks you to confront the parts of yourself that resist being known. Anxiety is not a rupture in the album's romantic arc. It is proof of its depth. Only relationships that matter make us feel this exposed.
Together, these songs show that love is not simply tenderness or devotion. It is the courage to face fear, grief, confusion, the quiet panic of being human, and to do so without turning away from the people who hold you steady.