Mike Alfieri (Tomato Flower) and Panda Bear Are the Glue That Glob It All Together

Mike Alfieri is the drummer for the Baltimore-based experimental pop band Tomato Flower; Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, is a member of Animal Collective. Tomato Flower toured with Animal Collective back in 2022, and now that their new record, No, is out (via Ramp Local) Mike and Noah got on a call to catch up about it, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Mike Alfieri: I wanted to talk about all this material that’s now coming out, because our record is out, and Time Skiffs and Isn’t It Now have had some time to live in the real world. When Tomato Flower got to open for you guys, this was what we were dealing with, so I just wanted to look back and talk about what went into all that.

Noah Lennox: Well, first off: congratulations on your record coming out. It sounds awesome, and it was cool to hear those songs again after not hearing them for a bit. Brought back cool memories from being on that tour. As far as those two records, it definitely was a long time coming. I feel like all those songs we were playing more than any other group of songs. It didn’t help that we had so much material — it made it hard to move on, just because there was so much to get down in the studio. And the pandemic obviously was kind of wedged in between the two, and definitely prolonged the whole experience. I think right before the pandemic hit in the States, we were trying to nail down a studio to go to. What wound up being laid across the two records, the original plan was to record all of that at the same time with Russell Elevado, who eventually did the Isn’t It Now stuff. 

But yeah, it just felt like a long time coming. For me drumming, it was sort of a different approach to the instrument. I kind of made a concerted effort to try to play in a different way. Not necessarily a new way for the world, but a new way for me, a style I hadn’t really done before.

Mike: Yeah. This was like a conventional way of playing the drum set, which I guess people hadn’t really seen you do before. It’s interesting to me — on Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, you were playing a drum set then, weren’t you?

Noah: Yeah, yeah. I guess the more recent stuff, in terms of drumming, is a bit full circle for me. In high school, I first started playing drums because my brother had a kit and I would kind of steal time on that when he wasn’t around. Eventually, as I got a little older, he was more OK with me sitting down at his kit and playing it. So I really learned on his kit — I’m not sure I even had a kit when we were doing Spirit They’re Gone. Maybe we did, I can’t really remember. But I would practice a lot to a metronome, which I think helped me as far as keeping time — which has been really useful for me, especially for something like Time Skiffs, where we were tracking remotely. We weren’t in the same room, so everything had to be put down to a click, and then I had to play to that. 

But can you tell me a little bit about how you got into the instrument? Because you seem to have a real studied technique. You’re way better than me.

Mike: Well, I definitely studied. I went to school for for music. But I started kind of in the same situation — my family is very involved in music, and I had a cousin that had a drum set in their basement. I really did just follow a path through school of like, when it was time to pick an instrument, I picked the drums. I did marching band and drum corps and jazz band and everything that I could do in school, and that took me through that kind of academic direction. I ended up studying jazz, and that was a really great experience. I got to study with John Riley, who was a really great teacher — and anybody who’s really involved with jazz might know his name, because he wrote this book The Art of Bop Drumming. 

That was my formative training, but I was playing in bands this entire time — I was in a lot of punk and hardcore bands through high school, and played in a ton of cover bands. When I was done with college and eventually moved to Baltimore, I fell into a real creative music scene here. And then Tomato Flower started.

Noah: That’s cool. Have you ever played in a jazz group?

Mike: Oh, yeah, a ton. I kind of glossed over that. I played a lot of original music. When I was living in New York City — that was around 2015, 2017, when I was doing my master’s — it was, like, intensive jazz world. It was like going to jam sessions at 3 in the morning and writing a lot of music, playing in a whole different bunch of bands, and then exploring a lot of free improv and experimental stuff. And there were some musicians on Long Island who had played with Cecil Taylor, so I got to play with them a little bit. It was a gig at an Italian restaurant — very Long island —  just doing standards. We lost the gig, like, immediately. [Laughs.] We were playing, I think, “My Funny Valentine,” and it was just getting too crazy. He ended up hiring an accordion player to do it instead.

Noah: Well, what does he know?

Mike: He needed to sell meatballs or something.

Noah: Gotta do what you gotta do, I guess. When you were starting out as a drummer, who were your inspirations?

Mike: I really liked Steve Gadd. Steve Gadd was number one. What about you? 

Noah: Probably Stewart Copeland in the very beginning. I was a real big fan of the Police, and just top 40 radio at the time was my whole world. I didn’t really know about anything that wasn’t shoved in my face by the radio until my mid-teens or so. And then a friend of mine who I worked at a bagel place with, she would make me tapes of stuff, and that opened up a whole world of different types of music. I remember the first tape she gave me, there was a couple Sun City Girls tracks on there, so Charles Gocher became a drummer that I thought was really cool. I never thought I’d be able to play like that, but I definitely liked the style. He had sort of a hodgepodge approach. He obviously technically was really good, but he could do free stuff, he could do kind of groove stuff. I just thought it was cool, the flexibility that he had and how he’d tailor what he was playing to whatever the the group was doing — because they did all kinds of different stuff as well. 

More recently, there was a period where we started playing with bands like Lightning Bolt, and probably played a festival or two with Deerhoof. Those guys I was always really impressed by. When I saw those guys, that was another moment where I was like, “I’m not going to be able to do that.” Just the physicality of it, I didn’t feel like I had the body to to do it or the strength. So it was trying to figure out what my approach was going to be. What I really wanted to do was try to find new rhythms or new ways of playing the drums that were different from stuff that I was hearing. I wanted to add something to the conversation if I could. That grew into really trying to do whatever the song needed, and that I feel like that became my thing — “what’s the perfect rhythm arrangement for this piece of music?” I feel like technically, I’m sort of limited, but I tried to focus on arrangement, and more recently on the sound of how I strike the drums — which is something I never thought about before. I was always kind of hammering away, and perhaps it was more about energy at first, trying to translate a sort of energy into the song. But more recently, I saw Anderson. Paak do one of those Tiny Desks, and you can really see how he’s playing. The way he would play on the hi-hat, I was just so taken by it. I thought it was so cool and so mechanical. So I went on kind of a mission to learn how to play like that. Really light, but almost robotic. And that led me to the Moeller technique.

Mike: Like the whipping motion kind of thing.

Noah: Yeah, yeah. Because I couldn’t really do that before. And then a bunch of the James Brown drummers like Clyde Stubblefield — everything online that I could see of him playing, I would try to figure that out and play like that.  Do you know the band Khruangbin?

Mike: Yeah. 

Noah: That drummer is really awesome. I like his style a lot.

Mike: Yeah, he plays solid, just in the pocket.

Noah: It’s very understated, but I think it’s really hard to play like that.

Mike: Yeah, to play with a lot of restraint is difficult, I think.

Noah: I mean, I want us to be able to play where you could just set up one microphone or two. I felt like trying to capture a good drum sound was more about how I was playing it than how it was being recorded — that sort of became a shift for me.

Mike: I think that is really a vintage style of playing, where you didn’t have all the recording technology — you didn’t have Pro Tools or Logic to compress everything. It was just one microphone in a room, the sound of the drums is what you’re going to get on the final take.

Noah: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: But I would give you a lot of credit for technique, because I think that’s the definition — just getting the sound out of your head. Like if you have a particular vision and you’re working on how to get that out, that is your technique. I was curious about how you develop that. Did you sit down just have deliberate practice time, or were you still composing and writing songs?

Noah: It was really just practice, yeah. I had a recording of “Funky Drummer” and I just would try to play along with that. Or I would have a metronome and slow it down a little bit and just try to get the sound of it right, and then gradually speed it up over time. There was a Jorja Smith performance where the drummer plays something that took me a while to figure out how he was playing it — because the syncopation was just so different than anything I knew how to do. So I felt like if I could figure out how to do this, maybe it’d open some doors for me. So that’s another thing I would practice every day. And then I would listen to a podcast and just sort of hammer away, trying to hit really precisely and at the same kind of velocity and get the same sound, just for 20 minutes at a time or something. So it was just like training. It was really kind of boring and monotonous.

Mike: Was that different from how you prepared for other projects in the past?

Noah: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t really practice in the past. I think it was more of a cerebral exercise than a physical one. Especially because something like reggae drumming, where the rolls of the kick drum and the snare are switched — the kick kind of plays on the beat where in a rock beat the snare would go, and they kind of switch. Earlier AC times, I was really more into trying to do something like that with drums, where I was like, “I want to play anything but a typical rock beat.” I did a lot of kick drum where I felt like a snare would be, and I would try to build or invent beats that use that as sort of the thrust of the thing. I always wanted to put the kick on the snare beat.

Mike: That makes me think about what you were saying before, how the song kind of changed the direction of what you were playing. How does that work as a collaborator? How do you approach different songs from different songwriters in the band? Do you feel there’s different tendencies to do certain rhythms or patterns depending on who brought in an idea?

Noah: Yeah. Perhaps your experience is the same, but whoever wrote the song for us is sort of the captain of the ship. So making them satisfied is the first target. Sometimes there’s stuff that I think is cool, but it’s not fitting their idea of what the song is. So you just gotta fish around and keep moving. Different guys in the band are more or less specific about that kind of stuff. But I feel like you can kind of tell with the energy of the room when you’ve hit the thing, you know? Because everybody just seems kind of locked in suddenly. I feel like that’s when you know you’re at least on the right path of of finding what the song needs. Does it work like that in in your band?

Mike: Yeah, Tomato Flower kind of operates the same way. I have the same goal, to try to make everybody happy, to try to fit all the parts together and emphasize certain things that are happening musically. I also feel like there’s a way of playing that helps everybody else play better, too — like maybe there’s a beat or a groove that sounds cool and or there’s an idea that we’re really excited about, but then it makes playing the song a little bit more difficult. So then having to tailor parts that sound cool and are interesting, but then also, like you’re saying, make the shit move in a smooth sailing way where everybody then can sound better from what they’re playing.

Noah: Yeah, I feel like oftentimes the drumming can be sort of the glue that connects the different parts of the arrangement. If you find the right thing, it sort of globs everything together in a nice way.

Mike: Yeah. And the contrast too, where if there’s a rebellious moment or things are supposed to get a little hectic, there’s a lot there that could introduce chaos. At times in the band, I think that has happened where people were not ready for it and it doesn’t work. But then to be able to write music that then infuses that idea too — that’s a really cool thing that happens, where we’re trying to please other people and figure out everybody else’s intuition to come to the greater good of the song, but they’re also listening to what I’m doing and incorporating that into their songwriting. So it just becomes this amorphous, homogenous world that we’re working in for ourselves.

Noah: That’s what is so cool about playing in a group, that sort of sharing of information. The song sort of hovers in between everybody and it morphs as people kind of chip away at it. It’s like building a statue — a statue of sound together. That’s really corny, but you know what I’m talking about.

Mike: That’s a great image for that. So in that sense, do you view your role in Animal Collective as the drummer? Or how would you define what your role is?

Noah: I think I am the drummer, sort of by default. Bass playing, whether it’s the synth bass or more recently the bass guitar, a bunch of us have played that role before. Writing songs, a bunch of us do that; singing, a bunch of us do that. But typically drums, I’m the only one who does it. So I’d say by default, I suppose, I’m the drummer of the band. But everybody does a bunch of different things. Maybe Brian [Weitz, aka Geologist] is perhaps the most rooted in one thing, insofar as he’s kind of like the sound guy, or the more textural part of the thing often. But otherwise I feel like we all flip around a bunch. Brian had this Taurus bass pedal thing, so he was kind of the bass player for a while as well. So we do switch around a bunch, but drumming seems to be my thing exclusively, for better or for worse.

Mike: Talking about influences: how do you feel about yourself being an influence? How does that resonate with what your output has become?

Noah: I don’t know. I mean, it’s nice when I talk to somebody and they seem inspired by something we’ve done. But I guess I try not to think about it too much beyond that. But in the same way that I feel like it’s cool playing in a band because you get this sharing of stuff, I feel like anybody who’s making music, we’re all contributing to this sort of global wave. I don’t think you just invent something out of nowhere. So the idea that I’m part of this wave of stuff is cool. I’d like to think I’m part of something that’s shared by a lot of people.

Mike: Yeah, there’s a lot of sharing. But you’ve invented something that’s been pretty unique, that has caught on, right? There are people who play a certain way because you played it, and you were looking for something.

Noah: I’m not sure that’s true. I remember somebody being like, “Oh, that person’s playing at a stand up kit,” but I wasn’t the first one to do that. 

Mike: Well, I’ll say that there’s a lot of parts on the Tomato Flower record that I am deliberately using you as a reference. And it felt like it was happening because, at that point in time, it was that energy for the song — it was a collective reference for everybody in the band. The rim clicks on “Do It” felt like “Genie’s Open” or “Prester John” or something. I was hearing those songs and I was like, Oh, that’s a great idea. 

Noah: That’s cool.

Mike: Even “Saint,” the groove I kind of think of in the same way as “Dragon Slayer,” but a little sped up.

Noah: But at the same time, having listened to those a bunch, even though you say there’s an influence, it definitely feels like your own thing. You know what I mean? It definitely feels very singular to you and the rest of your group to me.

Mike: I guess that’s part of the magic in the perception of it. Because if I’m playing something, my mindset about what I’m doing is going to be way different from the audience. So that means a lot if you are experiencing that. That’s very cool.

Noah: Yeah, for sure. That’s why I think trying to guess what the audience is going to get into is just a useless enterprise, because, like you said, the way people perceive things is just so wildly different. I feel like there’s so many other things that come into play when somebody is listening to a piece of music. That’s why I feel like it’s important when you’re mixing to listen in as many different types of atmospheres with different speakers and different setups and different rooms — there’s so many variables to it… I’m sort of losing the thread, but it’s all just to say, I feel like it’s worthless to try to guess what somebody’s going to think of the thing that you’re making. The only gauge you have is if you feel excited about it or not. And if you are, then let it rip. That’s kind of my mentality with it.