Secondhands is a column that examines music of the past through a modern lens.

I first heard Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs on an IBM Thinkpad issued by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’d liked their first two albums and loved their third, a chaotic live-in-the-studio set called Here Comes the Indian. What grabbed me about the band was the way their music blurred the line between familiar and alien forms. An Animal Collective album could sound like noise struggling to become a song, or a nursery rhyme that had been melted down and smeared across the stereo field. Listening to them was like looking at a mask: I might recognize it as a face, but I’d never mistake it for one.

This was 2004. I was 21, finishing a heady interdisciplinary program at a liberal arts school in central Virginia, tearing down long-held ideas I thought I’d understood, drinking stolen cough syrup in front of Bagel Paradise, battling it out on the hazy frontiers of the mind. College is a good place to be if you don’t want to manage the banal intricacies of adult life, which I didn’t. A self-fashioned new native, I lived to conquer the world within. Everything else seemed like a dream happening somewhere outside my room, which coincidentally was a closet under a set of stairs in a house across the street from a 7-11.

Animal Collective’s music didn’t just accompany my life, it embodied and sometimes even validated it. Here was a band that not only seemed to think that the bare fact of existence was as fucked-up and confusing as I did, but also managed to replicate that confusion in sound. Biking across campus, I listened to Sung Tongs' alternate-reality smashes at pitiless volumes, staring at my peers, thinking, "Damn, it’s weird to have eyeballs—could I love an insect if insects had eyeballs too?" Naturally, my academic advisors thought I was on the right track.

Sung Tongs is Animal Collective's children’s album. (Here I accept that people who hate the band think all their albums are children’s albums.) The songs on it are sing-alongs, nursery rhymes, lullabies—music that uses innocence to mask the ways it gets lodged in the dark parts of our brain; it's no surprise that Animal Collective are into horror movies, which often reprise childhood fears—the bad clown, the stranger in the house—in adult contexts. The record is mostly built with acoustic guitars, live percussion, and voice, sometimes bent so far out of shape you might not be able to recognize them as human. Still, the message rings clear: This is a fleshy album. An intimate album. An album that taps into myths about the things people are capable of when bonded together in a meditative state somewhere off the grid.

At first, it embarrassed me. Men who had been covered in The New York Times had no business squealing like infants. But in the squealing there was the promise of a safe space, a circle of protection in which I was invited to experience feelings that didn’t have a place anywhere else. There’s a reason Animal Collective’s music has been compared to primal scream therapy: Both suggest that there’s no such thing as progress without a little bit of carefully mediated regress. At 21, staring down the cold inevitability of adulthood, I not only wanted this but needed it. The loving, demented babytalk of Sung Tongs became my psychological ball pit: A place where I could play, get dirty, and still have a heavily mediated shot at feeling young.

And like anything that seemed to aim deep, Sung Tongs eventually touched on sex, which, at 21, I was having as often as possible. The involuntary yips, the squishy, burbling sounds, and the way the music shuddered and twitched all reminded me of bodies colliding. Though treated to porn at an early age, I could never appreciate it; I liked it clumsy—something to fumble through, not master. Something like “Visiting Friends”, a 12-minute block of slowly rippling ambience in the middle of Sung Tongs, always sounded more erotic to me than something like “Let’s Get It On”, because “Let’s Get It On” never let me feel lost. Like psychedelics, I was interested in sex not as a way of asserting myself, but as a way of letting myself dissolve.

The truth is that I was scared: of graduating, of growing up, of the thought that the free play of Sung Tongs was behind me for good. It’s a common fear, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel it. So I took refuge in a band that had traveled the world but still had the guts to acknowledge how scary and exciting it felt to get on an airplane (“Kids on Holiday”) or make out in public (“Good Lovin’ Outside”), who seemed periodically goofy but also offered the promise of restoring me to a kinder and more sensitized version of myself.

The love I felt for Sung Tongs took shape like a last gasp:
The moment just before the rollercoaster car creaks to the top
of the track and some instinct for self-preservation strikes you numb.

A lot of music I love takes a complicated experience and streamlines it into forms I can digest and understand. Humor is a byproduct of this. Wisdom, too. Both put the complexities of life in the rearview, where I can see them a little more clearly, then refocus my eyes on the road ahead. One of the reasons Sung Tongs still feels so potent for me is that it isn’t nostalgic for the past, but an acknowledgement that feelings we think we’ve moved beyond still lurk inside us, raw and in need of attention we never bother to give them. It isn’t a reflection on the trauma and beauty of childhood, it’s a recreation of it. The love I felt for Sung Tongs took shape like a last gasp: The moment just before the rollercoaster car creaks to the top of the track and some instinct for self-preservation strikes you numb.

Some albums seem terminal, like a closed circuit. Others start conversations. The calendar tells me that Sung Tongs is 10 years old, but despite Animal Collective’s ubiquity and influence on indie music, nobody has really picked up where they left off. Even the band—notorious for changing their template and lineup from year to year—moved on. Feels, which came out in 2005, marked the moment they graduated to louder, fuller music capable of reaching a big-tent crowd. Gone was the porch, the backyard, the woods. It was just as well. I had less room in my schedule for acting like a five-year-old anyway. Impedances, distractions, the hard shell of sophistication—they grow and keep growing. I stopped buying my clothes by the pound, and the acid in my freezer isn’t any stronger than it was when I bought it eight months ago, but I’m no closer to making time for it.

About a year ago I found myself waiting in the security check line at LaGuardia Airport after flying home to visit my mom. It was a good trip, bittersweet and marked by garden-variety annoyances along with moments of deep, inextricable connection. (As she says, by way of both unconditional love and vague threat: “You’ll always be my son.”) When I got to the TSA agent, I handed over my license. For reasons I don’t understand, the state of Connecticut has allowed me to keep the same photo I’ve had since I was 17. The agent looked confused. I asked if anything was wrong. “No,” she said. “Just that you were a young man then. Now you're a grown man.”

Years of unofficial training had braced me for situations like this, when tenderness hits so unexpectedly and in a context so banal that it seems like a mistake. Without thinking, I waved my hand across my body as if unveiling some game show prize and said, “Yeah, but I still got it, don’t I?”

Both of us smiled, and for a second I pictured myself dropping my bags and throwing my arms around her, crying that there were days I couldn’t believe I’d even made it this far. Instead, I told her to take care and have a great day, then I walked briskly toward my gate with a tight smile and my bags at my side, the way grown men do.