Animal Collective / Water Curses - EP / 2008
Water Curses
woozy, wistful, and quietly unsettled
A dreamlike wish-song built around water as an image of fluidity, ease, and self-erasure, drifting through loosely connected images of art, mortality, and desire before settling into a stranger, more possessive coda. It reads less like a story than a mood-poem, its logic associative rather than linear.
desire for formlessness/transformation mortality and impermanence creativity and artistic longing surrealism and dream logic control versus surrender in relationships
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addressing an unnamed 'you,' shifting between tender wish-making and, by the end, something closer to warning or possessiveness; the voice feels unreliable in the way dreams are unreliable, more interested in sensation than clarity.
What happens
The song opens with fragmented, almost hallucinatory images -- broken strings, a wish thrown into water, a talking fish -- before crystallizing into the recurring wish to become water itself: something that needs no doctor, no tools, no doubt. This wish is elaborated through images of art and impermanence (paper wings, dying peacefully in a natural room), repeated like an incantation. Midway through, the tone shifts toward interpersonal tension, with accusations of not knowing what one is doing traded back and forth, before the song ends on a quietly ominous domestic note involving control and a knife left in a drawer.
How it's built
Loosely verse-based with a floating chorus ('I want to be like water') that returns with slight variations, plus a recurring bridge-like refrain about dying in a natural room. The final third breaks from the water conceit almost entirely into a dialogic, accusatory passage, giving the song an arc from dissolution to confrontation rather than a tidy verse-chorus-verse shape.
Section by section
Opening verses
The song begins mid-thought, with disjointed images of broken strings and a coin thrown into water suggesting fate, wishing, and fragility. The speaker's self-description as drooling and passive sets up the desire for a cleaner, more fluid mode of existence that follows.the bridge scene with the talking fish deepens the dreamlike unreality before the central wish arrives.chorus wishish
First chorus
“I want to be like water”
The central wish is stated plainly for the first time: to become something elemental, self-sufficient, and beyond need or damage. It reframes the earlier imagery as symptoms of a desire to escape embodiment.
Middle verse and refrain
References to authors, painters, and floating paper wings suggest a longing for the kind of transcendence associated with art -- something light, transparent, hovering above ordinary life. The repeated wish to die in a 'natural' room reads as a longing for a peaceful, unforced ending, almost domesticating mortality.
Second chorus variation
The water wish returns with slightly darker undertones, imagining slipping into someone's throat and reflecting whatever surrounds it. This suggests not just self-dissolution but a desire to merge with or subtly control another person, complicating the earlier innocence of the water metaphor.
Late confrontational passage
The dreamy diction drops away here in favor of clipped, argumentative repetition, as two voices seem to accuse each other of the same failing. This passage reads as a rupture in the song's fantasy of fluid, doubt-free existence -- the water-self collides with real relational friction.
Closing lines
“There's a knife up in the drawer”
The ending trades surreal wish-fulfillment for a quiet, ambiguous domestic threat, tied to control over someone's movements and time. It undercuts the earlier idealism about becoming water, suggesting that beneath the wish for gentle formlessness lies something more possessive or anxious.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Water stands for a mode of being without friction, doubt, or medical/bodily vulnerability, letting the speaker imagine dissolving into something that simply moves and reflects rather than acts.
- surreal imagery
- Talking fish, transparent paper wings, and gypsy faces on a pill create a dream logic that resists literal narrative, mirroring the song's underwater, semi-conscious atmosphere.
- repetition/incantation
- The looping phrases about dying in a natural room and wanting to be like water function almost as a spell, reinforcing the wish rather than developing it argumentatively.
- tonal volta
- The late shift into clipped, accusatory dialogue about not knowing what one is doing breaks the song's dreamy register, introducing friction that the water imagery had been trying to dissolve.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats water as a fantasy of escaping vulnerability and conflict -- a wish to be endlessly adaptable, needless, and painless, including within a relationship. But the song doesn't stay in that fantasy: the late shift to accusatory dialogue and the closing image of a knife suggest the wish is undercut by real possessiveness and unresolved tension between the speaker and their addressee. An alternative reading takes the song as pure mood-piece, with the closing verses functioning as another dream-image rather than a literal threat, in keeping with the associative, non-narrative logic established earlier.
Context
Water Curses was released as the title track of Animal Collective's 2008 EP, following Strawberry Jam and preceding Merriweather Post Pavilion. It's often noted for a brighter, more accessible sound relative to the band's earlier work, but the lyrics retain the group's characteristic surreal, impressionistic style. I don't have reliable biographical detail about the song's specific writing circumstances, so this reading is based on the text itself.
Listen for
- the recurring water-wish refrain and how its tone shifts slightly each time it returns
- the sudden change in vocal delivery and lyrical register in the late accusatory section
- imagery clusters around art and impermanence (painters, paper wings) versus the closing domestic imagery
- how the song's dreamy, non-narrative structure resists a clear resolution
About Animal Collective
Animal Collective is an American experimental pop band formed in Baltimore County, Maryland. Its members consist of Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin.
2000 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue