Animal Collective Snags First Official Grateful Dead Sample

44575662Pitchfork points to a Gorilla vs. Bear post reporting a Tweet by Animal Collective's management announcing that the Grateful Dead have cleared the group's use of a piece of "Unbroken Chain" in a new tune, "What Would I Want Sky." (Whew.)

According to the Tweet, "Phil Lesh loved the track please pass this to the guys."

This is cool because it displays a connection people have been hinting at for a long time and suggests a bridge closing the serious (or silly) gap separating sixties "jamband" music and 21st-century indie rock. (The only real surprise is that Akron/Family didn't beat Animal Collective to it.)

In an interview with The Onion AV Club, Animal Collective member Brian Weitz (AKA Geologist) described the tune's creation thusly: "'What Would I Want Sky' is something that Dave [Portner, AKA Avey Tare] wrote for Merriweather and sent Noah {Lennox, AKA Panda Bear] and I, but we didn’t have time to work on parts before we got to the studio, and then one day a week, the engineer would like to have a day off. But we would usually go into the studio anyway and work on the songs that we had never played live, and some that didn’t make it on the record. 'What Would I Want Sky' is one we just never got to. We just didn’t have enough time, so we worked on it in Lisbon in January. We all went to Lisbon to hang out for a week, and that’s when we made a full-band version of that song."

AC played "What Would I Want Sky" in February at The Troubadour in West Los Angeles.