Brother Sport

Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox told Pitchfork Media that this song, "is really an encouragement song for my brother who was having kind of a rough time at the time I was writing the song. That's what the song is about, for me at least."

Panda Bear explained to Pitchfork Media how this tune came together: "The very first version of the song was just me improvising singing over a couple guitar chords, I can't remember what effects I was running through with an acoustic guitar, but I was playing to a Moodymann sample. I'd taken a little piece of a song of his as a rhythm to make a song to. I didn't really want to use that as the final thing, but the first version of the song was that. It was really house-y sounding and I came across a weird Brazilian drum school sample that eventually became the thing we used as the foundation of the song. The guitar chords kind of came second after the rhythmic part of the song and then the lyrics were the very last thing, which is kind of typical for me - the lyrics are always the last part of the puzzle of the song."

Ed Droste of the band Grizzly Bear posted a leaked MP3 of this song on his blog, adding that it was the band's favorite song since "Leaf House" (from Animal Collective's 2004 album Sung Tong's). This prompted a take-down notice from Web Sheriff, a company employed by Animal Collective's record label Domino and some pre-release publicity for Merriweather Post Pavilion.