For a time the street was lined with trucks operating as makeshift morgues. Those day-long drives were the first time that he had left the city in months, and it felt good, he says, to feel the sun on his face.
Pecknold had been struggling with lyric-writing. Now, as he drove, the words finally began to come. Pecknold was 22 then, and his band had quickly gained acclaim — first on the local circuit in Seattle, and then further afield as a revived interest in American folk rock gathered pace.
Fleet Foxes, with their harmony-rich baroque pop, reminiscent of the Beach Boys, Crosby Stills and Nash and traditional English folk song, captured the new mood perfectly. Over two months in , they saw more than a quarter of a million plays on Myspace. Attempting to follow such success was daunting. The record was pretty well mapped out, in terms of what the energy of it would be, back in February.
That changed in the last couple months. If you like it, enjoy it. I hope you enjoy it. There are songs about missing my friends and missing the dead. There are songs about feeling grateful for having a roof over my head and talking myself out of being dissatisfied.
Is that nagging feeling of wanting to improve yourself how the band got from the straightforward folk songs of the early EPs to the proggier turn on the last album? I still want to improve and get better at things. But you can confuse complexity with improvement sometimes. You push your limits to a certain degree, and you have enough inner strength as a result of doing that to be a little more playful with it.
Only one person could have done that. As someone who has written more than one song named after a mountain, how important are nature and travel to your work? With this album, the lyrics all came out of taking these really long drives in the country and being in lockdown, remembering times when I was doing backpacking trips and traveling around the world to weird, far-flung hiking trails, remembering those times with some wistfulness from not being able to do it.
I loved growing up in the Northwest, but I love the city as well. I need some form of stimulation. I have trouble after two weeks anywhere.
I get a little bored. As far as making music that has a pastoral quality, something about that feels timeless to me. For me, Fleet Foxes has always been this transportive experience.
The world around me dissolves when I settle into a record. Is that by design? For sure. I love escapism. I love Chrono Trigger. I asked if she could shoot some footage for the album along the way. She went all over Washington State to some of the most beautiful areas and got these interesting long shots, closeups, landscapes, narrative, and figures and built this great film to accompany the record.
You stayed in New York City in the spring, right? All you heard was constant ambulance sirens. I live fairly close to a hospital, and there were two temporary morgues set up next to it, just refrigerated semitrucks parked right outside my door.
I wanted to stick around. It was really intense, and it would pass through here the fastest. Population density is high here. Potentially, it could get back to normal here sooner than it did in other places.
I wanted to stay put, and I had this half-finished album. You got involved in some of the activism in the streets this summer, right?
That felt good … Well not, like, good. I felt lucky to live in an area where marches passed through pretty frequently, so I was able to walk out my door and join in.
Another wild part of being in Manhattan for all this was having that right outside your door. How are you doing on that front? I was always grateful to get lumped in with [Grizzly Bear], back when. But I was very conscious to try and not do anything that felt too much like them, because we share so much taste. The same song features a small sample of Brian Wilson counting in the band, taken with permission from the Pet Sounds Sessions box set that Pecknold encountered and loved when he was growing up in Seattle.
I just wanted to finish it and get it out. At one point, he expected to be playing these songs with the band on tour this fall. That feels really great. The process of making Shore has left him feeling newly comfortable with his life and career, shrugging off some of the cares that once preoccupied him. This is one weird little moment where there might be some optimism.
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