Shore, Fleet Foxes
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Please Note: All views expressed here are the author’s own.
On Shore, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold returns to a Spirit of Collaboration.
There’s a small-capacity nightclub in San Francisco called the Bottom of the Hill, considered a tastemaker for grunge acts in the 90s and much of the indie scene in the late nineties to the early 00s. Alumni include Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, Elliott Smith, oddly enough, Green Day. “This is,— We’re from Seattle,” Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes says after opening their first show outside the Seattle scene. This was in the months before their first official release and breakthrough EP, Sun Giant. “And,— and we’ve never been out of town before. This is beautiful.” His nervous grin is contagious. There’s cheering. “Um,— well, well, how about that,” he says. The set had just begun with the EP’s title track. Once the harmonies begin, the bustling Saturday night crowd hushes into awestruck silence and low whispers. Pecknold seems blown away by this. They’re paying attention. He’s twenty-two and clearly ecstatic.
Twelve years have passed. Their self-titled debut LP propelled them onto the national spotlight, getting play time in probably every coffee shop nationwide. After the success, Pecknold decided to go all in on the second album, Helplessness Blues, now with Josh Tillman on board as a drummer, trying to create a more cohesive album and to somehow top their debut success. Pecknold may have pushed too hard. He later describes the period as “an early-onset identity crisis,” he had become so caught up in topping their debut that relations in the band frayed and Tillman loudly exited the group, took up the moniker Father John Misty, and released his own LP, Fear Fun, creatively invoking Fleet Fox’s initials to poke fun at Pecknold’s obsessive hold over the album they worked on. It’s abundantly clear that Pecknold took over the album and the other members report feeling frustrated and sidelined. The band fell apart after touring the LP and Pecknold retreated from the national spotlight.
Years passed until the band came together again for 2017’s Crack-Up, swapping the Crosby, Stills, and Nash penchant for easy-listening folk for a more difficult Prog-Rock influence. Pecknold had spent the last six years spiraling. “I went down this weird, masochistic path,” he laments in a New York Times article promoting Crack-Up. “I never again in my life want to have an experience that isolating.”’ That isolation is almost tangible in Crack-Up, and it’s this feeling of exile and aimlessness that Shore is a reaction to.
Released on the Autumnal Equinox, kind of a given considering this is Fleet Foxes we’re talking about, Pecknold’s fourth LP had no singles and little to no press buildup aside from a couple snapchat stories teasing “Wading in Waist High Water” and “Featherweight.” It also acts as a return, in a way, to the sounds of their past. If Crack-Up was the band on turbulent waters without a map, Shore is what it sounds like: they’ve found land and throughout the album they’re wading from waist high water to the title track closing out the LP. Pecknold himself has returned from years of self-isolation with a more upbeat album filled, for once, with back-and-forth collaborations done over the internet due to the pandemic. There’s a celebratory, triumphant feeling because of that. It’s a return to the world for a group, and at the same time a reopening of Pecknold to collaborative songwriting for the first time since their self-titled.
“Wading in Waist High Water” makes this mindset immediately clear from the first washing strums and the first lines sung by Uwade Akhere, a 21-year old singer Pecknold discovered on instagram covering the Fleet Foxes track “The Shrine/An Argument.” In the background of this opening track you can hear him humming softly, signaling the more background role he’s taking with this album. “This is my least personal album,” he said to Rolling Stone. “I wanted it to be mostly about how I felt about other people.”
“For Richard Swift,” is his first line on the LP in the exhilarating and shimmering “Sunblind.” It’s a reference to a friend and fellow musician who passed away in 2014 due to complications with alcohol dependencies. They hadn’t talked in a while before his passing, “But we’d wanted to work together,” Pecknold said, expressing the song as part memorial and part what-if; the sparkling piano and the peaks and troughs of the chorus channeling a warm thankfulness for what time was given, the influence and the friendship, and a subdued yearning for something more.
“Going-to-the-Sun Road,” beneath all the psychedelic harpsichord, is at its heart a collaboration with portuguese Tim Bernandes, whom Pecknold reached out to for help on “Quiet Air/Gioia” but had decided to pitch his own idea for a separate song which came to be “Going-to-the-Sun Road.” His vocals can be heard at the end of the track. “Quiet Air/Gioia” drives in its opening with a rolling beat and chorus, transitioning over a drum roll bridge into an absurd baroque piano beat that somehow works with Pecknold crying out “Oh Devil walk by” in his unmistakable tenor. “Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman” samples Brian Wilson, another tremendous influence throughout the album, and dives into a maximalist orchestral composition reminiscent of Sufjan’s Illinois period.
The title track of the album is the homecoming, it brings all the themes of the album into a melting pot until it all dissolves and is taken over by vocals overlapping imitating clocks ticking, the universe spinning, ending after Pecknold repeats “Now the quarter moon is out,” referencing the album’s release date on the Autumn Equinox and a signifier of time beyond our political and social turmoil in year seemingly detached from the flow of time.
The next Fleet Foxes effort will come next year, in 2021, with nine tracks composed from the ground up by the entire band and not just Pecknold, making use of the time they would spend touring in a normal world. This will be the first time they’ve worked entirely collaboratively on a project since the self-titled LP in 2008. Crack-Up ended with Pecknold putting his guitar down in the silence after the final track came to a close, and then sprinting across the room and out the door, panting the whole way, desperate to escape. Shore interestingly ended with a hesitation after the final track, and then the sound of Pecknold closing his piano. It’ll be a year until a new release, which for long-time Fleet Foxes fans is nothing, and Shore will do more than keep me satisfied until then.
WORDS BY GRIFFIN BLUE EMERSON