After a four-month pause and not knowing where to turn next, Pecknold returned to the studio and made a three-month push to get the record out by September.
Most of Shore was finished when the pandemic hit. “It’s nice to only be thinking about what’s exciting to make.” The expansive, joyous mementos of the band’s new-but still familiar and charming-sound made it easier for them to slide into a broader category during awards season, all while retaining their foundational folk roots. “It’s very freeing at this point to not have to think as much about some kind of music industry narrative,” he adds. In turn, songs like “Sunblind” and “Can I Believe You” ditch the band’s baroque, Americana style for a poppier acoustic sheen, while suites and overtures (“The Shrine/An Argument,” “I Am All That I Need/Arroyo Seco/Thumbprint Scar”) are substituted for shorter works (“Thymia,” “For A Week Or Two”). “With a fourth album, you run into some of the same problems as ‘Well, what are you going to do for the fourth season of Succession? What are the changes going to be?’” Pecknold says. The record isn’t just Fleet Foxes’ most experimental work to date, it’s also their most accessible. Vincent and Halsey-after a period of active lobbying, on social media and in magazine ads, for the Recording Academy’s notice. Shore recently earned a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album-alongside Japanese Breakfast, Arlo Parks, St. “I think that was already on my mind before the pandemic, but when we were all isolated and death was everywhere, that was what the album centered around and was exploring.” “I think, with Swift and Berman passing, made it clear to me how important community is and how music is a binder and how these people could bring so many others together,” Pecknold recalls. In his artist’s statement, he said he “wanted to make an album that celebrated life in the face of death,” and he did so by conjuring globality through the spirits of deceased musicians-David Berman, Richard Swift, Judee Sill, John Prine-whom he loved greatly, in juxtaposition with that seminal Fleet Foxes self-contained heartache and fits of momentary, geographical joy. Instead of invoking his influences through sonic imitation, Pecknold was now name-dropping them explicitly. When the record arrived on the heels of last year’s autumnal equinox, it did so with a coterie of acknowledgements in tow. That mantra rings true on the band’s most recent offering, 2020’s Shore. “ folk music that we loved and stuff that evoked with care.” “The nomination was a great success because that album was about honoring our influences, like Roy Harper and Joanna Newsom and Joni Mitchell,” Pecknold says. Nearly a decade removed from the 2012 Grammys, the songwriter looks at the band’s absence from a mature remove. When we speak, it’s an unusually warm December Monday on the East Coast-the last Monday morning of 2021 weighed down by whatever emotional turbulence occurred on Succession the night before-and Pecknold is holed up in his New York City apartment. “And the lyrics came from a place of imagining some naive, perfect life of having a little restaurant, a store and an orchard in some pretty town.” “ Helplessness Blues was me hoping to get back to how things were before the first record came out,” he adds. “We had this pretty small, utopian-feeling artistic world in Seattle at the time.” Then, after the resounding success of Fleet Foxes and extensive touring, Pecknold’s songwriting became tempered with a fantastical response to the exhaustive cycle of being locked in buses and flying to Europe over and over for three years. hiking all the time and hanging out with my family and friends,” Pecknold tells me of his life before Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut came out. “The world that we were in was pretty innocent and naive.
Pecknold’s early compositions and stacked vocal harmonies mirrored Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound technique, just as Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds and SMILE compositions had previously his lyrics captured the symbiotic relationship between cinematic heartbreak and autumnal folklore unearthed from the quixotic Pacific Northwest landscape he was raised in. On top of the record’s nomination, Helplessness Blues occupied top spots on countless publications’ year-end lists, a body of work as mountainous and captivating as the untouched countryside acreage it symbolized. The gold gramophone eventually landed in the hands of The Civil Wars for Barton Hollow, a sturdy placeholder amongst the folk-rock revival that had overtaken the twangy corner of a mainstream genre carried by radio favorites Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers. When Fleet Foxes’ sophomore record Helplessness Blues was nominated for Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammys, in the category’s inaugural year, Robin Pecknold and company didn’t show up to the ceremony.
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