Robin Pecknold’s fleeting disappearance
In 2012, Robin Pecknold disappeared.
At least, that’s what it looked like to fans of his band, Fleet Foxes.
After a successful tour of their Grammy-nominated 2011 album, Helplessness Blues, the band had gone quiet.
It wasn’t until 2014 that Pecknold revealed what he’d been up to. He’d packed his bags and moved to New York, where he enrolled at Columbia University. He shaved his beard, he studied art and literature, he took up surfing.
Now, three years after that, Pecknold is back with a new Fleet Foxes album: Crack-Up.
Pecknold calls Crack-Up his ‘‘dream album’’. Taking time out from music freed him to make the record he has always wanted to make.
‘‘I’d really been solely focused on music from when I was about 15, so to come away and try on a different lifestyle kind of gave me a new appreciation for the freedom I would have in making albums, and how lucky of a job that is.
‘‘And to a degree it kind of reframed music as something I did for fun, for relief. At the end of a long day, I would sit down and write songs, or come up with stuff on guitar instead of having it be my ‘job’, quote-unquote.
‘‘It was just kind of my escape like it used to be when I was a teenager.’’
The impact Pecknold’s studies had on Crack-Up is clear in the list of influences he cites for the album: Renata Adler’s ‘‘fractured and imagistic’’ novel Speedboat, the Nicolas Roeg film Walkabout, and Orson Welles’ fake documentary F for Fake.
‘‘I think things like that were more inspirational than any particular band or style of music,’’ Pecknold says.
‘‘I guess if you’re really struck by something it will probably make its way into what you put out, whether you do it intentionally or not.’’
Crack-Up takes its title from a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald essays detailing the breakdown of the author’s life.
The album shares a lot of the essays’ themes, but Pecknold thinks it ends on a more optimistic note.
‘‘I feel like the essays end very despondent, and this album tries to end kind of hopeful, and kind of reassembled.’’
He wrote the album by working on snippets of songs in the evenings after class, and slowly piecing them together into longer tracks - a process he compares to exhuming and then reassembling a dinosaur skeleton.
‘‘It’s sort of like there’s this long intuitive process of kind of finding all these little parts of music ... and this other process of kind of deciding which ones to clean up and how they all fit together to make the end product.’’
Did he ever consider not making the album? Fully embracing his new lifestyle and abandoning the band?
‘‘If I ever felt comfortable stopping playing music, I guess I would just have to be so happy with the music that I made, and I didn’t really feel that way, there was still stuff I’d like explore or things I can do better.
‘‘It’s kind of limitless - it changes as you change, so there’s no kind of goal post. I never really thought about quitting music, I was writing songs for the whole time.’’
Crack-Up is out now.