Robin Pecknold’s Season of Rebirth
The chaos and loss of 2020 helped him make a creative breakthrough with Fleet Foxes
The chaos and loss of 2020 helped the singer make a creative breakthrough with Fleet Foxes’ new album.
In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic tore through New York City at terrifying speed, Robin Pecknold stayed home in his rented one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. “I wasn’t being creative at all,” says the Fleet Foxes singer-songwriter, 34. “There were some dark weeks where I would end up waking up at 7 or 8 p.m. and stay up until noon. The world just seemed like it was more sane at night.”
On top of everything else — “the stress that we’ve all been going through, just by being alive in 2020,” as he puts it — he had an album to worry about. He’d spent the previous fall and winter recording instrumental tracks for a new Fleet Foxes project, but the songs were half-finished at best, with no lyrics or vocals, and no sure ideas for what to do next. “It was this extra albatross,” he says. “It was unclear if I would just abandon it, or if it was going to come out in 2022, or what.”
That feeling lasted through March, April, and May. Then, in June, Pecknold had a breakthrough. Heading north for l ong loops through the Catskills in his Toyota 4Runner, he found himself pulling over to the side of the road to jot down lyrics. “I put 6,000 miles on my car in three weeks,” he says.
The songs that came into focus on those drives became Shore, the fourth Fleet Foxes album — a gorgeous folk-rock song cycle about life, death, and art, full of mourning and glimmers of relief on the other side. Track for track, it’s the most immediately rewarding Fleet Foxes record since their 2008 debut.
Pecknold began writing shortly after the tour for 2017’s Crack-Up, the album that ended a multiyear hiatus during which he quit music, enrolled in undergraduate classes at Columbia University, and learned to surf. Hoping to avoid another long gap between albums, he got the instrumental tracks down at studios in New York, Paris, and Los Angeles, working with engineer Beatriz Artola and select session collaborators.
The music was sunny and full of light, but finding a strong lyrical perspective to match proved harder. “I resent lyrics sometimes,” Pecknold says. “It’s very delicate. You can’t have a classic song with bad lyrics.”
Even before the pandemic, he felt himself hitting a wall of creative exhaustion. “There was just no subject matter,” he says. “Living with the gibberish scratch vocals for a year and a half is a bad idea.”
As the lockdown period stretched on, he began to see a way out of that dilemma. “The whole experience gave me so much additional perspective on what community means, what death means, what gratitude means, what privilege is,” he says. “This is my least personal album. I wanted it to be mostly about how I felt about other people.”
There’s no better example of this approach than “Sunblind,” the litany of thanks for musicians gone before their time that appears near the start of Shore. “For Richard Swift,” Pecknold sings, invoking the beloved artist and producer who worked with the Black Keys, the Shins, and many others before his death in 2018, and who Pecknold knew from his own time living in the Pacific Northwest. The song keeps going from there, reciting the names of John Prine, Elliott Smith, David Berman, and more, mingling recent tragedies with older ones in a cosmic scroll of appreciation. Then it bursts into a celebratory chorus. “That chorus is saying, ‘I’m going to live as best I can, in thanks to these people,’ ” Pecknold says. “It’s zeroing in on this idea of gratitude to be alive.”
This summer, as Black Lives Matter protests filled New York’s streets, Pecknold joined a march that passed by his block, and also used his car to bring ice and other supplies to occupiers who needed them. He wrote the lyrics to “Jara” — another key song, named for the Chilean protest singer Victor Jara, who was killed in the U.S.-backed coup that brought down socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973 — while thinking about others who took a more active role standing up against racism this year. “The speaker is equating a friend who’s a very engaged activist to their own personal Victor Jara,” he says.
The recording process for Shore was full of new collaborations, with three drummers (Grizzly Bear’s Christopher Bear, the Dap-Kings’ Homer Steinweiss, and Angel Olsen collaborator Joshua Jaeger) giving Pecknold’s songs a new rhythmic edge. Elsewhere on the LP, there’s a small sample of Brian Wilson in the studio, taken (with permission) from the Pet Sounds Sessions box set that Pecknold discovered as a kid in Seattle. “He’s making this crazy egalitarian magic with just his voice,” Pecknold says. “Hearing that when I was a teenager — that, more than any other thing, made me want to get into making songs.”
The other four members of Fleet Foxes — Skyler Skjelset, Morgan Henderson, Casey Wescott, and Christian Wargo — are notably absent from Shore. In fact, though they have contributed in varying degrees to Fleet Foxes’ previous albums, Pecknold says his bandmates have always been more like touring members. “The studio albums have always been predominantly my work and my vision,” he writes in a press statement. “I’ve always handled all the songwriting, most of the vocals and harmonies, and most of the recording of the instrumentation.”
This balance of roles hasn’t always been entirely clear to the public, in part by choice. “On the first Fleet Foxes album, I just didn’t list who played what, because I didn’t want to have certain songs be all me,” he says.
At one point, he expected to be reinterpreting Shore with the band on tour this fall. “Part of the idea of this record was songs that would be fun to play live,” he says. “It won’t happen for a year, and that’s weird.” But it’s also been freeing in a way: “We can’t go on tour. The record’s just the record. That feels really great.”
Recently, Pecknold has begun “bouncing ideas back-and-forth” with his bandmates, co-writing with them for the first time. “They’re all great musicians with interesting perspectives,” he says. “Maybe we can get those [songs] together for next year.”
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. “I’m still anxious and worried, but it’s not about my own stuff,” Pecknold says, sounding happy. “It’s about what’s going on in the world. This is one weird little moment where there might be some optimism.”
SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON