In a hotel room in Clerkenwell, Robin Pecknold waits patientlyfor his wholefood lunch to arrive. Casually dressed and bearded, hehas a relaxed, hippyish air about him which belies the more driven,methodical aspects of his character.
It's this inner ambition that helped elevate his band Fleet Foxesto an unexpected position of prominence in the modern pop landscape.Formed by songwriter Pecknold and his guitarist buddy SkylerSkjelset in high school in Seattle, the group devised its ownvariant on friends' shared musical interests - mostly Dylan and NeilYoung - adding extra members as the need for more guitars and drumsand especially voices became more pressing. (They currently numbersix.) By the time they released their self-titled debut album in2008, they had developed a rich blend of folk-rock textures andgleaming close harmonies, which on tracks like the single "WhiteWinter Hymnal" cascaded in round-like garlands through a song thatseemed closer to religious polyphonic choral music than rock'n'roll.Or, at least, any rock'n'roll since the glory days of Crosby, Stills& Nash and The Eagles.
For some reason, however, their sound captured the ear of a muchwider audience than expected, particularly in Europe, where FleetFoxes became the breakthrough act of the year. By the time it wasbeing lauded as Album of the Year in countless critics' end-of-yearlists, Fleet Foxes had sold more than 100,000 copies in the UK,reaching the dizzy heights of third place in the album charts, goingplatinum and kick-starting a groundswell of acclaim back in America.In retrospect, it was probably the single most important factor inthe recent resurgence of interest in folk music and harmony singing -a revival of this most analogue of forms ironically due in part tothat most digital of technologies, the internet, where Fleet Foxes'fanbase expanded exponentially within weeks of their early EPreleases.
It may seem a bit early in his career to start looking back, buton the new Fleet Foxes album, Helplessness Blues, Pecknold appearspreoccupied with matters of upbringing, childhood and heritage. Insong after song, lines seem to short-circuit his musings back to hisyouth, often in poetic manner. "I will lay down in the sand and letthe ocean carry me to Innisfree like pollen on the breeze," hesings, as if yearning to return home. Not that he has any personalconnection with Ireland.
"It's from the W B Yeats poem 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', whichmy grandma typed out and put on the wall of their cabin, as if tosay, 'this is our Innisfree'," he explains. "My grandpa built thecabin in the Seventies, I guess, and my parents were married there.Me and my brother went up there fairly late in making the record,saw that poem on the wall again, and kinda nicked it from mygrandma."
Yeats's poem is the quintessential back-to-the-land rural escapefantasy of urbanites in search of peace, the poet imagining buildinga small cabin, and listening to the lapping of water on the shore,as he trudges along the city's "pavements gray". A fantasy which isobviously so much easier to achieve in America, where there'snothing but open space for miles, than in a crowded little islandlike ours.
"Yes, it's insanely huge," Pecknold agrees. "Unlike here, wherespace is at a premium, and everything's so settled in its history.Even now, there's so much land, you can buy 20 acres in Californiafor a fair amount of money. There's still a lot of unsettled areas."
That's especially the case up in the Pacific Northwest, wherePecknold and his fellow Fleet Foxes grew up. Travelling to Europe asa successful musician has brought home to the singer the hugedifferences between transatlantic cultures separated, as Churchillput it, by a common language.
"It feels very new there," he says. "Here, there's so muchhistory, the old rubs up against the new everywhere. But in thenorthwest, and the West Coast generally, apart from the SpanishMission stuff, it's just new. I think the oldest building in Seattlewas built in something like 1898. I like that about the West Coastin a way, that it feels unsettled, that it's still the frontier, ina way - it doesn't feel as shackled to the past. And it's incrediblybeautiful up there. There are two huge mountain ranges on eitherside of the city, east and west, so there's all these hills andlakes, and Puget Sound - it's really dramatic, very Scandinavian-looking in the right light."
With such an abundance of open space and untamed wilderness, it'sno great surprise that the resurgent folk-rock movement has foundplenty of fertile ground in which to take root across America. FromFleet Foxes up in Washington state, to Midlake down in Texas and BonIver over in snowbound Wisconsin, musicians are retreating to ruralbasics with acoustic instruments, in search of firmer individualmusical anchorage within a tradition after decades spent marching inlock-step to computer click-tracks, hunting for a future in whicheverything and everyone sounds more or less the same. This notion ofmusic having a personal signature is vitally important to the band."The way we recorded, we didn't use a click-track, every song isfree tempo, just me and Josh laying down acoustic guitar and drumstogether," Pecknold explains. "Any time it's me singing and playing,it's me singing and playing at the same time. It's important thatthere's not too much editing, too; there are compositional changessometimes, but our performances are not edited to hell."
He remains dubious, however, as to whether this current trend for"woodshedding" suggests any deeper, shared affinity, between thecurrent crop of bands, for the past.
"I think certain different sounds evoke different things," hesays. "Like, there's a lot of history in the acoustic guitar,obviously. Every combination of instruments evokes something. Withthe Bon Iver record [For Emma, Forever Ago], his bio explained aboutit being recorded over three months stuck in the woods, and thatbecame the thing about that record - but I don't really hear that inthose lyrics, which are pretty oblique. And with the Midlake record[The Courage of Others], lyrically I thought it was almost more likeWhat's Going On, concerned with the ecology and 'what are we doingto the earth?'. Aside from the obvious implications of usingacoustic instruments, which is that you're going to be evokingsomething old, I don't know that there's that much similarity."
All three, however, have tapped into a new desire for rootednessin music - in Britain, the appeal of Fleet Foxes' debut album, whichsprang from nowhere to the top three of the album chart, helped pavethe way for the success of homegrown nu-folkies like Mumford & Sons.Fleet Foxes' sudden ascension is one of the more remarkableconfirmations of the power of the internet in disseminating newmusic, enabling bands to develop a momentum almost instantly withoutthe slow-moving promotional machines once considered necessary tobreak new acts. It's something Pecknold approves of, though he's notentirely convinced by music on the internet.
"If you choose to pay attention to music on the internet, it canbe overwhelming," he says. "You can get inundated with a lot ofgarbage. And it's not the best way to hear music. I still preferrecommendations from friends. It's much easier to consume music now,but that's what you're doing - consuming it."
There's also the worry that, just as the internet has destroyedthe delayed gratification that used to be such an enjoyable part ofbeing a music fan - hearing rumours about new recordings, readingabout them, and then waiting eagerly to hear them - it may also haveaccelerated the jading process. The notion of "here today, gonetomorrow" has become that much more literal in an age where instantidiot responses are requested for every new bit of digital media,and burgeoning careers are buried under an avalanche of "You suck!"comments. Being a music fan of the old school, Pecknold finds theabsence of any deeper interest being exhibited by online"commentators" quite baffling.
"Because there are no print limitations on the internet, you'dthink there would be all these 50-page articles examining therecords, but now all you get are Tweet-sized reviews," he says."There are way more opinions, but not necessarily more thought-outopinions. The other sad thing, to me, is that if you think aboutmemories that you have, they're about so much more than you get on acomputer: things like the colour of the light, what it smelt like,and tactile things. But if you're just looking at a computer screen,it's this void of just information. Will I look back and think aboutthe way the computer screen looked when I read that thing or talkedto that person on the internet?"
For the moment, though, Fleet Foxes are probably safe from anyonline backlash. Helplessness Blues continues the debut's formula ofrich, layered close harmonies set to jangling guitars and otherthings that go "twang" in the night: autoharp, hammer dulcimer andlap-steel guitar. "It's the same genre - it's not like a technoalbum or anything," says Pecknold. "It's within the same framework,it's not a bunch of different instrumentation, for the most part. Ijust see it as reflecting more refined ideas about this style ofmusic. Everyone had different arrangement ideas, but from thewriting side of it, I wanted the lyrics to be clearer, about someidentifiable topic. And we're just stretching out more, with multi-part songs."
One of these multi-part songs is "The Shrine/An Argument", inwhich the aforementioned yearning for Innisfree segues into somewhatspikier territory courtesy of the album's most shocking musicalmoment, a burst of free-jazz sax that tears into the fabric of thesong, leaving it in emotional tatters. Where did that come from?
"I was listening a lot to Ascension, by John Coltrane and AliceColtrane," explains Pecknold. "I don't have a ton of experience withthat kind of music, but I would put that record on and I liked theway it would just elicit different emotions in me - I'd have thispumped-up energy, like this weird anxiety. I was really into that,the way that music can be capable of producing that feeling. In thecontext of that song, it's like the different phases of a break-up,so I thought the music in every different section should have theappropriate emotional feeling: the beginning feels really nostalgic,and there's a section in the middle that's loud and rougher, then itgoes to this solitary place, then ends in this argument. I was justtrying to capture the different phases of a break-up in one song."
But it's the concerns with family, duty and responsibility thatmost mark the new material, from the opening track "Montezuma"'swistful refrain of, "Oh man, what I used to be, oh man, oh my, ohme" to lines in the Arabic-flavoured "Bedouin Dress" about "theborrower's debt is the only regret of my youth".
"I think that and a few other songs on the record are dealingwith the same thing," he agrees. "With the idea of how much are youtaking, and how much are you giving back - just generally, inrelationships and so on. Like for me, I've just been really focusedon music, and there were times when there was just no room in myhead for anything or anyone else - so the people around me weregiving themselves, and I wasn't giving much back because I wasfocused on the record. That started really bothering me!
"I'd like to find more of a balance. I think with this record outof the way I might be able to clear my head more. But I'd read aboutThe Beatles, and find that George Harrison was only 19 when theyfirst visited America, and I'd think, Wow, I gotta get working!"
Pecknold's concerns are perhaps given greater weight becauseFleet Foxes is very much a family affair for him. His sister managesthe band, and his brother does all the band's artwork and videos.His father, a luthier, is even building a special guitar for theband to use on their upcoming tour. So any careless emotional damagecould cut dangerously close to home. And he's so obsessive about hismusic that he might easily lose perspective: years after finishinghis debut album, he still frets over what he considers itsshortcomings - a lyric that could have been different, a vocal thatmight have been sung better, even the size of the font on the cover.
"Yeah, I have trouble getting over things," he admits. "Ilistened to the first LP the other day, and maybe it's not like theHiroshima of albums that I thought it was - to completely overstateit. I think you can become so intimately familiar with somethingthat it's like taking a trip with someone for two months, and at theend of it you hate each other, but when you look back at the tripyou realise you had so much fun. And anyway, if I was like, 'Oh mygod, that record is perfect', that leaves you no room to develop.You have to have a hard opinion about yourself, at least a littlebit, just so you have somewhere to go."
The concern with what one is taking, and what one is giving back,is perhaps most directly addressed in the album's title track, wherePecknold reflects on the self-centred individualism of his youth,when he believed he was special, and the mature fellowship of hisadulthood: "After some thinking I'd say I'd rather be/ A functioningcog in some great machinery/ Sowing something behind me/ But I don'tknow what that will be." Is this an accurate assessment of hiscurrent attitude?
"Yeah, totally," he confirms. "I wanted that song to be acompletely open opinion, with no kind of poetry, if you know what Imean. It's hard to articulate without it sounding really reductive,but I was born in the Eighties, a time of relative plenty in theUnited States, so I felt like the 'individual' thing was reallyemphasised when I was a kid, and I just don't know where that hasleft me. If everyone's just like this autonomous individual, y'know,to me it would be culturally..." He pauses, momentarily lost forwords, then continues: "Sometimes I find myself wanting something tostand under, you know what I mean? Something that is less like, 'I'mthis unique guy'."
As in being part of a lineage, owing something to a longertradition, rather than being this isolated, brilliant spark oflight?
"Yes. I don't want to sound too political or anything, becausethis is just my personal thought, but I guess I feel like in being awhite male from America, a member of the most privileged sect onearth, I have everything that people all over the earth are fightingfor, and sometimes I just feel like I'm not really doing enough withthat. That song is basically about that, the desire to cultivatesomething more than oneself."
It all sounds a bit liberal to me, I joke - the next thing youknow, you'll be in favour of socialised medicine! Which sparks themost left-wing outburst I've encountered from an American musiciansince Steve Earle. "Corporate America, in every incarnation, justhas us by the throat," says Pecknold with feeling. "Even the health-care bill they passed last year is just a big hand-out in a lot ofways - it has the full support of all the big pharmaceuticalcompanies, and you have to wonder why. Why would you want to pass abill that has the full support of all the pharmaceutical companies?That makes no sense. Until lobbyists lose control, or there arestricter rules on campaign funding, I don't think they'll getanything productive passed. But Obama's trying, he's really trying.People try and put the fate of the world on his shoulders, butthere's a lot about the system that you can't control."
Though as his band's home-grown, family-reared success confirms,judicious use of internet technology, allied to a grassrootscommunity of the like-minded, can enable those lacking the weight oflobbyists to carve out their own space within the system, just astheir forefathers built their own log cabins out in the woods.
Fleet Foxes tour from 31 May (www. fleetfoxes.com); 'HelplessnessBlues' is released on 2 May on Bella Union
HEAVENLY VOICES: HARMONY BANDS
The Beach Boys
Always recognised for their vocal harmonies, the Californiaband's Brian Wilson has been hailed as the greatest inspiration toFleet Foxes' songwriter Robin Pecknold.
The Byrds
Pioneers of the folk-rock we hear in Fleet Foxes and Mumford &Sons, despite their many line-up changes the LA band had adistinctive harmony-laden sound, most famously so in the gorgeoussongs "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and "Mr Tambourine Man".
Warpaint
The LA-based, all-girl art-rock four-piece incorporate harmoniesinto their winning delivery of psychedelic rock, effects and six-minute jams.
Bon Iver
The singer-songwriter Justin Vernon's hypnotic, hushed strummedguitar and falsetto often leads to lush, multi-tracked harmonies, ason his "For Emma" and "The Wolves".
Mountain Man
Label mates to Fleet Foxes, Mountain Man blend folk, country andtraditional Americana. Contrary to their name, they're a trio of 20-something women who met at college in Vermont, and who creategorgeous, haunting harmonies.
Mumford & Sons
The most rapidly ascending band of last year, with their Britaward, Mercury Prize nomination and No 2 charting debut album, thefolk-rock band's rousing harmonies are in debt to Fleet Foxes.
ELISA BRAY
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