LONDON –- December generates endless ‘best of year’ lists. One band that kept appearing in the top 10 albums of 2008 is Seattle’s Fleet Foxes. They released their debut EP, Sun Giant, in February and followed it up with their eponymous album in June. The album has sold around 400,000 copies so far.¹ Four-hundred-thousand copies is a lot of albums for a group of bearded twenty-somethings from the Pacific Northwest (even if their US record label is Sub Pop). Fleet Foxes has sold out major concert venues in both Europe and America. The keepers of the keys of the alternative rock kingdom, pitchforkmedia.com, named Fleet Foxes “album of the year.” Why the buzz?
Image - Adam Filipson
The first thing that strikes you when you hear Fleet Foxes is that the music is both contemporary and ancient. The band’s sound evokes noisescapes that hint at the middle ages or 19th-century sacred harp singing or the 1960s (you’ll grow weary of the CSNY comparisons). Yet, the band still sounds very “now.”
Critics often accuse contemporary popular music and culture of being transient. The same critics will often look backwards to a more authentic, substantial age. However, the various golden ages often seem to have little connection with the present. The music Fleet Foxes plays and sings seems to capture our longing for tradition and rootedness without their becoming hippy curators of lost forms. They take the ancient and shape it into something contemporary.
However, there is a strong sense of nostalgia within their music. Many of their lyrics have a pastoral, agrarian quality. The opening verse of the album’s first song is:
Red squirrel in the mornin’,
red squirrel in the evenin’,
red squirrel in the mornin’,
I’m comin’ to take you home
The album has songs called Ragged Wood and Meadowlarks and Blue Ridge Mountains. It constantly refers to forests, rivers and hills in creating a rural world worthy of wonder. Remember Fleet Foxes is from the city of Seattle. Here I am in London, listening to Fleet Foxes, unable to get a ticket for any of their shows here in the city. Why have they captured the urban imagination?
It’s a truism that in times of rapid social change or uncertainty there is a desire for something that appears to be more settled and safe. A superficial listen to Fleet Foxes seems to offer that. The city is often dark and dangerous, a place of physical, emotional and economic uncertainty. The rural past offers a place of rest and refuge. The so-called “natural world” is a place for the guilty to reclaim their innocence. It becomes a home-focus for the spiritually and socially displaced urban diaspora.
Robin Pecknold, the lead singer and songwriter of Fleet Foxes, recently said in an interview that, “In terms of the message on the record, it’s about family and finding a genuine space to live in.”²
However, I think it would be wrong solely to see Fleet Foxes as creating a pastoral utopia for the diseased. There is a darkness in the album. No sooner has track one, Sun It Rises, told us that, “I’m comin’ to take you home,” than track two, White Winter Hymnal, tells us:
I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied ’round their throats
to keep their little heads
from fallin’ in the snow
And I turned ’round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in the summertime
There’s a sinister tension here. The song’s central metaphor is of a snowbound pack of people trying not to fall. Yet one of their number does fall and stains the white snow red. Images of winter are contrasted with images of summer. There’s an unspoken sense that the one who falls is unnoticed by anyone except the narrator. The pack goes on without him.
Later, in a song called Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, Pecknold sings:
In the town one morning I went
Staggering through premonitions of my death
I don’t see anybody that dear to me
Once more there’s a deep sense of isolation. The narrator is alone on his deathbed deserted by family and friends. As is the case in this song, throughout the album the narrator constantly invokes grandfathers, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and yet their presence is at best ambiguous.
The album ends with Oliver James. The song doesn’t reveal a distinct narrative, but its story seems to concern the discovery of a dead body. Once more the theme of coming home is introduced in the opening verse, “You will lift his body from the shore and bring him home.” Brothers, grandfathers and mothers are mentioned. Then there’s the refrain:
Oliver James washed in the rain no longer
Oliver James washed in the rain no longer
We don’t know who Oliver James is. We only know that he is dead and that he has been brought to a home away from the harsh elements. There is comfort even in the face of death.
This album is not a theological treatise. It never mentions God. Robin Pecknold has taken pains in interviews to avow their lack of any kind of religious motivation or practice (although their drummer, J. Tillman, has been known to keep company with Christian musicians).
Nonetheless, the album does have a sense of wonder in the face of mystery. It has a longing for home in the face of death. It has a deep desire for relationship in a fractured world. I think for all those reasons Fleet Foxes has resonated with a generation hungry for all those realities.
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¹Craig Mathieson, “No Fleeting Fad,” theage.com, http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/music/no-fleeting-fad/2008/12/18/1229189783436.html. <12.19.2008>
²Ibid.
Andrew Jones is Vicar of Grace Church Hackney, which meets in Shoreditch, London, England.
