Description
The news of a new Fleet Foxes album (their 4th) dropping with a day’s warning was nearly as surprising for main man Robin Pecknold as it was for fans of this phenomenal indie pop/folk band. At the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic this spring, the New York-based songwriter had a half-finished album. In April he felt stuck, creatively paralysed by the horrifying sights of trucks functioning as makeshift morgues close to his Greenwich village apartment. He hadn’t written a single lyric for the songs composed in 2018. Completion in 2020 felt insurmountable.
By June, however, Pecknold had a breakthrough. He took advantage of loosened lockdown rules and embarked on aimless drives through upstate New York. It afforded him the space to ruminate on things he’d been thinking about up to and during lockdown: his personal anxieties and how the pandemic had somehow dissolved them, the beauty of life when faced with death, his musical heroes, politics, and “renewing my vows with music”. What inspired this unlikely wave of optimism? “The pandemic was a big period of reflection for me in that I recognised that a lot of my problems compared to what’s going on are just so small,” he says. “I’ve been so lucky to make music for a living, to know the people I know, and to have been born with the talents I have and to have cultivated them.”
The Seattle native has been conscious of weaving socio-political commentary into his songs since 2011’s ‘Helplessness Blues, but ‘Shore’ is less preoccupied. ‘Quiet Air/Gioia’ and ‘Maestranza’ speak to the negative tensions of America post-2016, but there are plenty of celebratory ideas about honouring lost heroes (‘Sunblind’, ‘Jara’) or having gratitude for life and music (‘Wading In Waist-High Water’, ‘Going-to-the-Sun Road) when things feel hopeless.
