Happy 15th Anniversary to Fleet Foxes’ eponymous debut album Fleet Foxes, originally released June 3, 2008.
On some level, music is about concentration. How do you make the biggest feeling, or the biggest idea, fit in the smallest possible space? How, with a turn of phrase, a guitar lick, a breakdown, a key change, do you communicate a complex thing that would take hours to express in conversation? So often, our favorite musicians do this via sharpness; a single line or moment that captures it all.
Not so with Fleet Foxes on their 2008 debut. It’s true that the record’s arrival was essentially a lightning strike, forever shaking up the indie folk landscape. But in terms of the album’s meaning itself, the record uses the passage of time, a slow unfolding of its spirit, as its mechanism for expression. Rather than condensing into as little space as possible, Fleet Foxes fill every corner of their inaugural LP and ask you to rummage through all of the drawers.
At points, it seems like the record has no idea where it’s going, but not in a way that feels insecure. Instead, it’s like one of those long summer afternoons where you head over to a lake, and some friends come by, and you were going to do something that afternoon, but they have friends from out of town, and sure, one beer couldn’t hurt, and all of a sudden you’re somewhere else.
“Ragged Wood” is perhaps the best example. It starts as a propulsive folk-rock tune over a train beat, but eventually wanders off the path altogether. The song’s second part has little in common with the first, and the ends of some vocal lines (e.g., “lie to me if you will”) get drawn out for surprisingly long. They create the impression of singing just to keep the song going, not because you’ve got somewhere to be. The two bars of white space after “any old lie will do” are just letting the time drift by until we can get back to the song. The whole thing ambles. Does the original song, the one with the train beat, ever come back? No, because we’re somewhere else now, and that’s alright.
While the record is defined by its convention-defying instrumentals—winding, baroque guitar passages, uncharacteristically propulsive basslines, wordless harmonies adding depth and melody—two of the highlights on Fleet Foxes feature just singer Robin Pecknold’s voice over an acoustic guitar. The tunes couldn’t be more dissimilar; “Tiger Mountain Pleasant Song” is a nearly foreboding narrative, while “Oliver James” is an openhearted, simple tune, begging for a singalong. With these two tracks—as well as “Heard Them Stirring,” which doesn’t even bother with lyrics—Fleet Foxes feels much more boundless than its 39-minute runtime.
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But even though Fleet Foxes has been tagged with adjectives like “warm,” “cozy,” and “bucolic,” the record has much more to it than a distillation of good vibes. On “He Doesn’t Know Why,” a forceful, plodding melody tracks a vignette about a lost soul. The subject has fallen victim to the passage of time, wandering from place to place without a defined purpose. The “siren’s song” of his memory might as well be the meandering sounds of the record, which promise a sunny nostalgia that’s as deceptive as it is pleasant. Our vagrant might have gotten lost in the wandering structure of “Ragged Wood,” or somewhere in the gaps of “Sun It Rises.”
Meanwhile, “Blue Ridge Mountains” finds the singer inviting his brother to leave his worries and obligations behind in favor of a retreat into the woods. The “Terrible am I, child? / even if you don’t mind” refrain reveals that the singer knows that he is letting someone, or something down by going away, but also knows that his brother can be seduced by the tranquility of the woods.
So Fleet Foxes is beautiful, but it’s also a trap, and the trap is a warning. It’s good, and worthwhile, to wander for a bit, slow down, unpack. But such wanderings only truly work if they help us understand what we owe to each other, or what we owe to ourselves. The band needed every nook and cranny of their record to get this idea out, and the beauty of it is not its sharpness, but its width.
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