Six years is an eternity between records, especially in an era where an artist can release two full-lengthalbums in as many weeks and have them both hit No. 1. Plenty of bands return after hiatuses, but those typically follow decades-longbreakups and flashy reuniontours. Not many acts vanish from the precipice and come back from it. Seemingly bucking that trend, Fleet Foxes quietly disappeared after two greatalbums and an even better EP. What began as patient waiting for the album cycle wheel to spin slowly led to piqued curiosity as to why the LP would take so long to make. Robin Pecknold’s revelation that he went off to study at Columbia University only added to the build-up.
Finally, Fleet Foxes will release Crack-Up on June 16 through Nonesuch, as announced today along with the premiere of “Third of May / Ōdaigahara,” a song that’s both bigger and tighter than its predecessors. That the band returns to an indie ecosystem where its former drummer headlines “SNL” is perhaps less surprising than the ways in which the musical landscape itself has expanded throughout this decade, a time when genre lines seem a bit more blurred. Despite the heightened expectations their absence fosters, Pecknold sounds certain in an email conversation with Pitchfork. “I’ve struggled at times with finding a solid, objective reason to live, or I should say I’ve struggled with the notion of needing an airtight reason,” he writes. “So that has meant coming around to making my own meaning, and finding meaning in connection to other people.”
Pitchfork: You once commented that the album title, Crack-Up, was inspired by a few things: an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name, your arrangement and editing approach, and the initials of your alma mater, Columbia University. How does that Fitzgerald essay relate to the album, and how would you describe your recording process?
Robin Pecknold: The first resonance was feeling like I’d cracked myself to some extent. I read the essay at a time when I wasn’t really sure what I cared about exactly, which is something Fitzgerald addresses a bit. I wasn’t focusing on music, I was trying to find other hobbies but nothing else had quite the same pull.
Beyond that, there are themes in the essay that come up a lot on the album, both lyrically and musically. The essay addresses the necessity of holding two opposing thoughts in one’s mind at once, in the “I can’t go on/I must go on” sense. I’ve struggled at times with finding a solid, objective reason to live, or I should say I’ve struggled with the notion of needing an airtight reason—almost anything you cling to can be explained away with logic in one way or another if you’re crafty enough. So that has meant coming around to making my own meaning, and finding meaning in connection to other people.
Lyrically, a lot of the album deals with perception, and the difference between how I have seen the world and how it actually is, in terms of people or situations or self-assessment, or any other permutation of the problem. As I get older I try and take people as they are and project less onto them, either good or bad, not make damsels or heroes or villains out of people who are just individuals doing their best with the hand they've been dealt.
As far as how the title relates to the structure of the album, the editing and arrangement, there are a number of songs where I wanted the transitions to feel jarring, non-linear, like you were watching a movie that has been edited partially out of sequence, like a Nicolas Roeg movie, or as if it’s a stained glass window that’s been shattered and reassembled.
The Third of May 1808 is a famous Francisco Goya painting—a political piece that is ostensibly about resistance to a dictator, Napoleon. Did this factor into the title of the first single, “Third of May / Ōdaigahara”?
My friend and bandmate Skyler Skjelset’s birthday is May 3, and our album Helplessness Blues was released on May 3, 2011. The song “Third of May / Ōdaigahara” is about my relationship with Skye. It addresses our distance in the years after touring that album, the feeling of having an unresolved, unrequited relationship that is lingering psychologically. Even if some time apart was necessary and progressive for both of us as individuals, I missed our connection, especially the one we had when we were teenagers, and the lyrics for the song grew out of that feeling.
It felt like a funny coincidence to see a Goya painting called Third of May. The compounded coincidences, and how the whole experience of playing music with him itself felt like a series of lucky breaks and coincidences, left me feeling like it was a good phrase to use for the title of a song. Beyond that, though, the painting only served to inspire a few of the lyrics, like, “Aren’t we made to be crowded together like leaves,” or, “Stood, congregated, at the firing line,” but those lines are about Skye and I, and our time playing music together, and not the political events depicted in the painting.
How did going to college shape the album, and what Fleet Foxes represents for you?
I went into college with a naive dropout’s idea of what people in college listened to, like maybe everyone was just jamming Nancarrow and Schoenberg on the quad, so when I was there I was honestly sort of embarrassed to say I was a musician from a pop context. I found academia intimidating, but in a good way, as if being that uncomfortable was helping me to grow. I thought maybe I’d attain some new level of intellectual justification for making music, but I didn’t really end up there. My thoughts on that remain scattered and subjective; I just had to throw up my hands and default back to: just trust your gut, go with what feels right, and let the reasons why it feels right remain somewhat mysterious.
What’s your plan for touring Crack-Up?
I was lucky to do some solo shows opening for Joanna Newsom early in 2016, and people would often say to me afterwards they had only gotten into Fleet Foxes after we had stopped touring, and that they wished they could have seen us live, which I honestly wasn’t expecting to ever hear. I thought that everyone who wanted to see us got a chance to back then, and it would have been redundant to keep touring and I might as well do something else. So, that was heartening and made me excited to make this album and tour again. The show will be a mix of the new and old songs, and we’re working on a set and projections with a visual production studio in Los Angeles called Sing Sing right now. We hope to hit everywhere we can this time.
After releasing two albums and an EP on Sub Pop, you are now signed to Nonesuch. What made you decide to change labels?
Hugely grateful to Sub Pop and honored to have been on that label, but in the years between Helplessness Blues and beginning work on Crack-Up, most all of the people we worked directly with there had moved on to other labels or had started their own companies in the music business. Which makes sense—it’s been a really long time!
When we were thinking about how we would release the album, we knew we wanted to try something new, either by self-releasing or by finding a new label, and of the constellation of labels out there, Nonesuch just had the most copacetic energy and history, and it felt like the album would fit there. Their ethos seems expansive and inclusive—they appreciate all kinds of music and aren’t built on a rejectionist ethos but instead a kind of utopian one, one that can logically accommodate both John Zorn and the Black Keys. That is really appealing to me as a music fan and as an artist.
You’ve used Instagram to keep fans very informed about the album rollout, beyond just teasing release dates and posting studio sessions but also getting in the comments. Why interact so closely?
Sometimes I’ve found social media incredibly stressful, either from insecurity about the validity of my “content” or just from seeing too many people living their great wonderful lives. But for whatever reason right now, I just find it entertaining. I like talking to the people who comment on my Instagram, and it's been so long since Fleet Foxes has released anything that I thought a certain segment of people interested in the band would get a kick out of seeing the recording process unfold in real time, transparently. I do worry about fatiguing those people a bit with too many updates, or this whole rollout having taken too long to go down, and I don’t think I’ll be as forthcoming while we’re recording the next album, but I felt like enough people would enjoy watching the process unfold and that it was clear enough that it was going to be a long process, that it just ended up being fun. Also it seems like sharing a small clip of music imbues it with this gravitas or mystery that maybe the full piece lacks (ha), and it felt cool to feature some snippets of songs in that context.
Last fall, you posted on Instagram that you were working on a solo album. What’s the status of that?
I’m still writing songs for that and the next Fleet Foxes album. The solo album songs have a different character, different stakes, and the next Fleet Foxes album will be fully ecstatic. I feel like Crack-Up begins in pure conflicted solitude and ends in a bright clearing, one of closeness, like the top right hand corner of the photograph on the album cover. I’d like the next band album to be a celebration of or elaboration on how Crack-Up ends.
