A fleeting glimpse

Robin Pecknold is a regular dude in an extraordinary situation. Released with little fanfare, the 2008 debut album from his band Fleet Foxes became an overnight sensation, a prog-folk marvel that shifted close to a million units and saw the group playing to sell-out rooms across the world. A retiring sort who has never craved fame, or wealth for that matter, for Pecknold mainstream success has taken a little getting used to. Which may explain the three-and-a-half year layoff between Fleet Foxes and the Seattle quintet’s second record, Helplessness Blues.

“I go back and forth on the success thing,” says Pecknold, who once complained that Fleet Foxes sold ten times the number of copies the group were naturally comfortable with. “If you look at contemporary musicians, a lot of them make stuff that is purely intended to sell a lot of copies, I’m not too into that. What it comes down to, ultimately, are the circumstances in which you make music. Do you do it so that it will sell millions? If you don’t, you can’t really be held responsible if it does well. I know there are records I loved that have sold a million copies.”
There was another reason for Helplessness Blues’ prolonged gestation. About halfway through the process of making the LP, Pecknold deemed the recording not up to scratch. Scrapping months of work, the band relocated to another studio and started over. An amateur psychologist might wonder whether second album jitters were a factor? Pecknold shakes his head – Fleet Foxes get the jitters with every album, he says.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Hey I’m going to make something great’,” he says. “You are not necessarily capable of doing that all the time. A lot of it is about waiting around to find the right songs – there is lots of recording and revising. It’s a very involved process to bring something to the stage where you’re happy with releasing it.”
As to the criticism that the new LP represents an updating of their debut rather than a move towards fresh territory... well, Pecknold is inclined to agree.
“If the first record had been the only example of us doing something that way, we would have been pretty bummed,” he says. “Not to close the book on that sound or anything – but we wanted to do a really cool example of something we already had under our belts. Our next record will probably be done live.”
By his own admission, he was difficult to be around through this period. Helplessness Blues helped wreck his relationship with his girlfriend (today they’re not quite sure what their status is) and drove a wedge between the normally easygoing Pecknold and his family.
“I don’t know how other people do this,” he sighs. “Maybe some of them treat it like a nine-to-five job. Most musicians I know are obsessive over what they are doing and want to make it the best they can. I have lost sleep over it. I have friends who feel the same way. It can be difficult to maintain a normal life.”
As if that wasn’t enough to contend with, Fleet Foxes had to endure the horror of being lumped in with the eminently slappable ‘nu-folk’ movement, as embodied by waist-coated chappies of the hour Mumford And Sons. Not to accuse the media of being reductive, but this owed as much to Fleet Foxes’ backwoods sartorial sensibility as to their music, far more dreamy and proggy than anything on the nu-folk bandwagon. Did Pecknold get tired of endless questions about his beard?
“Well, you can reduce anyone to anything,” he reflects. “You can reduce Radiohead to ‘gloomy’ – and that’s an extremely complicated band. Everybody deals with media stereotyping in a different way. I don’t know... It is ultimately such a stupid thing to care about. Compared to, say, AIDS or something.
“I feel I’ve gotten more outgoing. None of us are exactly excited by the exposure. And yeah, the more exposure you get, the more you get tied down to a particular thing. If you are put in a box, it can be hard to get out of the box. What matters is how you let it affect you. Some people don’t let it get to them at all. With others, it totally takes over their self-perception.”
Just for the record then: when he hears Fleet Foxes compared to Mumford And Sons, does he grin or grimace? Pecknold shakes his head.
“I don’t think I could usefully answer that question,” he ventures, with peerless diplomacy.
If he seems a little jumpy around journalists, who can blame him? A few months back, in an interview with a British broadsheet, Pecknold observed that, in a post-CD world, music had lost a lot of its material worth. Or, as he phrased, it, music had “no inherent value”. The comments, however throwaway, lit up the internet, leaving Pecknold to feel his remarks had been distorted. He’s not making the same mistake twice.
“In interviews, you talk for like an hour and you think it will all get printed. You say ‘on the one hand, blah blah blah’, but ‘on the other hand, blah blah’. You try to cover all your bases. However, there will be a news outlet that will look at only one part of it. That’s been true forever. That’s not because of the way things are disseminated on the internet. If you read the actual quote it’s not even new – it’s just a stupid statement about the way the music business is.”
For Irish fans, Helplessness Blues contains a strangely familiar moment as Pecknold quotes Yeats’ ‘Lake Isle Of Inisfree’. Given that the poem was about wanting to flee the hubbub of day-to-day life for the bucolic tranquility of a mythic west of Ireland, it seems fair to wonder whether the verses bespeak a desire on Pecknold’s behalf to retreat from the spotlight?
“My interpretation of the poem is completely different. I think it’s about having this ridiculous idealism for something – and knowing it isn’t realistic. There are songs on the album that are touching on these things, where I’m singing about an ideal while at the same time I know that’s not the way things are. I think those lines are knowingly naïve.”

Helplessness Blues is out now. Fleet Foxes play Live at the Marquee, Cork on June 25.