The world's most awkward interview with Robin Pecknold of the Fleet Foxes

The Fleet Foxes' debut album had been out for just over a year when this interview happened. The record had been one of the most praised debuts of 2008, a dense harmonic folk album that placed the band somewhere between Brian Wilson, Pentangle, and the kind of American folk music that comes up through the soil rather than down from art school.

The interview did not go according to plan.

The setup

The context was Pickathon, the Portland-area roots festival that runs every summer on a farm in Happy Valley, Oregon. The Fleet Foxes were playing. The site had a press credential and a list of questions. The questions were about folk influences, about the recording of the debut record, about where the band was heading.

The questions were reasonable. The conversation that followed was not.

What happened

Robin Pecknold is not a person who talks about his music comfortably. This is not an unusual trait in musicians, particularly in musicians whose work is as densely layered and personally rooted as his. But the discomfort was more acute in 2009 than it became later, and it made for an interview that went sideways almost immediately.

The first question was about musical influences. Which folk music had been formative? Which records had mattered? This is an open question, a warming-up question, the kind that is supposed to produce five minutes of relaxed talk before the harder material.

Pecknold answered it briefly and then went quiet.

The next question was about the texture of the harmonies on the debut record. How were those arrangements developed in rehearsal? Was there a reference point?

He said he did not know how to answer that.

There was a pause that lasted longer than a pause should last in a press interview at a music festival.

The actual conversation

What followed was not conventional interview material. Pecknold talked, eventually, but not about the things the questions had asked. He talked about the difficulty of doing interviews. He talked about the gap between making something and then being required to explain it to people who will write the explanation down and publish it.

He said something close to this: the music is what the music is, and putting it into language does something to it that he could not entirely account for.

This is a position. It is not an unreasonable one. It is also not particularly useful for a music journalist who has a credential and a slot and a deadline.

The interview went on for about twenty minutes. The useful material came in short bursts, surrounded by long silences and a couple of moments where Pecknold seemed to reconsider whether he wanted to continue.

What he did say

He talked about growing up in the Pacific Northwest and the way landscape and weather were inside the music without having been placed there consciously. He mentioned Judee Sill, which was an unusual reference for a 2009 conversation about a young folk band. He mentioned the way the electric guitar is used sparingly on the debut record as a deliberate choice, not an absence.

He said the harmony arrangements came from wanting the voices to be the primary instrument, the thing the other elements were supporting rather than the other way around.

He was more comfortable talking about other artists than about his own work. Asked about contemporary folk, he named a few things without strong opinions attached. Asked about the relationship between American and British folk traditions, he had a bit more to say.

The record, for context

The 2008 debut — Fleet Foxes / Sun Giant EP included — is a record of unusual density for a young band. The production has a quality that is difficult to place precisely in time. It does not sound like it was made in 2008. It does not sound like it was made in 1968 either. It sounds like it was made in a room where nobody was keeping track of the year.

The harmonies are the primary fact of the record. Five voices, layered in complex but not ostentatiously complex arrangements, sometimes adding and sometimes subtracting over a given passage. The lead vocal sits in the middle of the arrangement, not above it. This is an unusual choice.

The songwriting draws on folk forms without being simply retrospective. The melodies have a quality that is difficult to describe except as "arrived at carefully." They do not feel placed or forced. They feel inevitable in the way that certain traditional melodies feel inevitable, as if they could not have gone any other direction.

After the interview

The band put out Helplessness Blues in 2011, which was received as well as or better than the debut by most critics. Pecknold took a long hiatus after that record. The Fleet Foxes returned with Crack-Up in 2017 and Shore in 2020.

None of this was knowable in the summer of 2009 at a farm outside Portland. What was knowable was that the debut record was very good, that the band had found something worth preserving, and that the person who had made it did not want to talk about it.

That is its own kind of information.

For more on the site's Pickathon coverage: The Light of Pickathon. For the full interviews index: Interviews.