fleet foxes // shore

Fleet Foxes’ fourth studio album is the soul-searching reflection on grief and gratitude that this year of chaos and loss has so badly needed. Grief is strongly illustrated with references to recent events, and gratitude is displayed in many forms, including (Foxes’ frontman) Robin Pecknold’s appreciation of music as an entity (and perhaps as a coping mechanism). Shore was released at 9:31am on September 22, 2020: the exact moment of the autumn equinox. If ever there was an album that emulates the feeling of fall, a season bridging the sun-soaked days of Summer and bleakness of Winter, it’s this one.

The first track, “Wading in Waist-High Water“ sets the tone musically with its sparse, mournful and haunting vocals, “Sunblind,” the track that proceeds it, sets up the POV of the album in its gorgeous, heartfelt, and melancholic lyrics. Pecknold lists the names of deceased artists that have inspired him, giving them “the type of coronation [they] deserve.” It serves as almost a bibliography for the album’s inspo. He begins with Richard Swift, a brilliant singer/songwriter/producer and peer of Pecknold, who died in 2018. He continues with “John and Bill,” John Prine and Bill Withers, both of whom died in 2020 (the former from COVID-19). 

For every gift lifted far before its will

...

I've met the myth hanging heavy over you

I loved you long

You rose to go

Beneath you, songs, perfect angels in the snow

So time to stage

Forget reserve

The type of great coronation you deserve

Death has not been a topic widely covered by Fleet Foxes, other than as a byproduct of their reflections on aging (such as “Montezuma” on Helplessness Blues). But on an album like Shore, it makes perfect sense thematically. The song doesn’t focus on feelings of loss and grief; it is filled with love, admiration, and gratitude for those who have passed. Judee Sill, Elliot Smith, David Berman, Arthur Russell, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Buckley, and Marvin Gaye are also name-checked (in addition to many others). Those artists have in common both indelible marks on music history and the fact of a premature, tragic death. 

I'm gonna swim for a week in

Warm American Water with dear friends

Just intending that I would delight them

Swimming high on a lea in an Eden

American Water was the name of an album by David Berman’s band Silver Jews, and this is also the second reference to water on the album. Unlike death, Fleet Foxes are no stranger to the illusionary power of water. The cover art of both Shore and their previous album Crack-Up feature shorelines, Crack-Up features a song called “On Another Ocean,” and on Helplessness Blues there are “Grown Ocean” and lyrics like “in the ocean washin’ off my name from your throat,” and the EP Sun Giant features “Drops in the River.” In the context of “Sunblind,” water might serve to represent life. Pecknold is giving these artists “new life” by using Shore as a vehicle to explore the many ways they have inspired him, as he wishes to “delight them” by “swimming high on a lea in an Eden.” The album largely celebrates Pecknold’s love of music, as on tracks like “Cradling Mother/Cradling Woman” (which brilliantly borrows vocal tracks from the Beach Boys Pet Sounds Sessions box set); he’s said:

“That image of the maternal and feminine would again be a reference to music. Like my receiver, cradling me again. Kind of like being subsumed by music and comforted and consoled by it.”

He eulogizes again on the track “Jara,” inspired by Chilean folk singer Victor Jara. Jara was killed by the Pinochet Regime for his politically-minded music, and here serves as a metaphor for the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and the brave responses to the injustices faced by Black Americans. He continues commenting on this cultural moment on the proceeding track, “Featherweight.” The first song on the album in a minor key, it examines Pecknold’s reflections on privilege, a very necessary contemplation many white Americans have explored in response to Black Lives Matter:

All this time I've been hanging on

To an edge I caught when we both were young

That the world I won wasn't near enough

Always distant, always all

In all that war, I'd forgotten how

Many men might die for what I'd renounced

I was staging life as a battleground

No, I let that grasping fall

May the last long year be forgiven

All that war left within it

I couldn't, though I'm beginning to

And we've only made it together

Feel some change in the weather

I couldn't, though I'm beginning to

On “A Long Way From the Past,” he sings:

We're not on one straight line

I made my own way through

And when the track goes cold

I'll know that it's true

That rebirth won't work like it used to

Pecknold seems to be saying: life and growth are not linear. He’s done the best he can to muscle through, but knows this song-- like all things-- is impermanent. And the ways he used to reinvent himself as an artist, the pressure he put on himself to move forward as a musician, are no longer relevant in our new world. In a press release for the album, Pecknold said:

“By February 2020, I was again consumed with worry and anxiety over this album and how I would finish it. But since March, with a pandemic spiraling out of control, living in a failed state, watching and participating in a rash of protests and marches against systemic injustice, most of my anxiety around the album disappeared. It just came to seem so small in comparison to what we were all experiencing together. In its place came a gratitude, a joy at having the time and resources to devote to making sound, and a different perspective on how important or not this music was in the grand scheme of things.”

On the absolute banger and Bill Withers-inspired “Maestranza,” he sings about the loneliness of social distancing and comfort of knowing, as every commercial likes to tell us, we’re all in this together:

Sunday end

Ache for the sight of friends

Though I've been safe in the thought

That the line we walk

Is the same one

Continuing with the relevant content, on “Quiet Air/Gioia” he sings about climate change and, as he says, “dancing while the world burns.”

In “A Young Man’s Game,” he seems to mock his younger self for his pretentiousness (“I could dress as Arthur Lee... Maybe read Ulysses”). It recalls Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” wherein the refrain is “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” He’s said:

“..in this song I use [the phrase “young man’s game”] more in the negative sense of ‘glad you’ve moved on from some of these immature delusions’ or something.”

Pecknold has matured not just a songwriter, but as a person. Albums like Helplessness Blues were deeply personal, finding the universal via specific experiences. On Shore, the themes of grief and gratitude feel much more accessible; they are the primary emotions we have felt culturally in the chaos of 2020. “It’s great to get older and not make the same mistakes and not have the same hang-ups,” Pecknold said in Rolling Stone. He continues:

“I’m still anxious and worried, but it’s not about my own stuff. It’s about what’s going on in the world. This is one weird little moment where there might be some optimism. We don’t know what’s going to happen in November; maybe it all falls apart. But there’s a little bit of hope in the air in this moment, and I can’t say if that is always going to be true.”

Helplessness Blues ended with “Grown Ocean,” an epilogue that tied together all of the references and themes woven throughout the album and spoke of waking from a dream in which he experienced freedom from darkness. Shore also ends with an epilogue:

Kin of my kin

I rely on you

Taking me in

When a wave runs me through

As a shore I ever seem to sail to

And I know old heavinesses shake you

He thanks his friends and family for getting him through the hard times, then promising to make the best of his life while he’s still here:

Afraid of the empty

But too safe on the shore

And 'fore I forget me

I want to record

The last words of the song recall the release date of the album, the equinox. The moon was waxing at 25%:

Now the quarter moon is out

Now the quarter moon is out

It brings us full circle. Death, life, rebirth, it’s all here in stunning sonic glory. This isn’t just Fleet Foxes best album, it’s their most mature, cohesive, deeply felt, and intimately universal effort. While Pecknold sings of finding refuge from the insanity of 2020 in his music, we too find refuge and reassurance in it. In a world that seems increasingly frightening and foreign, it’s quite the comfort to see this lighthouse on the Shore.