Robin Pecknold, lead singer and songwriter of Fleet Foxes, toured with folk sing-songwriter Joanna Newsom after the release of his band's first album. He has indicated that because he was Newsom's opening act, he had to push himself further as a musician and songwriter. Newsom's music incorporates shades of the avant-garde, Appalachian, and psych-folk, and the influence this must have had on Pecknold is strongly felt on Helplessness Blues. While the first Fleet Foxes album was impressive for it's lush, layered vocals and harmonies that recalled the work of Brian Wilson, it's follow up is mind blowing in it's seamless inclusion of both traditional folk-rock and the experimental.
A Brief Comparison
Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues shows a progression and maturity in songwriting not heard since Joni Mitchell followed up Ladies of the Canyon with Blue. Fleet Foxes self-titled 2007 debut album, like Ladies of the Canyon, was full of melodic masterpieces and occasional lyrical depth ("He Doesn't Know Why" on Fleet Foxes, "For Free" on Canyon). These albums were answered with terrific strides in both musical dexterity and introspection. Mitchell allowed herself to be emotionally raw and truthful for Blue; the title track alone is a lesson in confessional lyric writing. It is tribute to a mood, reflecting on a time and place and sincere misgivings about its culture. Take a look at the title track from Helplessness Blues, which also succinctly finds a way to express the anxieties of an entire generation:
I was raised to believing
I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes
Unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking
I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me
But I don't, I don't know what that will be
I'll get back to you someday soon you will see
And then:
If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm sore
Someday I'll be
Like the man on the screen
Pecknold has captured the frustrations of someone in their 20's, who is not quite sure if they should be the special snowflake they've always been told they are, or if they should work for The Man, or if they should work on a commune somewhere Upstate, all the while wanting to be like the Very Happy People seen on TV.
Themes
This theme of age and contemplation leads off the album, with Montezuma. In this song, he mulls over the choices one makes as they age-- he is older than his parents when they had their first child ("Now what does that say about me?"), and "in dirth or in excess" he will "return to the dirt, I guess." Again and again lamenting half melancholic, half flippantly "oh man what I used to be, oh my oh me." This theme again pops up in Bedouin Dress with "believe me it's not easy when I look back/everything I took soon got returned." This song also nods to Pecknold's social anxiety in its chorus "one day hidin' is free/one day that's my thing." The existential questioning inherent in aging finds voice in Blue Spotted Tail, a series of questions where no real answer is presented or assumed to exist. In this song, there is no imagined purpose to life, or the earth or the stars. We are in a "floating vacuum" fated to die. It is unusually bleak for Fleet Foxes, but they wrap in the guise of a low-fi lullaby, something you might sing around a campfire. A campfire of doom.
In addition to age, there are a great number of references to a relationship on the rocks. Take Lorelai:
So, I guess I got old
I was like trash on the sidewalk
I was old news to you then
The lyrics there are Ben Folds-ian (that is, cheeky) more than a Fiona Apple-style ode to violence and anger, or the previously mentioned Joni Mitchell's tendency towards bleakness and depression. A Fleet Foxes channeling Fiona Apple moment does however occur in Someone You'd Admire:
One of them wants only to be someone you'd admire
One would as soon just throw you on the fire
After all is said and after all is done
God only know which one of them I'll become
However, the depression and anger isn't fully felt until later, on A Shrine/An Argument.
Fleet Foxes still uses some of the imagery it did on the first album, invoking folklore and woodsiness, but it marries well with the new found self-reflection. Nowhere is this done better than on the album's masterpiece A Shrine/An Argument.
I went down among the dust and pollen
To the old stone fountain morning after dawn
Underneath were all these pennies fallen from the hands of children
They were there and then were gone
And I wondered what became of them
What became of them
Sunlight over me no matter what I do
Apples in the summer are golden sweet
Everyday a passing complete
And then the shift, musically and lyrically:
In the morning waking up to terrible sunlight
All diffuse like skin abuse the sun is half its size
When you talk you hardly even look in my eyes
In the morning, in the morning
And if I just stay a while here staring at the sea
And the waves break ever closer, ever near to me
I will lay down in the sand and let the ocean leave
Carry me to Innisfree like pollen on the breeze
A quick Google indicates the reference to Innisfree is possibly a nod to the song Isle of Innisfree, about an exile thinking of his (fictional) Irish home. But what is truly notable here is the juxtaposition between "The Shrine" and "The Argument" portions of the song. "The Shrine" has the images of an old fountain, of children, sunlight, and fresh golden apples. Then "The Argument"-- suddenly the sunlight is awful, the green apples "belong only to [him]", the morning is cruel, and finally the only thing that can bring him relief is to drown in the ocean. In 8 minutes and 27 seconds, we are taken on a fantastic visual and emotional journey that accurately expresses the joy of loving and the pain of losing someone.
This combination of confessional songwriting with classical imagery is also done in Sim Sala Bim, which is also another relationship-ending song. Here he begins with:
He was so kind
Such a gentlemen tied to the ocean side
Lighting a match
On the suitcase latch in the fading of night
A shift:
Then the earth shook
That was all it took for the dream to break
All the loose ends
Would surround me again in the shape of your face
Then the confession:
What makes me love you despite the reservations?
What do I see in your eyes
Besides my reflection hanging high?
Ending with a Biblical reference:
Remember when you had me cut your hair?
Call me Delilah, then I wouldn't care
A one-two punch.
The Resolution
The album ends with a soaring, ethereal, rolling folk-rock dream. Grown Ocean is an appropriate ending to Helplessness Blues. It ends with hope, longing, and resolution. It brilliantly calls back, for the careful listener, many of the images sung about over the entire album. It's a "Can you find them all?" activity for the music listener. Mountains, starlight, fountains, children, ocean… and that's just the first verse. The "Why's?" of Blue Spotted Owl are pacified in the second verse. By the third, he knows the critical inner voice will eventually subside, and that he will awake into a more pleasant reality. That is the hope-- that the feeling of the dream, the lust of life, the zest, will transfer into real life. He seems to be running, from his dream into reality, ready with enthusiasm and, it would appear, rekindled love.
In that dream I'm as old as the mountains
Still is starlight reflected in fountains
Children frown on the edge of the ocean
Kept like jewelry kept with devotion
In that dream moving slow through the morning
You would come to me then without answers
Lick my wounds and remove my demands for now
Eucalyptus and orange trees are blooming
In that dream there's no darkness alluded
In that dream I could hardly contain it
All my life I will wait to attain it
There, there, there
I know someday the smoke will all burn off
All these voices I'll someday have turned off
I will see you someday when I've woken
I'll be so happy just to have spoken
I'll have so much to tell you about it
Wide-eyed walker, don't betray me
I will wake one day, don't delay me
Wide-eyed leaver, always going
