Surprise Yourself

By Jack Garratt, Phase (2015)

Speak and open up your mind
It's something you should do all the time
Keep exploring, seek and find
You know you might surprise yourself
Talk without a taint or hold
The doubts that should embrace your heart
The calm and chaos of your soul
You know you might surprise yourself

Search for Purpose: Fleet Foxes’ most recent album is also their most honest

Fleet Foxes were popular by 2007, thanks to MySpace and Napster. Lead vocalist and songwriter Robin Pecknold attributes this early attention to illegal music file sharing. But the music of the baroque pop/folk band seems otherworldly enough to atone for these painfully mundane sins.

The Seattle-born band released their first EP, Sun Giant, in 2008. A self-titled debut album followed, called simply Fleet Foxes. Their second full album, Helplessness Blues, serenaded the public in May of 2011. Although Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop/Bella Union) lost the Best Folk Album Grammy to The Civil Wars’ Barton Hollow, it was listed as one of the year’s best albums by both The Rolling Stones and Entertainment Weekly.

Pecknold calls the album “a synthesis of folk rock, traditional folk, & psychedelic pop, with an emphasis on group vocal harmonies.” Pecknold also lists Bob Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, Brian Wilson, and Van Morrison as inspiration. The music feels folksy. It sounds like the mountains. The harmony of Pecknold, Skyler Skjelset (Pecknold’s highschool friend), Christian Wargo, and Casey Wescott sounds like plaid shirts and foggy sunrises. The lyrics explicitly invoke apples in the summer, tar seeping up from the ground, the bloody reaper, and rotted fingers.

While Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes were more like recitations of old legends – a subdued, peaceful collection of stories – Helplessness Blues is clearly a journey. It is a combination of deeper poetry and fuller sound. Pecknold’s voice is ethereal but also raw and hauntingly honest. Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes were closer to hymns, but Helplessness Blues is a supplication, a search for atonement and purpose.

The album uses instruments ranging from a 12-string guitar, zither, and fiddle to a hammered dulcimer, and even Tibetan singing bowls, whatever those are. Maybe it is the mixing of so many instruments and ethnic sounds that makes the album feel transcendent.

The rawer edginess in the latest album allows our relationship with Fleet Foxes to be more personal than before. We have a sense of the present, not the past. “So now I am older than my mother and father / when they had their daughter / now what does that say about me?” sings twenty-five-year-old Pecknold.

The album is clearly about maturing. “Guess I got old,” exclaims Pecknold with half whimsical, half biting simplicity (“Lorelai”). The poetry is woven out of the struggle that comes with growing up and seeing the world in different colors.  “I have borrowed all my loans from life / and I can’t, no I can’t get through / the borrower’s debt is the only regret of my youth.” Helplessness Blues is full of questions, from personal identity struggles (“Montezuma”) to beautiful contemplations of the universe (“Blue Spotted Tail”).

The title track speaks to coming out of disillusionment with hope and a plan: “I’d rather be / a functioning cog in some great machinery / serving some purpose beyond me.” These realizations bring a fresh intensity that will intrigue new listeners and allow Fleet Foxes to endure long enough to give fans what they really want: another chapter in the odyssey.

Can't Stop the Tweet

Forbes shared my thoughts on how social media and smartphones are changing the concert experience. 

"Whether or not they should coexist, they do. Smartphones invading musical experiences are inevitable, but so are creative solutions. Some artists request that pictures and videos only be taken during the first few songs. A start-up called Yondr distributes cases for phones that auto-lock once the concert starts, giving fans the peace of keeping phones on their person while removing the temptation to use them. Yondr advertises phone-free hands in the air celebrating a collective, almost tribal, human experience under the slogan “Be Here Now.”

The American Authors show left me disconcerted. Bright screens attached to waving arms looked like some kind of extraterrestrial seabed, or the luminescent Tree of Souls in Avatar. I took a few videos, but did not feel the need to prove I was there. Four dynamic artists lost their voices proving that to me. Maybe other audience members engaged in the concert through their social and camera apps, but I did not feel present until my iPhone was in my pocket. I told myself be here now. I’ll remember."