SONG OF THE DAY

“Your Pro­tec­tor” by Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes [self-titled album], Bella Union/ Sub Pop, 2008). Writ­ten by Robin Pecknold.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- Fleet Foxes is a Seattle-based indie folk band.

- The band came to promi­nence in 2008 with the release of their sec­ond EP, Sun Giant, and their debut full length album Fleet Foxes. Both Sun Giant and their epony­mous debut album received much crit­i­cal praise and review­ers often noted their use of refined lyrics and vocal harmonies.

- The quin­tet describes its music as “baroque har­monic pop jams”.

- Robin Pec­knold and Skyler Skjelset both attended Lake Wash­ing­ton High School in Kirk­land, a sub­urb of Seat­tle, and soon became close friends. Pec­knold and Skjelset bonded over a mutual appre­ci­a­tion of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began mak­ing music together. Their par­ents influ­enced their musi­cal tastes early on — Skjelset’s mother Peggi was a keen lis­tener of both Bob Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold’s father Greg was a mem­ber of The Fath­oms, a local 1960s soul group. The two were inter­ested in the achieve­ments of Dylan and Brian Wil­son and real­ized the impor­tance of prac­tic­ing music from a young age.

- Orig­i­nally going by the name “Pineap­ple”, a name clash with another local band prompted a change and Pec­knold decided upon “Fleet Foxes”, sug­gest­ing that it was “evoca­tive of some weird Eng­lish activ­ity like fox hunting”.

- Their debut full length album Fleet Foxes received four stars from Rolling Stone, who com­pared it to the likes of the Beach Boys, Animal Col­lec­tive, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a 9.0 out of 10 in a review by Pitch­fork Media, as well as shar­ing the website’s Album Of The Year rank with the Sun Giant EP.

- The Guardian was par­tic­u­larly com­pli­men­tary, award­ing the album five stars and declar­ing it “a land­mark in Amer­i­can music, an instant classic.”

- The album achieved an aver­age rat­ing of 87/100 from 30 critic reviews on aggre­ga­tor web­site Meta­critic.

- While the group enjoyed mod­er­ate suc­cess in the United States, Fleet Foxes was bet­ter received in Europe, sell­ing over 200,000 copies in the first five months fol­low­ing its release. The sales were matched with crit­i­cal plau­dits and their debut album won Uncut’s first ever Music Award 2008 prize. Uncut edi­tor Allan Jones said that the album “showed impec­ca­ble musi­cian­ship, and though you could trace its antecedents, it sounded totally unique. Fleet Foxes was just a glo­ri­ous debut.”

- At the end of 2008, Fleet Foxes was rated album of the year by Bill­board’s Critic’s Choice and in Metacritic’s end of year best album round-up it appeared in 17 lists, top­ping six of them.

- As Sub Pop had yet to get involved with the band at this point, the record­ing was funded by the group themselves.

Acco­lades

- The cover art is a detail of the 1559 paint­ing “Nether­lan­dish Proverbs” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The cover claimed the Best Art Vinyl Award 2008, an annual award, orga­nized by Artvinyl.com, a com­pany that man­u­fac­tures dis­play frames for record albums. Pec­knold notes:

When you first see that paint­ing it’s very bucolic, but when you look closer there’s all this really strange stuff going on, like dudes defe­cat­ing coins into the river and peo­ple on fire, peo­ple carv­ing a live sheep, this weird dude who looks like a tree root sit­ting around with a dog. There’s all this really weird stuff going on. I liked that the first impres­sion is that it’s just pretty, but then you real­ize that the scene is this weird chaos. I like that you can’t really take it for what it is, that your first impres­sion of it is wrong.” “There’s a story to each lit­tle scene. Which I just felt fit­ting for that record– dense but uni­fied, not a col­lage or any­thing. …It was some­thing you could look at for a long time on a vinyl sleeve and find new lit­tle things.

WHERE I HEARD IT

HBO’s Big Love, dur­ing Sea­son 4’s dra­matic end­ing brought the track back into my con­scious­ness, but dear­est dad had bought me the album way back dur­ing 2008 for Christ­mas (or, “The Christ­mas Of Dad’s Epic Music Research”). So, yeah,  I was hip to the Fleet Foxes already.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Lis­ten to the album ver­sion:

And have a ear-gander at this great live ver­sion: