If You Need To, Keep Time On Me –

Fool’s Errand –

Here’s another band that I’ve been itching for some time now to feature on a Monday LP. As 2017 comes closer and closer to wrapping up, I also wanted to pick one of my favorite albums to be released this year.

Crack-Up (2017), Fleet Foxes. One of the bands that I really fell head-over-heels for during my first year of college. They had all the traits I was looking for in music at the time. Colorful, complex lyrics, a wide range in musical instruments, and a strong sense of visual style in their album design and music videos. Oh, and I guess there was also the important factor that “folk” had taken the top spot in my music taste at the time. This came from me diving deeper into musicians I grew up listening to, like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, and was also helped by the boom of the “freak-folk” movement, with bands like Mumford & Sons, Of Monsters and Men, and Bon Iver. Anyways, you can imagine my disappointment when they announced they were going on hiatus while they’re lead singer/songwriter, Robin Pecknold, returned to college. They had only made two full albums and a short EP (plus a second EP, if you count their first self-published demo EP, with only 50 copies made and sold at their first shows). How could they leave so soon?! Well, Crack-Up was their long awaited return after 6 years and boy, was it worth the wait 😀

While the band’s lineup has had some slight changes over the years, most famously Josh Tillman (AKA Father John Misty) as their drummer for a few years, the group has mostly been spearheaded by Pecknold and normally consists of around five core members with almost all members providing vocal harmonies. The multilayered vocal harmonies come largely from one of their primary musical inspirations, The Beach Boys. Their influence can be heard more prominently in their earlier works, but it definitely helped shape their overall sound as well. Even some of the abrupt time signature changes mid-song for some of Fleet Foxes’ tunes mimic some of Brian Wilson’s more avant-garde work.

The album Crack-Up picks up immediately where Helplessness Blues left off, literally following the final lyrics of the previous album. “Grown Ocean” (the final track of the previous record) has a “call-and-response” structure, where the second line answers the first line, but the final call is left unanswered as the album unexpectedly ends. The speaker of the song reaches out to their older self in the future for assistance, thus leaving the last call unanswered till they have the solution. This is where the opening lines of “I Am All That I Need” answer that call, left hanging for the past six years. Much of the rest of Crack-Up follows a similar pattern with what I like to call “partnered songs”, where a track is directly followed with a response to the previous track. Some of these tracks are so closely intertwined that they become the same song, with titles like “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar” for the first track. All of the songs share some common themes and ideas, but I feel like a large portion of the record follows this pairing pretty closely (occasionally weaving together three songs).

But what about the two songs I chose specifically? While they don’t directly follow one another, both of them are featured on the second half of the record and it is still possible to draw connections between the two. The first is “If You Need To, Keep Time On Me”, an actually rather subdued piece in comparison to several of the other tracks on the album. It largely focuses around an acoustic guitar part accompanied by a piano and a mixture of swirling musical notes and sounds deep within the mix. What really makes this a standout piece on the record though is in its subtleties. On multiple occasions, tunes from the album change key and rhythm almost without warning, leaving you with this startled transition, that can still be beautiful, just in a different way. “If You Need To, Keep Time On Me”, on the other hand, gracefully changes key three times as well as tempo while never feeling rushed.

“Fool’s Errand” is an amazing example of the contrary though. The song’s verses are carried by this driving, staccato rhythm with even the lyrics sung in a similar manner using unusual harmonies. The composition is able to craft this sense of discomfort or unease with this; however, it distills these feelings almost immediately upon entering the chorus. With the arrival of the chorus, everything immediately shifts. The music becomes legato and flowing, now slower in tempo, and the singing rises becoming almost joyful. Taking a closer look into the lyrics, we also notice an interesting change from verse to chorus, but in a different way. The verses speak of unrest and troubles and our attempts to conquer them before admitting our faults in the chorus. This is expressed as “I knew it was a fool’s errand” (hence the title).

So where do the songs connect? Well first, we’ll need to take a dive into the lyrics of “If You Need To, Keep Time On Me”. The title is repeated twice at the end of each phrase and expressed in a comforting manner to someone unspoken. Perhaps it is spoken to a lover as their relationship teeters on the edge of the abyss, and the following song is looking back after the relationship has truly fallen to pieces. However, I think there are enough hints to paint a different picture as well. In the lyric insert sheet with the record, the first song begins with the date “January 20th, 2017”, the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. This is also teamed with the line “Who knows what State is in store” with an emphasis on the capitalized word “State” to help drive the point home. This new interpretation can also alter the way we view the second song. While I feel like “Fool’s Errand” is less specific and purposefully more vague in its lyrics, it is hard not to connect the line “Blind love couldn’t win as the facts came in” with the political race of 2016.

Whichever way you look at it, I love how they structure their lyrics. Even within the lyric sheet there are places where a word is written twice with two different, yet similar sounding options. For example the line from “If You Need To, Keep Time On Me” that reads “A frightened fool stokes [heedless/heatless] fire” ultimately leaving it up to the reader which word you think the singer is saying or which one better fits the sentence. The Fleet Foxes’ work is filled with several of these small nuances that really makes them into something special. Their songs overflow with a multitude of sounds and emotions.

While I dearly missed their presence, I am glad they were able to take a productive break from music and return with such a well-executed album. I’m fairly confident that if someone asked me to name only one band as my “all-time favorite”…I couldn’t answer ^^;

Although, Fleet Foxes would definitely be one of the names that would run through my mind ;D