Song Exploder - Fleet Foxes - Mearcstapa

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

Fleet Foxes formed in Seattle, Washington in 2006. In 2011, they put out their second record, which was nominated for a Grammy, and then, the band went on hiatus. The lead singer and songwriter, Robin Pecknold, moved to New York to go to Columbia University. After six years, in 2017, the band returned with their third album, Crack-Up. And in this episode, Robin breaks down a song from that record called “Mearcstapa.” songexploder.net/fleet-foxes

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hurway. Fleet Foxes formed in Seattle, Washington, in 2006. In 2011, they put out their second record, which was nominated for a Grammy. Then, the band went on hiatus. The lead singer and songwriter, Robin Pecknold, moved to New York to go to Columbia University. After six years, in 2017, the band returned with their third album, Crack Up. And in this episode, Robin breaks down a song from that record called Mayor Kestapa.

My name is Robin Pecknold. I'm a singer-songwriter in Fleet Foxes. I started writing this song December of 2015. I was getting ready to go on to her opening for Joanna Newsom. She asked me to some dates opening for her solo. I was a student at the time, and I was doing undergraduate in English literature. I was kind of deciding if I should do that tour, if I should keep doing school. And I decided, you know, it's a very hard person to say no to, so I skipped out on my finals.

And just started writing a bunch of songs. And this was one of them. I was listening to Ali Farcatori. He's a guitarist from Molly. And he would do these cool drones where the second was always ringing. Since I started writing songs when I was 15, I've always been interested in alternate tunings. or people that would find new chords or unique sounding voicings on the guitar. But I'd never kind of made up my own tunings.

And so for this song, I was like, okay, I should do this. And Ali Falkitore, some of his songs have a tuning where the E string, the low E, is tuned up to like a G. And if you play the lowest string and the second lowest string, if it's G and A, there's this ringing second. So I got that from Oli Farkatore. Then I tuned the highest three strings to FAC. So that's like an F triad. So then the chord on the guitar was G-A-D-F-A-C. So I had these two kind of segments of the six strings on the guitar.

And then to separate them, even more, I started playing a triplet on the F-A-C, and then kind of a four pattern on the G-A-D. and that took a long time to kind of get the rhythm. And so the chord changes then are just modulating that shape up and down the fretboard. The changes in this song, more than any other song I've done, when they hit, I still have some weird physiological reaction to them. Just something about the way they move

makes some synapse bloom, you know, whatever. I always try and chase that in writing a chord progression, setting up an expectation and then subverting it. Something about the third modulation, the image I had in my mind from that was just like sailing. It just had this feeling of being on the water or it just evoked that to me. And so the lyrics grew out of there. My father is a good sailor. He was in the Coast Guard and worked on boats when he was in his 20s.

So we went on a couple trips in the last few years. And I was reading about Bernard Mortesier, who's kind of a sole sailor. There was some race where there was like the first. around the world race and he was in the lead he was going to win but then he didn't want to go back and so then he just went around the world again and lost the race but he would have won i think about him just as kind of a hero of taking your own path and devotion to the thing itself i guess there's one way of looking at sailing is this like pastime of the rich or something but i get excited about it's this kind of private almost monastic or self-flagellating journey

Sometimes on this album, if I was at a loss as far as where to go lyrically, sometimes I would try and obliquely reference what the music was doing. So, like, the first lyric on the song is, like, two lines in the air. And that's both, like, a reference to, like, looking up from a boat and looking at the lines of the rigging. And then it's also just literally what I'm doing. There are two lines going on the guitar. Merik Stoppa.

I don't really remember where I encounter. I encountered the word for the first time. I didn't know how to say it. I don't know what language it is. Looking it up after the fact, I saw that it was from Beowulf and that it was another word for the monster, Grendel.

It's so clumsy that I got a kick out of trying to make it graceful to sing. Like Frank Sinatra, like Mayeckstapa. There's something I really wrong about that that I was into. The word Merrick Sapa meant border walker. And so just thinking about Bernard Mottessier as someone like that, or being on trips myself, you're between the air and the water,

you're apart from other people, you're on this separate journey with what the word began to mean to me. That's how I associated it with sailing. I guess when I hear most of these songs now, I think about the space that I lived in New York when I wrote almost all of them, which is a very small studio apartment. It's a hard place to find an apartment in New York, but I found this one that was like a sixth floor walk-up, and for a long time I didn't have any furniture.

It was just this empty room when I had a desk and my mattress was on the floor, and I was just kind of like student slash just this weird monk in this top floor studio. Like this is the space where I'll be writing these songs and this is how I exist for this music. and that was just my day to day every day was in this little spot. It was about the size boat, the cabin of a boat, I'd say. So I had the acoustic guitar, but then I was like, this should be like an electric guitar song. I wanted it to be kind of like pointillist

and something about the clarity of an electric was sounding cool. And so then if you add the other electric guitar in, harmonized one, it's the same five notes, but it's rearranged. So then the song became based on these two harmonized electric guitar. They're playing perfect intervals together and moving counter to each other. So that's my band-a-Morgan-Henderson,

playing that part of the guitar line on the acoustic bass. This figure, this G-A-D figure, is 1-25, and the dum-pum-pum is how the record opens. I built a lot of chords in other songs of the album out of just those three notes, out of a one note, a two, and a five. That pattern became this kind of mantra throughout the songs on the record. So there's this kind of stately acoustic bass that's playing, but then this kind of tight, dry, electric bass that's playing this counter rhythm over the top of it.

This one, two. I kind of wanted this song to feel like a Beach Boys song with a Cann song being played on top of it. I still remain really like taken by Beach Boys songs like Feel Flows. That certain transportive magic of those songs, just a kind of an openness and a harmonic complexity or grace that is in that music that feels very satisfying to me. And then Cannes is the opposite. It's very tactile, tight.

It's not reaching for the air, but it's very on the ground. And so to have the air, these two different feelings kind of happening simultaneously. simultaneously. We knew we wanted the song to go from this lush, open feeling to this really tight precision. And so that's Christopher Cassiano, who played percussion and drums on this song. The drums start.

And it's just this kind of marching tribal bass drum pattern. And then it snaps into this other more textured drum sound, doing this kind of dry, crowd rock drum sound. When these drums come in with these different electric guitars that harmonies together, it tightens up completely. Just going for textual contrast. Chromatic shifts. That's my jam. That is a Moroccan percussion instrument called the Krikheb. They're like these metal percussion instruments. You hear a lot in Moroccan Ghanala music. They just make this really beautiful, metallic, energetic sound. You can't quite tell what it is.

It could be like a sample of rattling pots and pans or something. If you get a few different patterns going, they have this just interesting interlocking feeling. That is a harpsichord. The part was really beautiful and cool, but it just sounded a little too delicate sounding to harpsichordy. And so we pitched it down an octave, and that's why it has that kind of digital artifact-y quaver and that unsettledness. That's a 12-string electric guitar.

That's also tuned to GADFAC, and then played with a photo of a friend as the pick. Because all the picks were too, there was like too much attack. I was like, I need a softer pick than this. I can't do this. I just wanted this really soft kind of background swell. My friend Skyler, for some reason, he had a shadowed photo of Steven Strohmeyer, who's a great Baltimore musician and great guitar player in his wallet, which I still don't really understand.

But that became the pick for that part. So Skyler Shelza. Sky is my bandmate, and we started Manchester. together when we were 16 or something. And a lot of that I was kind of him and I working as a duo. He made a lot of textual contributions and guitar contributions. He kind of did this prepared guitar thing, Sonic U-style putting quarters between strings

or putting a playing card between strings or a photo of a childhood friend. And then playing it with his hands. I believe it was Sky's idea to have the ending be as long as it is. And then that's where a lot of the most interesting stuff on the song is happening. That's a few different horn tracks.

My only direction to the horn players was make this feel like bubbly and like you're under the surface of the water and then at certain moments you're going to crest out and then duck back under. Associating the frequency range with the height of like looking at the sun and then to be beneath the sea to, you know, having some stuff that's really muffled and some stuff that's really clear and tactile. Well, I wanted the vocal to be really smooth, and then also like it was cresting and ducking and weaving over the surface of the water. The eyes of the sea, so easy to...

Kind of moving like a boat with these kind of graceful, long lines. Making a melody that kind of... flowed gracefully over these chord changes was fun to be messing around with. That's me singing into the Fleet Fox's preset on a personal harmonizer that's sold by TC Helicon or something. They have this little like a voice harmonizer pedal

thing that you can buy, and then someone was like, oh, this has like a Fleet Fox's preset on it. And then it's like, oh, that would be so funny if we used it. Pitched it up an octave two. The preset is called Fleet Hymnal. But then it doesn't really sound like flea foxes. I guess it kind of sounded like a boni verre. Just trying to layer up as many frequencies and textures as we could.

That's just a B3 organ. We had that B3 and we're like, it's not like active enough, but there's not enough energy. So Sky had these recordings of blue noise. And we ran that through a Leslie speaker so that there was some movement to it. The Leslie speaker is what you attach, one of those Hammond organs too,

and it's a speaker inside of a big wooden box, and the speaker spins around inside of the box. So you get this vibrato effect. So we recorded that, and then our bandmate Casey is a proficient in this program called Super Collider that I know nothing about, but he was able to somehow tease frequencies

out of the blue noise, and from there he was able to make a keyboard patch that had notes. Just from the blue noise, he carved out actual noise. notes. The sample we ended up with had the grainy texture of the blue noise sample, and it had the vibrato of the Leslie speaker, and then it had these kind of weird quavery notes. I like when expensive things get introduced at the end of songs. The idea was that we would have the song be a long,

slow fade out, but then this string orchestra would come in as that was happening. And I had that melody from like a little voice memo just walking around town and then for the recording of it we had that melody they played it a number of times and layered it all together but they did such a good job and the part sounded so cool that we didn't end up doing a fade out I asked them to play it as a round so to take that melody and then just to start it at different times and it ended up really being the most beautiful way we could end the song was just to highlight this round that they were doing so we faded everything else out I played the

whole song for the string quartet. And they were like, so what is going on in this song? Like, what instruments are those? And that was gratifying because that was a goal to kind of build these sound landscapes out of different instruments. And then the conglomerate whole was its own entity, where the instruments involved were less important than the eventual sound being made. The Merrick Stapa is kind of me talking to another part of myself. I was traveling by myself a lot, either because I couldn't find anyone to go with me or I just seemed like having a romantic idea of what it means to travel alone. By the end of the song, it's like, the phone doesn't sing and the phone doesn't ring,

so what will you find Merrick Stoppa of mine? What are you actually accomplishing on these trips? Because life is best experienced with other people. To me, if I do something alone, it just might as well have not happened. And now here's Mayerkestapa by Fleet Foxes in its entirety. at SongExploder.net for a link to buy this track and to learn more about Fleet Foxes. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh

Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation

about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live.

Thanks. Song Exploder is produced by me along with Christian Coons. Song Exploader is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts, made possible by the Knight Foundation and listeners like you. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. You can find Song Exploder on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder, and you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at songexploder.net or wherever you download podcasts.

My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.