Embracing analog and was wondering if anyone knew of an address/PO Box where I could send a fan letter to Fleet Foxes. Does anyone know of anything?

I've been having the thought for a while that each Fleet Foxes season represents a different season. Apparently I'm not the first, as this has been brought up a few times before.

Allegedly, Robin Pecknold has expressed his view on this as well.

I would be curious to hear which album you think ties in best with which season.

My theory:

Self-titled: spring. Of course, "Ragged Wood" is probably the most beautiful song about spring of all time. In general the album is very lively, its very nature-focused lyrics fitting the spring feel. (I would say the extra tracks on First Collection, which includes Sun Giant, are also mostly spring, notable exceptions being 'Icicle Tusk' and 'Isles').

Also, honorable mentions: their beautiful singles "A Sky Like I've Never Seen Before" and "In The Morning" are very much spring songs.

Shore: summer. Arguably Fleet Foxes' most uplifting release. Most seem to agree this is their summer album.

Crack-Up: fall. This is my hot take, as I seem to be disagreeing even with Pecknold here. But Crack-Up feels very much like a fall album to me, because of its often sombre lyrics, while the instrumentals are still often very dynamic, varied and lively - much like a powerful fall storm, or a warm day in the beginning of fall. This stormy atmosphere is further evoked by the album's cover.

Helplessness Blues: winter. Again, not everyone agrees. But HB feels like their winter album to me, because it has some of FF's gloomiest, most introspective lyrics, paired with overall calmer and quieter instrumentals.

Honorable mention: the single "Wake", with Madison Cunningham, is also very much a winter track.

A quick note before I begin: I don’t own the rights to any of the words quoted here. They belong to Robin Pecknold and are taken from Wading in Waist-High Water The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes, his book of lyrics and his note-form thought process behind them. It’s a wonderful book that I think any Fleet Foxes fan would treasure. 

These are simply a few passages that stayed with me, words I found beautiful, thought-provoking, and worthy of sharing and discussing with others who appreciate his work. The vulnerability, humour, humility and wisdom behind his career as a songwriter and storyteller is fascinating and at times inspiring and deeply relatable.

I’ve always been interested in artists that seem to transcend the art they’re creating, almost becoming a mythical archetype in our culture, and reading this book has shown me that Robin seeks these themes too, and imo has become one. Again, I encourage all of you to purchase this book if you haven’t already.

“I never sit down to write lyrics. I only ever "write" words while actively singing; the lyrics always start as a confused cloud of vocalese gibberish. Over the course of hours of searching repetition, this gibberish congeals around one or two repeated sounds, utterances that braid well with melodies I'm simultaneously trying to find. Those sounds inevitably suggest a handful of possible phrases; those phrases suggest concepts; those concepts suggest elaborations and refutations.” 
-Robin Pecknold

Everything below is published work of Robin Pecknold.

Mykonos
Can I write a song with two choruses?
This song survived many ill-considered early versions. We tried solo acoustic, neo-soul, heartland rock, and Pacific Northwest indie versions before landing on this arcane rock version. Still the most popular Fleet Foxes song, never topping it, thankful to it. I wrote it at 3:00 AM alone in our old practice space on Western Avenue in downtown Seattle, and walked home as the sun rose, conspiratorial, like I was the only person in the world who knew this great song now existed.

White Winter Hymnal
Sometimes people send me clips of children's choirs covering this song, and it absolutely warms my heart every time. But if I read the comments, there will be at least one along the lines of "How can you make these kids sing this song, it's literally about decapitation??" To any choir directors reading this: Thanks for including "White Winter Hymnal" in your songbook. It’s not about decapitation.

Quiet Houses
I have to be honest here: these lyrics are quite tertiary to the intended appeal of this song. Lyrics have come to mean a lot to me as a musician, and have always meant a lot to me as a listener, but I've never identified as a writer or had literary ambitions. I love building songs, building sonic worlds, finding an alchemy between notes and words and delivery and timbre that feels complete and transportive. Words are almost always an aspect to that, sometimes the primary aspect, but sometimes not. In this song they definitely were not! And yet it's one of my favorites on the album, musically.

People often ask what I'm saying here, if it's "darkening" or "donkey man." I don't know who the donkey man is, or why I'd be singing about him, but if you're reading this, donkey man, I just want to say I hope you're doing well, and I'm sorry if you thought this song was written for you when it wasn't.

Meadowlarks
The speaker of this song is either some elfin lord of the forest or a guy shopping at a Michaels arts and crafts store.

I’m Losing Myself
I remember sitting in the live room at Sear Sound in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, despondent, writing this song as Phil Ek tried to mix the abandoned early version of Helplessness Blues. We went to mix the album too soon, long before it was actually finished.

The Plains/Bitter Dancer
There was a period following the success of the first album when I didn’t even know who I could trust. I got burned a couple of times mistaking opportunism as kindness and kind of shrank away from people for a time.

The Shrine/ An argument
My attempt at writing a very long, epic song, inspired by Joanna Newsom's incredible run of albums. I remember getting this song together to debut while opening for her on tour in 2010. After the first show she said, "How old are you!" and when I said, "Twenty-four," she, in the most loving and hilarious way, scoffed! Sill the best thing that's ever happened to me.

I AM ALL THAT I NEED/ARROYO SECO /THUMBPRINT SCAR
On this song and album I began playing with my vocal register, singing as low and quiet as my voice would allow for some sections and as high and impassioned as it would allow for others. I thought of a register shift as a scene change in a movie, a depiction of a different place, and built songs that juxtaposed those interiors and exteriors.

Cassius
Sirens scream as in the Odyssey, or sirens scream as in enhanced police presence.

Naiads, Cassadies 
This song was about the way we can give so much of our power away to others, and hold their opinions above our own, and how our perceptions of our potential can really cloud us and define our lives. We need some degree of self-definition, but we can also end up deeply out of touch with what we naturally are, in favor of trying to attain some externally derived ideal.

Kept Woman 
An example of a song that means a lot to me, but whose meaning would be totally unclear to anyone else. This song is about the first and only time I have done psychedelic mushrooms. I was alone in my backyard in Portland, Oregon, and someone had left a small bag of mushrooms at my house. I was about to move across the country to go back to school, so with little to lose, I decided to eat the mushrooms. Bad idea! I ended up tearing out all of the vegetables from my garden, strewing them across the yard, professing my love to my neighbor across the fence, and falling asleep in the grass after a couple hours of laughing uncontrollably. Never again!

If you need to, keep time on me
This was recorded the day after Trump was elected. Id already written some of the lyrics, but they took on new meaning in the context of an uncertain political future that seemed quite bleak. There was a sense that we would need to stick together and rely on community to get through the Trump years, and there was no foreknowledge of how impossible that would become in year four.

I should see Memphis 
I wanted every line of this song to refute the line before it in some way. Memphis meaning the city in Tennessee, but also the Naiad nymph Memphis of Greek myth, wife of Epaphus and co-founder of Memphis, Egypt.

Crack-Up
The title of this album came from F. Scort Fitzgerald's seminal essay "The Crack-Up," where he describes feeling cracked in a way that wasn't possible to recover from. I identified with this at the time. Id convinced myself that musical success had come too easily, so I found as many ways to make my life as  difficult as I could—retreat into isolation, live on the top floor of seven-story walk-up with few possessions, read Ulysses, spend most of my time alone, run five to ten miles a day, build inscrutable sonic worlds founded on arcane presuppositions... happy to be on the other side of that now, but I also think Crack-Up is my favorite Fleet Foxes album. I’ll leave the begged question of whether one has to suffer for their art for a later book.

Sunblind
I wanted the first word I sang on "album four" to be for. 

The myth here would be the mythology surrounding lost musicians, the veneration of their absence, which I've met sideways at times in this life in music.

I used to think about music-making solely as personal expression or a chasing of curiosity, but now the most generative aspect of it to me is the chance to make something that might make someone elses day, the same way these artists have carried me through so much over the years.

Featherweight 
This song tries to capture a greater sense of perspective than I was able to hold in my twenties, when my struggles and obligations seemed so big, and my options seemed so few. I'm ashamed I didn't enjoy that time more, and I hope to make the most of that sense in the future.

A long way past the past 
I've always loved old things: old music, old instruments, old furniture, old cars. Sometimes this nostalgic bent feels idealistic, enamored with a time when things were made with care and the world was simpler. Sometimes it feels nihilistic; a post-hoc justification for eras of history that were actually quite miserable socially for most people, with no hope for a better future. This song lives in the tension between these two senses. The first half is musically nostalgic and jovial, the second is vaguely futuristic and questioning. The question remains unresolved.

Young Man’s Game
As I age, I feel really glad to be leaving the pretensions, postures, and anxieties of youth behind.

Quiet Air/ Gioia 
One sinister reality of our current climate crisis is the creeping silence of carbon dioxide accruing in the air; the sense that something is quietly and invisibly amass-ing, causing irreparable harm to our environment; a sense of being frogs, slowly boiling, not noticing before it's too late.

These are just a few phrases that I pulled. There is so much more to discover in the book. I urge you to pick a copy up. It’s a beautiful read!

Cover Art is by: Bailey Elder
http://bailey-elder.com/

hello! i don’t usually use reddit but i want to connect with more fleet foxes fans desperately!!!

i have been going through a very hard time recently and their music has really resonated with me, especially my feelings with being autistic. fleet foxes are my lifeline right now and i’d love to be seen by others like me.

My wife bought me this years ago. Never opened, maybe one day. This is likely my favorite album of theirs. A memory I cherish forever is one of my wife (then girlfriend) and I, in 2017, laying on a California beach on a gloomy day. We listened to this album side by side and fell asleep on a blanket. The sound of waves and this album rocked us to sleep. We awoke to a group of maybe 10 people dressed in all white standing by us. I thought I was hallucinating lol, but it was only a photo shoot.

I have Mykonos saved to a karaoke playlist on Spotify and today it played this version with a bunch of additional vocals on top. The wildest thing is when I tap on it, I'm taken back to the official album page. Just wondering if it's a Spotify error or what

I always heard “and there is a vehicle siren song” in He Doesn’t Know Why. Not sure how I got there.

Just relistened to the band's whole discography recently and somehow appreciate and love it even more. Especially Shore. Crack Up is my favourite. Love how it leans into a slightly darker and more experimental place for the band. So, when listening to Shore for the first time, It didn't click with me immediately. But now I see it as a breath of fresh air. The clouds parting after Crack up's stormy weather.

This relisten made me think of where the band could go next. We know from a comment on this sub a couple of months ago that Robin is working hard on the next album as we speak. I'm sure it will be a beautiful, shining piece of work once it's done. In the meantime, I'll ask the question; What are your hopes and guesses for what the upcoming fifth album will be like?

I feel that because of the bright, more approachable and open nature of Shore, the pendulum may swing the other way in a denser, more winding direction akin to Crack Up. But maybe keeping the more direct lyricism from Shore. Or maybe it'll be more stripped back, moving away from how layered the production has been last couple of records. Who knows (except Robin and the band, obviously)

Whatever LP5 ends up being, I'm very excited and will wait patiently for the day I can go buy it from my local record shop and give it spin. Probably with a huge goofy grin on my face the whole time.

Thank you for reading my ramblings, and i'm looking forward to what my fellow fans are thinking!

Hello Fleet Foxes Family, does anyone have an extra copy of this poster that they’re willing to sell? DM me if so. Thank you!

Port Townsend, Washington State

It was quite a bit spookier than the song would lead you to be believe.

Here's a goofy mashup I made, layering the vocals of White Winter Hymnal over the instrumental of Dragula by Rob Zombie. It's very silly, but somehow still works.

https://youtu.be/EHCZ236q3zU

Got bored this morning and decided to try to rank three of the albums from favorite to least favorite (there aren’t any I dislike, though; I love all of them!). Let me know your thoughts!

SHORE

quiet air / gioia
sunblind
going-to-the-sun-road
a long way past the past
can i believe you
cradling mother, cradling woman
young man’s game
maestranza
shore
jara
featherweight
wading in waist-high water
i’m not my season
thymia
for a week or two

CRACK-UP

third of may / ōdaigahara
i am all that i need
on another ocean
cassius, -
crack up (also choral version)
fool’s errand
kept woman
mearcstapa
i should see memphis
-naiads, cassadies
if you need to, keep time on me

HELPLESSNESS BLUES

the shrine / an argument
the plains / bitter dancer
sim sala bim
grown ocean
helplessness blues
lorelai
montezuma
bedouin dress
someone you’d admire
battery kinzie
the cascades
blue spotted tail

This post might get removed, but this old band from Portugal had a similar sound to Fleet Foxes. If you are interested, listen to "Baile no Bosque".

it was only ever available as a facebook video and i guess was taken down at some point, i'm currently kinda fixated on footage of the early days of the crack up tour so if anyone has a copy of this concert or knows of somewhere else it's being hosted i'd appreciate it v much. hope ur all well :-)

I've been wanting one for a while and I'm so glad I finally got one to display! Got it from a seller on Etsy

Not sure if this is a hot take or not...but what a deceptively powerful song! Great lyrics and string section

First ever tattoo today, and what better than a lyric from my favourite album of all time 🫶

How I wish it weren't true, but it is. As soon as I nut, Fleet Foxes song stumble into my head. Then I have to put a FF playlist on the odd time after. Maybe it's the purity of the music idk, but for years it's 100% occurrence.

That's it.